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Published: December 30th 2006
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The
CouchSurfing situation this week has clearly gotten out of hand. With an endless rush of out-of-towners scampering to occupy a limited supply of couches, a veritable CS ghetto has cropped up in places around town. I’m sharing the apartment of Robin - a sweet, quirky Dutch kid I met in Lisbon - with somewhere between six and eight other travelers - young backpackers boiling big pots of pasta
al dente and making a general mess of the bathroom. Nearby some others are staying in a swank penthouse with views of both the sea and Sagrada FamÃlia; on the CS message boards, there are daily posts from desperate travelers who are determined to celebrate the New Year in Barcelona, couches be damned. The resolve that some of these plucky young kids show is admirable. At the same time, you can’t help but wonder whether that vital CouchSurfing spirit - a feel-good mantra of cultural exchange and promiscuity - is being lost in the holiday shuffle.
While a boisterous junta of locals and ex-pats has organized near-nightly CouchSurfing fetes, I make plans to meet with a friend I haven’t seen since Mexico. I met Uri in Oaxaca in the
spring, before the protests and violence rattled that poor city, and just as I was starting to declare my undying love for the country. There was a group of us staying in the same hostel - a cheerful place with blossoms spinning their colors in the courtyard and a water pail beside the toilet for us to flush. Though me and Uri - a Barcelona native - were planning similar trails across the country, I would constantly find myself a few days behind, nipping at his heels. When we met again, briefly, in Palenque - the howler monkeys wailing in the trees, the hippies stoned off their gourds just below - we exchanged promises to meet again in Spain. In the months that followed, our emails were sincere but sporadic - our friendship taking on that light, airy quality common to travelers who forge a brief bond and aren’t entirely sure what to do with it.
On the streets of Barcelona Uri’s all smiles - as much a consequence of our meeting as the fact that he’s planned a two-hour lunch break. The greeting is a warm, earnest mix of English and Spanish. We make small-talk about the
city, and the holidays, and he takes me to a neighborhood pasta place whose owner - a graying man in a neat sweater vest - hand-rolls the
tagliatelle each morning. A friend of Uri’s is at a table by the door: a tall, handsome Catalonian with rumpled hair and a fiery gaze and white-threaded sideburns that taper to a point near his chin. We join him just as he’s enthusiastically rubbing his belly over an empty plate. Two more carafes of wine crowd the table. The Spanish endear themselves to me more with each passing minute.
Vidi’s spent most of the past two decades hopping about the globe - as a musician, as a performer with an experimental theater group - and he gives us a weary shrug as we talk about plans for New Year’s Eve. He’s performing in Rome - a holiday spectacle paid for by the Italian government - after a brief Christmas break. His group, La Fura dels Baus, is famous across Europe, their shows a kinetic act of circus theatrics, high-wire acrobatics and skin-tight, neoprene suits. He launches into an improbable story about a show in Beirut, when the troupe - short on
volunteers - had to enlist a group of Lebanese soldiers for the performance. I try to picture them - young and cocky, used to carrying heavy ammunition to the office - as they squeezed into their outfits for the grand finale. When they stepped out of line, their commanding officer would grab them by the ear. Vidi made threats about how failure would look in front of the wives and girlfriends and available young Lebanese girls in the audience - most likely omitting how those tight white neoprene suits would look, too.
Uri remembers when, as an extra in one of La Fura’s shows, he first met Vidi - the two of them suspended in their body-hugging ensembles high above Plaça Catalunya. That I can’t imagine Uri outfitted and harnessed and swooping through the air points to how far our young friendship still has to go. Later, as we’re puttering across Barcelona on his scooter, he mentions that he’d just performed on-stage the night before - showing off, for the first time, the trumpet skills he’s been honing for the past two years. He joined a funk group for their rendition of “I Feel Good”; when we’re parked
atop Montjuïc, the city spread out under the golden late-day sky, he’s still fingering those famous notes - “Ba da ba da ba da ba” - that have, however briefly, earned him local stardom.
Afterward he takes me to Bogatell Beach, and through the old fishermen’s streets of Barceloneta, the sky purple and pink as a brisk wind begins to blow. In under an hour he’s shown me more of the city than I’ve covered in a week on foot. He gives his moped an affectionate rap with his knuckles. I fiddle with my helmet and get back on board, clinging to a waist that once - harnessed and strapped in for dear life - dangled sixty feet above Las Ramblas. All around us the traffic starts to swell as the evening hits its stride, and I begin to appreciate just why the streets of Europe are crammed with these ubiquitous scooters, whizzing between the cars and buses, little flashes of quicksilver darting into the night.
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