Coffee at a Barcelona Café

Sitting on the terrace watching the world go by

View from the cafe. Photo by the author from the author’s private collection.

It’s 11 a.m. on a Monday and I’m at the café taking a coffee break. Instead of reading like I normally do, I people watch.

The café is called Gent del Barri, which is Catalan for “people of the neighbourhood”. I still pinch myself that I’m a person of the neighbourhood and not a tourist who’ll soon be heading back to Australia.

My ‘hood is what’s described as “local”, which means that despite being less than a mile from La Sagrada Família, few guiris live here. Just me.

On Thursday it’ll be exactly a year since I moved to Barcelona. October 2020, an interesting time to move countries…

I’m sitting outside on the café’s terrace, which is on a pedestrianised street. Even before the events that began in early 2020, people in Barcelona prefer to sit outside. Some of them still smoke or have their dogs with them. Besides, the café interiors are often not the architectural marvels the city is known for.

It’s an outdoors society. Even in winter. The cafés don’t provide an outside heater or a friendly blanket like they do in Scandinavian countries. You just bundle up in your jacket. In late October the maximum temperate has dipped to around 21 degrees Celsius (70 Fahrenheit). That’s obviously not cold…