Walking Barcelona

I have just spent the weekend in Barcelona (I am in London more on this soon). Barcelona is a walking city. For one thing, the footpaths are almost always wide and spacious. Sometimes the footpaths are actually wider than the road. La Rambla, or the Avenue, has wide footpaths on either side and in the centre. Here people – tourists and locals – stroll, ramble, wander.  Performers busk here, there are stalls selling birds, souvenirs, ice cream, cakes, and restaurants serving tapas, paella and sangrias.  Once off the main road, some of the side streets are car free, with only the occasional bicycle and moped to watch out for. Like many other cities, Barcelona is promoting cycling and you can hire bikes to ride around the city.

One of the reasons for choosing the weekend of the 16^th and 17^th of October to visit Barcelona was the Caminda  International, Barcelona. Run by the International Marching League – Walking Association (IML-WA)  along with Associacio Caminda Internacional de Barcelona and Ajuntament de Barcelona, the walk, which is actually six different walks, is part of a schedule of annual walking events run by IML-WA. The walks take place all over the world, including Australia (Canberra) the ‘aim is to spread the wealthy benefits of walking in the society.’ You can read more about the organization, the walks at http://www.imlwalking.org.

The walks are non competitive but there are certificates and awards for those that walk at least 20 kilometers a day. This was not me. I opted for the Saturday morning 10 k walk. The 10 k walks, one on Saturday and one on Sunday, were organized by Barnatresc  Internacional as part of the International walk program.  Barnatresc runs monthly 10 k walks around Barcelona.

I arrived around 8.30am having to find my way from La Rambla to Trinitat Vella.  I went on the metro and soon groups of walkers – walking shoes and hiking sticks a giveaway – started to get on the train at each station. We got off at Trinitat Vella and I followed the trail of people to the hall where we signed on.

‘Is it a difficult walk?’ I asked.

‘No, no the 10 k is easy,’ the woman at the table said handing me a route map with a graph of the altitude. A steady rise from 0 to about 250 meters over the first 4.5 kilometers, and then a drop from 250 meters to 50 meters over 2 kilometers.  I was starting to think I should have opted for the much flatter Sunday walk. But they reassured me it would be fine, easy, and as most of the people gathering seemed to be middle aged and older – some quite old – I decided it would not be so bad.

It was a great fun walk. Hundreds, maybe thousands – I was number 2109 – of people, mostly from Barcelona.  The walk has an international focus but I only met locals and one German couple. We gathered and then began walking together through the streets of the suburbs and then out of town and up to Torre Baro. The climb was tiring at times but not too difficult – if you don’t count the muddy section or the narrow path up the mountain in which we had to walk single file, and the rewards included amazing views of Barcelona and the valley of Besos plus a bottle of water and a couple of bars of chocolate.

It was not really city walking, though some of the first and last part of the walk was through the suburban streets, but I loved walking with strangers whose language I did not understand. I did have a couple of conversations in English and met a young man who was on his first walk after recovering from a stroke – a kind of test he told me. He found the walk tough but managed it. 

I found the walk interesting visually but also emotionally. I had no sense of the route or what the walking would be like. I didn’t know whether we would be walking on the road or on bush tracks.  I just followed the people ahead of me. I put the map away and had no idea where we were on the route. This kind of handing over to other people was both freeing and anxiety provoking.  When I walk in Melbourne in the familiar streets, I go into another space – a space in which I find stories and memories – this was a different experience. There was too much to see that was new and different and I found my thoughts focused on the physical and the present moment. But now much later – I the memories and stories are surfacing.

 

The Mall

Bourke Street has been a mall now since the early 1980s. I have vague memories of the demonstrations by traders who did not want Bourke Street closed off to traffic. They believed that it would negatively affect their trade. We had the same debates in Footscray when a section of Nicholson Street was closed off to traffic. That Mall has had a much more potted history than Bourke Street Mall – mainly because once Highpoint Shopping Centre the whole shopping centre lost customers and nothing looks more deserted than a street with no people or cars. Bourke Street Mall looks here to stay – though there are still trams and so you do have to watch where your walking and when. But it is great to turn into a road with no cars in the centre of the city. I look forward to the day when the whole city is car free. Is it possible? I hope so.

