Returning to Spain is predictably pleasant, a reminder of the comfortable ignorance that comes with visiting a country smart enough to welcome tourists. The fact that I speak passable Spanish makes things seem even smoother.
But I must keep reminding myself that I really don’t know very much about what’s going on here. I’m skating on the surface. The weather is great, the people pleasant and the water drinkable. Cities like Barcelona, Madrid and Seville all appear prosperous and calm. But that’s superficial, broken infrequently by reminders like the campaigners for and against Catalan independence we met in Barcelona. The anti-separatists were helpful enough to have printed English-language brochures explaining their position.
The tourists I encounter when I’m in New York aren’t fixed by what’s happening in the Trump White House, although some see posing in front of the Trump Tower on Fifth Ave. as a selfie must. And those of us visiting Spain see scant evidence of the political tensions we’ve read about.
The fact that many people seem to be eating and dressing well seems inconsistent with what we know of this country’s high unemployment rate (currently down to about 15%), and political tensions internally and within the broader EU. We’ve talked with a few shop clerks who came from provicinicial downs, but it isn’t clear whether their migration reflects a lack of economic opportunity back home or the inevitable charm of the bright lights in the big city (for historic perspective, check out the Netflix series Cable Girls).
And there was a revealing moment in talking with a clerk who sold me a spiffy new blazer as she acknowledged that she’d only come to Spain six months ago from Venezuela, where the political and economic problems are much more serious than they are here.
My taste in travel tends to focus more on today’s culture than yesterday’s, even while acknowledging that the two are linked. There’s an excavation in Barcelona directly behind the hotel we stayed in that features centuries-old religious venues that were used as shelters from the bombs of the Spanish civil war. How quickly, fortunately, people seem to forget as we’ve found in prior visits to South America where the violence came centuries later.
But the operative word in that phrase is “seems.” Those of us who lack deep ties to the culture can’t begin to know what’s really going on. So I constantly remind myself that things may not be as peaceful and comfortable as they seem and check my habit of making inferences, which is imperfect even in the American culture where I belong.
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