Beach Blanket Barcelona
Somewhere off the coast of Newfoundland, my flight only a few hours old, I watched people surfing. Never mind that these people were from El Salvador and on videotape courtesy of the entertainment division of Lufthansa, they surfed nonetheless.
As entertainment, the fifteen-minute segment made better diversion than the chosen two-hour film for the trip to Frankfurt. The story of a boy from a Northern England mining town who decides ballet would be a better way for him to gain the respect of his peers — you know, one of those real-life dramas — couldn’t compare to the story of the ex-patriot father and son who surfed the war-torn shores of El Salvador simply hoping to spread the good word of surfing. I switched between the English and German language versions, just for fun.
Reaching Frankfurt the next morning, I changed planes for the final destination of Barcelona. Since the city sits on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, a certain degree of seaside culture was to be expected. I found loads of seafood in the cuisine, extensive things to see and do along the beach and harbor front and even a “beach culture”. I also found surfing, in some odd places.
I saw surfing used to advertise a bizarre variety of products: phone cards, pizza, magazines and shoes. Speaking (in broken Castilian) with the proprietor of the oldest magic shop in Spain (El Rey De La Magia, opened in 1881) I glanced down and noticed he wore a t-shirt of an Australian wetsuit company. This cross-cultural mix staggered me even more after I found out he lived in Paris for seven years and New York City prior to that. It seemed every automobile had surf stickers in the window, surf racks on the top or a combination of the both. I never saw the slightest hint of waves until the last day, as the plane ascended over the Mediterranean. They broke knee-high, at best.
For a trip essentially designed to get away from what was shaping up to be a miserable life, I kept running into the one thing that makes all the bad aspects disappear, or at least fade for a while. I don’t necessarily believe in signs or fate or messages, but less than two weeks after the trip, I paddled out for my first session of the year. They broke knee-high at best, but I could think of no better.