The Stranger of Two Cities

Barcelona has grown to become one of the “it places” to visit in the world. The city has only seen growth in tourism and a surge of startups, making it a certified “tech hub”. However, the idealized view of visiting any city is often in contrast with the day-to-day. Barcelona is not just tapas and sangria. Having spent a few months in the city as part of my master’s program with Swiss Business School, I’ve had time to reflect on the expat lifestyle, both the good and bad. 

Walking and Talking

Barcelona, and Spain by and large, have a large contrast in pace and communication from a North American city such as Toronto, Canada. In contrast to my time growing up in a more traditional urban city, the chaos of Barcelona manifests itself differently. Barcelona is a city bustling with tourists and movement, late night parties and colorful characters. While it may seem that the Catalan population can appear more closed off, I found that beyond the language barrier, there is a sense of protection of culture and pride. Barcelona and Catalunya by and large carries itself differently from the rest of Spain, but integrating into the culture takes effort to learn the language and be willing to adapt. Once you make the effort, I found that people’s friendliness and openness grew. To take lessons from Meyer’s The Culture Map, Barcelona is very high-context in communication; the impression that people might not be friendly comes from some indirect communication. If you only stick to the expat scene then you never grow the opportunity to integrate. My personal experience with attending Catalan events such as festivals and castells, is that while there is an in group, people were incredibly inviting. Just don’t carry yourself as the loud and disrespectful tourist.

On this note, festials and social events are highly aniticpated, and contrbiuutes to Barcelona’s reputation as a party city, but this is due to a stirking difference in work-life balance compared to Toronto, NYC. In more traditional North American urban cities, speed is the name of the game. It’s just as chaotic as Barcelona, but the chaos is focused on work. There is a “grind culture” that prides itself on the amount of hours, side hustles, or career growth one has. In Barcelona, people just don’t care about your career all that much, and are unlikely to be impressed by the size of your wallet or the job title you acquired. As such, they have what Meyer’s considers a flexible sense of time;  the reputation of having “Spanish time” is true, and the rush to start things on the dot is replaced with a more lax sense of “8pm really means 8:40pm”. Quite frankly, it was refreshing.

The Needs of the Many

That is not to say there aren’t drawbacks. Barcelona can have a very clogged bureaucracy, with an empashics on procedure, red tape, and the collective need. That leads to good social programs and healthcare, but acquiring appointments and documentation is a slog. This can hamper integration or feeling like one belongs at times.

Buddy System: A Question of Trust

While there are many other expats in Barcelona, as mentioned before, integration takes time. It may be easy to stay in your comfort zone, and only speak English, but the great difficulty in “fitting in” starts with knowing Spanish and the basics of Catalan. The government website also lists events in the city, but I’d recommend finding a hobby you already enjoy and learning the language/words related to the hobby. For me it was marital arts and bouldering.

I’d be lying if I said the process was easy, or that I felt invited. The truth is, as Meyer’s discusses in The Culture Map, a city like Barcelona is “relationships based” and a lot of these people who have their in-groups grew up with a Catalan way of thinking, and know each other for years, and have an entirely different perspective of what Barcelona is. While a tourist or expat might know Barcelona from just Las Ramblas, there is so much more to the city. This can create a feedback loop where you only stick to other expats or to English without ever taking the plunge to see the local scene.

The Stranger

This is what creates what I’d call strangerdom: you feel like an outsider in the city you’re visiting, like you don’t “know” the culture fully. But when you return to your home city, things just aren’t the same. Like Frodo returning to the Shire in Lord of the Rings, something felt off for me. My time in Barcelona taught me to relax, to walk slower, to enjoy the moment more and to stop stressing about the next gig, the next hustle, the next LinkedIn career post. There’s more to life than that. But as a consequence, this left a lasting impression upon coming back to Toronto. I find myself less obsessed with sticking to the script, to having the material items and hitting the prized target so often coveted by people in Toronto: the car, the picturesque/Instagrammable lifestyle, and the elusive highrise condo. The desire to chase for a higher salary to have these things, to only live for the next goal without actually living has become a lot less appealing. While bordering on nihilism, the real question to ask yourself is: who cases? Maybe the real reason I felt isolated in Toronto growing up, and why I feel like a stranger, is because my own culture’s norms and expectations were never questioned, but rather assumed as fact. It seeped into our subsoncsious that it is normal to chase for a mult-million dollar home and bankrupt yourself in the process, to avoid random small talk and chit-chatter, to rush through every task and to grow extra gray hair in your morning commute.

Barcelona opened my eyes to the contrast, to the dissonance I’ve been harboring about. When I learned to live in the moment, to take an interest in other people on a deeper social level, to put myself in social situations outside my comfort zone, I took back some of these values with me. The strangerdom I feel in Toronto is something that stems from non-compliance, a sense of small, cultural rebellion against the “americano with double espresso shot”, suit-and-tie, 45-minute morning drive, the 10-paid vacation days you’re guilted into not taking, and the 6 figure salary carrot-on-the-stick you’re forever chasing. All of this cannot replace human interaction; we chase these to feel whole only to realize even that won’t fill any void. In the end, the question is: do you live to work, or work to live?