Joe le taxi (parte dos)

I’m on a plane and don’t even know exactly where we are flying to. Obviously I know the name of the city, the name of the country, but the geographical location on the map is a mystery. There’s a map of Europe with flight routes in one of the airline magazines. My ignorance is compounded as I locate Barcelona. I thought I knew what Spain looked like but I’d never noticed that little strip of land in the north-east that borders France and never realised that the two countries met quite as they do.

Outside the airport, in the sweltering heat, I spot a sign in three languages. ‘Please extinguish your cigarette here, thank you’ is obviously English. The second language appears to be Spanish. The third looks a little like French but it isn’t. Then I realise. It’s Catalan and it must resemble French because Barcelona is so close to the border. Ok, that makes sense. I knew they spoke Catalan. It just took a while to piece it all together.

It dawns on me that I am now doubly ignorant. Not only have I not bothered to learn any rudimentary Spanish, I have failed to learn any Catalan too. I ponder about the similarities with French then stop myself. The Catalonians take great pride in their history. The last thing they would appreciate is some English tourist raping their language by thinking badly pronounced school boy French might just pass.

We queue for a taxi and it is not long before I am taking my second atypical cab journey in the space of a week. Luckily, the driver has a basic grasp of English, and he apologises for its poorness.

“Better than our Spanish”, we joke but I’m embarrassed that I know so little.

Yet again, I find myself slightly unnerved as a cab driver leans across to the passenger side of the car, trying to work out where our apartment is from the map one of my companions is holding. The night time traffic in Brighton is one thing but a busy road in a foreign country during the day is another. I regret not putting my seatbelt on and wonder if it would seem rude to do so at this stage of the journey.

We hit upon the international language that all men can speak, wherever they gather – football. It seems he thinks that England had a good chance but he’s unsure about Spain. He reaches over to the glove compartment, pulls out a newspaper and appears to start reading it at the wheel. Finding the page he wants, he turns round and taps on the paper. His finger points to the TV listings and the time and TV channel of the England game.

“Sexto”, he repeats several times.

I’m unsure if that’s how many he expects England to score or the TV channel. I only hope we live long enough to see it.

The journey is educational. We discover through a mixture of broken English and Spanish that the driver’s father was a political exile during the Civil War. The Catalonians were on the side opposed to Franco, I knew that much. I even recall that Ernest Hemmingway went off to fight in the war too. I’m not sure when it was but I’m pretty sure it was in the early to mid 20th century. Yet something else to look up when I get home.

The driver’s father lived in London for some years before ending up in Poole. It seems odd trying to juxtapose the image of a young Spanish Revolutionary, exiled from his homeland, and Poole, a small harbour town on the Dorset coast. It’s akin to Che Guevara moving to Blackpool. Fortunately for the driver, his father did return to Spain or else he’d probably be ferrying tourists round the harbour in the rain right now.

We are told that there over a million motorbikes and scooters in Barcelona. I’m unsure how accurate this fact is but looking out of the cab window, there certainly seem to be a lot of them and throughout our stay they are everywhere. It does seem a very popular form of transport.

A small church is pointed out to us. It looks picturesque and again he’s leaning over and reaching into the glove compartment. I start to work on a theory regarding unusual cab journeys and the element of danger involved. He pulls out a small, religiously decorated card and it looks like it has the times that the church is open. We all nod appreciatively.

“I’ve only visited it once,” he tells us,“to get married. That was enough.”

We learn that it hardly ever rains in Barcelona, it’s always hot and you can swim in the sea all year round. The subject of Sonar, the festival we are here for, comes up. We briefly chat about that before nervously looking at each other as we realise just how long we’ve been driving for and that we are now late to pick up the keys for our apartment. Just when we think that we are lost and the driver really doesn’t know where we are going, he pulls over. We pay for the journey, grab our bags and, thankfully, the woman with the keys for our apartment is still waiting outside.

We’ve arrived.