According to the “Who’s Visiting?” section of this very web site, we should be running for Parliament by now, since Mark and Susan have come and gone. But alas – we wouldn’t be able to really understand our own radio ads. Time flies when you’re oer learning the subjunctive.

The visit of Los Braverman began at 8 am two Saturdays ago. They were raring to go, but I cannot lead anyone to see the Cathedral at that hour, so everyone was shuttled off to bed. Yet they managed to pack in a full day, complete with a nice dinner at Silvestre, where we were so early that they gave us the special table-on-the-pedestal. How early did we eat? Not early at all by your standards, but early enough that, in the midst of a perfectly good conversation in Spanish about our reservations, the host answered my “nueve y media” with an almost unaccented, “Very good, sir. See you then.” I could hear him thinking, “If only these people would just eat dinner at a reasonable hour, they wouldn’t have all that nervous energy and maybe they’d stop picking so many fights.” Another family came in at 9:45, raising our spirits, but they were German.

By the time we got home, around midnight, Mark and Susan were…um…groggy, with Mark opening his eyes only long enough to swear that he would not be eating at that hour again. We had heard that before: weeks ago, Sue insisted that if we ate dinner at 10, she would already be asleep. Both times, we countered with a short lecture on how time zones work, and how most of you reading this are used to being on the east side of one. In Spain, we are hours from the eastern edge of the zone. Hence the sun rises later and sets later, too. It doesn’t matter what time someone wants to go to bed: they see the sun set at 9:00, and they think about eating maybe an hour later. Poof, you’re Spanish. Eating at 7 feels like you should be riding around the neighborhood in a golf cart and setting your alarm to make the Coral Gables shuffleboard tournament. Mark slept through the lecture, but he stayed up late the next time, anyhow.

Thus began another week of visitors who left Barcelona thinking “Modernista” was just the name of the only restaurant we forgot to take them to.

Even on Mallorca, where we had every intention of seeing a cathedral and Michael Douglas’ house, we played within ourselves. The first day, after a typically delightful nobody-really-knows-where-we’re-going-but-how-about-everyone-suggests-directions drive from the airport across the island to Deià, we installed ourselves in the house of Huguette, one of Susan and Mark’s friends from Washington.

And what a house it was. Huguette has spent her career as a poet (and translator of Robert Graves’ work – I think you are supposed to have heard of him, though we had not), and her late husband was a painter. They both owned a gallery in Paris. Evidence of lives not spent in offices is all over the house: books in four or five languages, original paintings and sculptures, pottery from all over the world. She even had the world’s coolest coffee maker, a ceramic stovetop thing with a funny little tube that sprayed pressurized coffee from the bottom part into the pitcher.

From the porch, we had a view of the Mediterranean against rocky cliffs, groves of olive trees perched on terraces put in by the Arab settlers who first lived in Mallorca, and old stone houses. It was the sort of view that makes it easy to abandon the idea of poking around a dank old cathedral in favor of eating lunch on the porch for three hours. We also wandered up into the little mountains behind the house, where a trail took us past farmhouses from the 13th century. The path was steep and rocky, which made the run Mark and I attempted foolish, but it led us to a lot of good views of the sea and made us feel like we had accomplished a lot. Mark, in fact, fired up the e-mail right away in order to tell the guys back at work about it.

The hike also took us past tons of hiking tourists, which led to plenty of silly exchanges like the following:

Us: O-luh!
British hikers: Owe-lawe!
German hikers: Ooo-luh.
Dutch hikers: Hi.

We even found a store in which the owner spoke French – luckily, so does Mark, so we could communicate, a little – but no Spanish. And the restaurants served dinner starting at 7 or so, but we weren’t interested in that sort of thing, since it was still light out.

This left us plenty of time to work the phones. Mark had learned, just before the trip, that he would be stopping in Paris on his way home. Apparently Marsh Maclennan has the contract to re-brand French Toast. People go from Barcelona to Paris for work the way they do from New York to Washington: daily, cheaply, and without fuss. But alas, there is always a travel department. Getting himself to Paris entailed numerous phone calls from the dented booths along the road - the road is such that if you are walking along it and a bus comes by, you need to step into a doorway – to the home office. At one point, nearly an entire bar full of people was involved, offering advice about how to use payphones and buy phone cards in a variety of languages.

Eventually Mark was set for Paris and we had gotten our fill of wandering around cathedrals in the mist and dodging other tourists. Our days kept ending with a relieved retreat for the tranquility for the house along the road between Deià and Soller with the porch overlooking the sea and the lemon trees, and the quaint landline connection for Mark’s computer. Even the young rich neighbors who recently built their house don’t seem to bother anyone – if Mallorca was Cape Cod, England and Germany would be New York, sending well-meaning folks who earn more money, only want to hang out in the nice weather, and don’t speak the language.

And if England is New York, then that would make Barcelona into…Boston. But without any Catholics, that’s not quite possible. A better analogy would make the US into New York, and all of the UK into Boston – plenty of religious similarities, of course, plus a general annoyance about not being in charge of anything, an array of accents that could convince you that you don’t speak their language, and teams that couldn’t beat the Northbrook, Illinois, juniors in powder puff football if making the playoffs was on the line. That would, of course, leave Barcelona, with its stormy history, half-Spanish, half-Mediterranean culture, and, of course, that famous Modernista, as Barcelona.