"'Soy estudiante de Erasmus'" a Barcelona Travel Page by kit_mc

Going down memory lane on this page to a place I visited many years ago. I spent 4 months living in Barcelona as a young whipper snapper, studying (yeah, right) anthropology at la Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. I arrived in Barcelona on a steaming early September day in 1995, armed with a Rough Guide and a smattering of self-taught Spanish, very little money, no accommodation and no idea that everyone would actually, really, no joking, speak Catalan, in the way that only an utterly naive 21 year old Erasmus student can (for those not in the know, Erasmus is the name given to the university exchange scheme enabling poor fools like me to go to a foreign country knowing nothing of the language and spend several months of their lives clubbing and boozing with other lost and frustrated international students under the guise of study).

I had accommodation and financial nightmares almost the whole stay there, but I still managed to have the most fantastic time in Barcelona and a little inner nostalgic glow lights up when I think of those days. Well, those days that I can remember. A lot of cheap red wine, cava and Cuarenta y Tres was consumed in those 4 months you see…

I was reminded of my days in Barcelona more vividly recently after I visited an old Erasmus friend in Montpellier in the south of France where she now lives with her husband and two kids. She and her husband met in Barcelona just after I’d left. She recommended that I watch a French film called 'L'Auberge Espagnole' (the English title of it is 'Pot Luck') about a bunch of international Erasmus students living in a flat together in central Barcelona. Seeing the familiar streets and that chaotic student life brought back some memories, no doubt tinged with the rose tinted-ness that 10 years of trying to be a grown up can give you.

Oh, the memories… Saturday clubbing at super-cool 'Polyester' under Estacion Francia until the sun was rising, followed by coffee in the station café; getting completely hammered on cheap cava in a bar that I would never be able to find again and having what must have been the worst hangover of my life; eating our regular late night falafel with extra chilli with my Belgian, Italian and Mallorcan friends on the Rambla in the early hours of the morning; finally finding a room in an apartment after 6 weeks of angst while staying in a pension with dwindling funds, only to discover within days that the live-in landlord was a psycho and that my American roommate had been told to get the hell out of there by his mother, a shrink, who reckoned we were residing with an official schizophrenic…

What else… Countless nightclubs and bars that are probably long lost now; banging loudly on a downstairs door and shouting, 'Soy yo!' up to a 3rd floor flat when visiting friends in the Barrio Chino because all the buzzers in that decrepit building were broken; the seemingly endless nights of impromptu festivals in random city squares; the regular evenings spent nursing beers and/or coffee and smoking far too many cigarettes while the sullen waiters of Cafe Opera looked on; learning Spanish as it’s spoken by a multilingual group of friends, in other words, badly but with lots of hand movements (when I told my friend in Montpellier that I’d started to dream in Spanish before I left, she retorted that I must have had very simple dreams, cheeky mare!). And don’t forget the difficulties of actually learning Castellano in a Catalan city ('No parlo catala', indeed!).

Of course, like any Erasmus student, you think that you’ve got ages to see the sights, and then you find yourself with a week to go and you still haven’t seen the Sagrada Familia actually from the inside even though you’ve passed it most days on the way to your Mallorcan boyfriend's flat (or was that just me?). There are no doubt so many things that I didn't see in Barcelona but my main regret was that after four months there, I'd just begun to feel at home when it was time to leave again.

In some ways I'd love to go back to Barcelona and spend a week or so just seeing the sights as a tourist, but part of me is scared to go back. My friends, both Spanish and foreign have all moved on and I'm sure it’s changed so much and I’d feel like a stranger again, in a city that was quite a tough place to so briefly make home. I'm also sure that it would resurrect a desire to live somewhere more Mediterranean than London that I just can’t do anything about right now. So call me an overly nostalgic old scaredy cat, but for now the photos that I’ll add here will just have to stand as my Barcelona memories page until I pluck up the courage to visit again.