I was in McDonald’s trying to navigate the large touchpad order screen. Daughter Number Four will eat a quarter-pounder with cheese, but only if certain ingredients have been removed: pickle, onions, mustard. And cheese.
A woman loomed up beside me, her eyes blazing.
“We were waiting in line,” she declared.
It wasn’t clear to me if she was American or another nationality and had learned to speak English with an American accent. What was clear was that she was angry and stressed and accusing me of jumping the queue. She had a small child in a pushchair. The child didn’t look too happy either.
I’m pretty sure I hadn’t jumped the line, though the queuing system was chaotic. I opted not to debate the point but instead endeavoured to continue inputting the complex instructions for Daughter Number Four’s cheeseless cheeseburger.
The woman remained standing beside me: so closely that whenever my finger paused on the screen, I could see her hand moving forward to complete my order.
This isn’t about a narky woman in a fast-food restaurant. The McDonald’s was in Barcelona, adjacent to the Sagrada Família: just about the most touristy part of that city. Swarms of people had come to take the expensive guided tour or queue up outside in the heat; to buy fridge magnets or boxes of chocolates that would never be eaten. Kids were crying. Adults were arguing or looking bewildered. Just like that woman, we were all being tourists. Everyone was narky.
Being a tourist is ruined by the presence of other tourists, yet still we go to the big attractions, secretly thinking of ourselves as adventurers or citizens of the world: there to drink in the culture or have some sort of Eat Pray Love epiphany. Yet we arrive and are aghast to find thousands of others doing the same thing. We form into queues and plod obediently into world heritage sites and get to stare at the Mona Lisa for 10 seconds, where we think: it’s much smaller than I imagined.
The Sagrada Família is a magnificent building. It’ll be great when it’s finished (2033, they’re hoping), but the entire experience was, by necessity, so curated that it almost felt like we hadn’t been there at all: like we’d read about it in Wikipedia or looked it up on Google Street View. And it feels like all tourist experiences are like that. We go to see the Tower of London or the Acropolis hoping to get some feeling of what these places are like, or what they were like. But all they feel is touristy.
There’s a hope that the rest of the time you might glean a sense of what the city or country is really like. But even that’s difficult. When you walk around the streets, you can’t help but wonder how many of the people you see are also tourists, wondering the same thing about you. You’d wonder what holidays are for.
We stayed in the L’Eixample district, which (according to Wikipedia) does have real-life Barcelonans living in it. It’s designed in a New York-style grid system, so from the balcony of our apartment, I had a view of the back gardens and balconies of some of the locals.
I felt a bit guilty about it – like they were zoo exhibits – but I’d spend 20 minutes every evening watching them. They all seemed to eat outside. They’d sit outside and watch TV through their huge patio doors. They’d hang out washing. The apartments seemed gorgeous. (I looked it up: €1 million for a one-bed.)
As I’ve done before in various countries, I had a brief fantasy of coming to live here one day, of somehow overcoming the lack of Spanish, Catalan or cash. Perhaps that is what a foreign holiday is really for: to provide a brief dream of escape; one that is never realised.
