Falling in love...

They say you can fall in love with a city, but I would not believe them. You may feel comfortable, you may even feel at home but "love" is a word far to strong to describe a person's realtionship with a city. For me these relationships are more like family. You are born with your city, you carry it with you until you die, although occasionally you may move from place to place. But falling in love with a place?

Last week it happened to me. And it was the kind of unjustified, not-at-first-sight, sentiment-mining love that cannot be explained. Nor was it anything like a movie-style , firework-embellished feeling. Fireworks, though, were included in the proccess.

Barcelona, was at its best during the Fiesta Major of La Merce, a four day festival, sourrounding the 24th of September, which like so many other "fiesta" dates, suspiciously coincides with an astrological timepoint, (this one with the autumn equinox), is suspiciously masked under a catholic religious miracle (the Virgin of la Merce saving the city's harvest from a swarm of locusts) and has unsuspiciously nothing to do with religion itself. This means processions of gigantic statues of everyday heroes instead of saints, "batucadas" instead of religious hymns and pagan parades of torch-bearers (correfoc) instead of devout marches of yougnsters carrying candles. And given that the equinox has been in this world far longer before the locust-scaring Virgin, it seems pretty likely that the turning of the season is behind the whole fiesta after all.

This whole extravanaza, of course, means anything else than calm, peaceful and quiet afternoon walks in the Gotico or in Barceloneta. The usual people-buzzing Ramblas are now infested with tourists once more, there is no place to appreciate the stuffy, humid air in the streets of Born, you can nomore actually listen to the tramondana blowing all the way down from Tibidabo Hill, bringing with it the suicidal tendencies Marques once described. The city seems to be stripped off from everything it would make it attractive to its regular inhabitants. She is no longer the kind housekeeper that welcomes you every day after work. You now look at a glittering, all made-up hostess trying to shine as much as she can, although you know she 'll be out of this dress soon and she 'll also have a hangover.

Still, I fell in love with her exactly then. When I saw this city trying to do her best to make her guests have a bowl! Even more when I felt pretty confident that I would like her more the day after, after all this would have gone. When people would no more be acting like crazy, kicking empty beer cans all around Plaza Reial at 4 in the morning, when Francisco will be back working instead of chasing around his shoes in the midst of all this frenzy. When car-horns replace free concerts, the garbage trucks occupy the streets of the batucadas and fireworks are substituted by the cloudy sky, completely devoid of stars.

Until next year's Merce, I 'll be living with my sweet, loving housekeeper.