Imagine Melbourne with only walkers, cyclists and trams. Imagine being free to move around the city without the constant traffic, imagine what we could do with all the car parks. This is what I have been thinking about as I walk around Melbourne this morning; the pleasure of walking in a city that is given over to pedestrians. Where pedestrians are the priority – there would be much more public seating, water fountains on every corner, buskers and other entertainers, good public facilities, and of course fast reliable public transport. There would be more public art, more cafes with outdoor seating (there would be all that extra road space).

Meandering

According to the Oxford Online dictionary, to meander is to ‘wander at random…to proceed aimlessly or with little purpose’.  Therefore, it seems, I can’t claim to be a flâneur and to meander, because a flâneur has a purpose: to ‘saunter around observing society’ and usually with the intention of turning those observations into some kind of ‘art’.  But then the flâneur, also according to the Oxford (and other sources too), is a male: ‘a man who saunters…’ and I am a woman.  A woman who meanders. Or actually a woman who loves meandering – ‘following a winding course…proceeding in a convoluted or undirected fashion’. Convoluted – that’s the Oxford’s word – but not difficult more intricate, winding and twisting and not following a straight line.

Melbourne is made up of straight lines. It’s a grid. Neat, easy to manage. The street order easy to remember especially when you start with King, William, Queen, Elizabeth. This grid argues against meandering. But meandering is possible – avoid the main streets and stick the side streets and laneways.  Meandering gives you a different city to the one you think you know. Some of the laneways of Melbourne are well-known – Degraves, Hardware – full of cafes and restaurants. Some are just short dead ends frequented only by the residents/tenants of the buildings that have laneway entrances, by graffiti artists, by smokers looking for a quiet sheltered spot.  Some occupy a space in-between they are shared road ways where you will find the juxtaposition of very different activities.   I have spent an hour or so meandering through the city today, working and reworking a chapter I am writing. The character is a walker too … she is struggling with my meandering. We were at cross purposes for most of the walk, her tastes and mine are so different we couldn’t even agree on where to have coffee.

Where do you meander?

Looking up in Melbourne

 

 

Giftland

Between Swanston Street and Russell Street along little Collins are a number of up market menswear shops.  I haven’t taken much notice of these before but today they stand out. It’s just after eleven on a weekday and most of the shops are not busy. I imagine that the kinds of men who buy their clothes in these shops are sitting in meetings or in offices, talking on telephones, making deals, writing policy, running industry or maybe even the government. They do not go shopping on weekdays.

 I worked in a shop in my teens and this is the memory that comes back as I walk along Little Collins Street. The shop where I worked was not in the city and did not sell menswear. But watching the sales people behind the counters, looking out into the street, reminds me of the Friday nights and Saturday mornings I spent in ‘retail.’  As I walk I am transported back, back as if walking is some kind of time machine.

 It was a gift shop in Footscray – Giftland. It was run by two young men – long time friends – who came from the other side of town but saw an ‘business opportunity’ in Footscray. It was the early 70s. It was my first job, I was not quite 15. Giftland was a small crowded shop with objects especially chosen to cater to the tastes of the large local migrant population in the west, then mainly southern European. They liked me because I could speak Italian and many of their Italian customers could not speak English. And also I think because I was a chubby teenage girl, who looked like she didn’t have a very active social life and so, they imagined, would probably be reliable. Unlike my friend, lets call her Maria, who had the job for a couple of months and quit – she was pretty, she liked to flirt – she did not want to work in a shop where all the customers were over 30. It was my job to dust – there was always a lot of dust – to serve the customers when it was busy, and to watch out for shoplifters.  We sold holy light-up pictures (you know the kind – Jesus with his bleeding heart in his hands, the very virgin-like Virgin Mary), statues of David and Roman soldiers (in bronze or in white), dinner sets, glass ware and all sorts of ornaments including a wine decanter in the shape of a little boy urinating.  

