Catalunya was a come back home. I spent a year in its capital Barcelona working as bartender almost 20 years ago and I haven't been back ever since. The initial plan of '22 was to go to Mexico or Colombia but I had to postpone the trip because travelling guidelines short after the pandemic were still not clear and to be honest I was also short on money. Therefore I decided for Catalunya and instead of visiting only Barcelona, this time I added some extra stations to my journey (Sitges, Girona, Tarragona) where I had the chance to hike at the beginning of the Pyrénées region, despite the February cold weather that left me one night freezing in a bed with high fever.

Montjuic and Tibidabo were inspiring as usual although my mind was often going elsewhere, mostly thinking about the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine that happened during those days. For the rest of the time, I tried to get the best out of my journey and enjoy the simple pleasure of walking. I have also visited the bar where I used to work called Merbeyé and had few pints with the bartender who's currently running the place. Certain places never change and are able to keep their identity during the years. Merbeyé is a nice cozy bar and definitely one of those places. It used to be part of the jazz scene of Barcelona but I think nowadays is mostly a place where locals and tourists coming down from the Tibidabo amusement park like to stop for a drink or two but the cultural scene does not belong much to the place anymore. I remember during the old days the way to work was a pretty long journey for me. Living around the area of Raval I had to take a local train until the beginning of the hill, where a small blue tram called tramvia blau used to take me up the hill to my workplace. During this time I was reading a novel from a catalan writer called Carlos Ruiz Zafón called The Shadow of the Wind set in the same place.

Talking about tramways brings back to my mind the tragedy that occurred to the greatest catalan architect of Modernism called Antoni Gaudí. Gaudi was a strong catholic and his art was largely inspired by religion and nature, especially neo-gothic style. He adopted Modernism as a genre but he was able to fully revolutionise the movement, basically creating his own style out of it. Gaudí is the author of some of the most beautiful buildings Barcelona owns, including casa Milá, casa Battló, parc Guell and the Sagrada Familia which is nowadays still the most visited monument in Spain. Gaudí lost his life at the age of 73, hit by a tram while going out for his morning walk. He was mistaken for a beggar and that did not help him to receive immediate aid that could have saved his life. Gaudí never married and dedicate his own life to his only passion and reason of living which was obviously architecture.

During my last visit in Barcelona, I took with me a masterpiece of the twenty century called "Hundred Years of Solitude" of the majestic Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Reading about Macondo and colombian magical realism also helped me in order to familiarise with what would have been my travelling destination of the next following years, Mexico and Latin America. The book talks about many topic, colonialism, progress, war, economy and family relations and it covers the life of seven generations of people in their struggle to survive.

My soundtrack for the trip was made mostly by spanish contemporary artists including Maria Arnal and Marcel Bages, Leiva (which also quotes "Gabo" in the song A ti te ocurre algo), Melendi and Joaquin Sabina.