Arriving in Barcelona

It was an unremarkable flight from Bristol y the no-frills airline EasyJet just a bit over 2 hours and we were in a new life.

Nothing like the trip that my great-grandmother did when she left the tiny village of Caravate in the shores of the Lago Maggiore in Italy to go to far away Argentina. She left her family and her job (making silk from silkworms), married her fiancee by proxy (her father would have never left her travel as a single woman and he was already in Argentina), packed her few belongings and just went. She has a very dramatic crossing of the Atlantic, the engine on her ship blew up living the ship and its cargo at the mercy of the currents for month until finally arriving to Tenerife by chance. It took her many month to make her way from her pretty village at least is pretty in the pictures now) to tropical and exotic Tucuman inn Argentina and nobody knew what had happened to her until she was able to tell the story. No fast communications then, it was at the end of the 19th century.

I grew up in a country made by immigrants and everybody there had a story (or four) of grandparents crossing the oceans to go to a sort of a promised land where they build a home and a family. I grew up thinking that THAT was emigration all about: adventure-like life-altering trips. But here and now, my life-altering trip took only a couple of hours in a sort of comfortable seats drinking overpriced Coca-Cola; and to take away any hint of adventure I it seems that everybody around us was ready to enjoy the three S (sun, sand and sangria). No grandchild of mine will be remotely interested by this start!!

For me it was literally flying into another life. One that I didn't even took the time to imagine beforehand.

Let's me explaining something about me first: I'm that sort of person to whom life has to be first imagined and only then is allowed to happens. I have a very overdeveloped imagination and just go around imagining all sort of possibilities around me and everybody alse. I've always been like that and, yes, my whole family thinks I'm funny that way too.

Anyway, I was so incredible busy the few months before this trip that I didn't had the time to imagine Barcelona, or better said: I didn't had the time to imagine Barcelona with me in it. That was an absolute first.

The busy months were all about packing and huffing and working and taking care of my son and my dad who were living with me. The husband moved to Barcelona 3 month ago to start his new job and we stayed behind in order to sort things out while waiting for the school year to be over. Migration or not, I thought that it wasn't fair for my son to move to another life in the middle of the school year. Far too disruptive, I thought, lets keep things as simpler as we can and split the family, pack everything and sell the house on my own, take care of my newly widowed and grieving dad and three month after the husband is gone and when I'm about to go mad... THEN, get the husband to come back, sign a few papers with a flourish, enjoy the farewell part and go to Spain.

The party part was great. Many of our friends went to M's farm near Weston-super-Mare and we spend our whole last weekend in England dancing and eating merrily surrounded by friends... Paradise. See picture so you can see it for yourself.

The arriving in Barcelona part was going hard only in comparison and probably because I had a bit of a hangover. Emotional hangover, thought, because I never drink much anyway. We flew away a few hours after the party, which in retrospect, was not a good idea as I had my heart wormed by my friends.

It was REALLY hot and dusty in Barcelona, again compared with the weather at the south of England which was -of course- rainy and coldish which is as good as you get in most summers. And my heart if felt cold and empty because all my friends seems to had been left behind. We managed to get a people's carrier taxi and we arrived at the flat that the husband had rent for us to live in August.

I cried myself to sleep that night.