The two guys who ran the shop were good bosses and I ended up working there all the way through high school until my last year at university. The job was not that exciting and retail was never really my kind of gig but I earned some money and got out of doing the housework on Saturdays. I found some things difficult – especially customers wanted reassurance for their choices: ‘Do you think they’ll like it?’ they would ask me as I wrapped a picture of the Virgin Mary for their just engaged nephew, an orange glass punch bowl for their niece’s 21^st, or statue of David for a housewarming (very hard to wrap)…It’s not that I felt that bad about lying. I just felt really bad for the people receiving the gifts. I imagined their disappointment when they took the wrapping off…I never even considered that they might like these presents. And some of them must have because the shop was always busy…

Out of town

I have been out of city over the weekend. Down to the beach – my favourite section of Victorian coastline – anyone who has read Swimming will recognise it – the stretch that begins at Airey’s Inlet and includes Fairhaven, Moggs Creek and Eastern View. You can walk from one end to the other and back again, and back again in a kind of mediative state. At low tide there are a few other walkers – locals and their dogs – but not many. At Eastern View there is the occasional huddle of tourists; they park, walk down the stairs onto the beach take a photo or two and then leave. There are some fishermen and women, and when the waves are good, there are surfers. Young and old, men and women, in their wetsuits they look like seals – herds of seals – bobbin in the water beyond the break, until the right wave comes along and one by one they transform and take flight.

I’m not a surfer. I have never liked fishing. I love to swim but it’s still too cold for me (I don’t have a wetsuit) and so I spend my time walking and then sitting on the beach staring at the ocean or reading, and then walking again. You can really breathe here – that is what I notice – the way my lungs demand long deep breathes.

Rebecca Solint writes: ‘the rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking.’ This is true for me wherever I walk – the city or the beach. But here more than anywhere else the rhythm is a mediation, and I find myself in a kind of reverie. The thinking lucid, sometimes takes the form of a narrative – the self telling the self – a story. I find the long stretches of sand, the emptiness, allows my sense of sight to relax, I can walk here with my eyes closed and I do sometimes for a short stretches. So the other senses take over, I can hear the constant sound of the waves crashing, I can feel the touch of the wind and sand against my skin, I can smell the salty sea…Moving this way seems to bring up stories, some from my own past and others from the lives of imagined characters. When I walk like this, my mind wandering, narrative threads and possibilities, come to the surface for even the most problematic piece of writing.

Festival wanderings

Last weekend was the first weekend of the Melbourne Writers Festival. I only went to a couple of sessions – my own of course – ‘I see the darkness’ with Jennifer Lee, Michael Hyde and Louise Doughty. We talked about writing about the dark side of life – death, grief, abuse, suicide – the taboos and secrets. I enjoyed the panel despite our dark topic and preparing for it did make me think more about the impulse I have to tell silenced stories. Some would argue – my mother included – that some stories should not be left untold; that taboos are taboos for a reason but I don’t agree. I don’t think any topic is off-limits. And this is what I often think about when I think about the city – the layers of stories – the layers on layers. And if we only tell the acceptable stories, we can only ever partly understand the city and ourselves.

I went to two other sessions at the festival, both related to the city. ‘The Changing City’ with Adrian Franklin, Fiona McGregor and Emili Rosalas and ‘My Story’ with Barry Dickins, Cate Kennedy, Tony Birch and Matt Blackwood. ‘The Changing City’ ended up being a bit of ‘we think Melbourne has more buzz than Sydney’ discussion. With Adrian leading the way, and Fiona, a Sydney-sider, agreeing. While I too prefer Melbourne – well it’s my home and if I preferred Sydney I might have moved there – it made me question ‘buzz’. Would younger people make the same assessment? What is buzz? And surely your buzz and mine are likely to be very different.

I enjoyed the ‘My Story’ session. ‘My Story’ is a laneway project funded by City of Melbourne and directed by Matt Blackwood. Matt kept referring to himself as and emerging writer which I guess he must be at least compared to the other three. However, the idea is all his. He wants to map the city with stories and has started with these three writers who have each written three stories based on a particular location. I am booked in on the Tony Birch walk and looking forward to it. But you can download the stories from the ‘My Story’ cite and take yourself for your own walk. http://www.mystoryworld.com.au/