Column:

Escaping tourism, defining real culture

By John Hendel

Published March 20, 2007

BARCELONA, Spain — Hey there, MU. Hope everyone thoroughly enjoyed St. Patrick's Day this past weekend.

People started talking about St. Patrick's Day here early on. Many envisioned a celebration of crazed Irish, Brits and Scots decked out in green and pounding pints. Several booked trips to Dublin for this weekend. My gut tells me that they're right to imagine this and that Irish drinking songs are booming throughout the U.K.

But Spain, as I discovered, doesn't really dig St. Patrick's Day. Aside from a few Irish pubs, little out of the ordinary happens on account of the day. Luckily, this doesn't make any difference in Barcelona, which is literally the wildest city I have had the pleasure to see. This amazing mega-club I know of didn't open till 1 a.m. and most places only warm up between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. Plenty of young people still walk the streets at 6 a.m.

This type of partying puts you to shame, MU. The label of a "party school" seems like a joke after experiencing Barcelona. Three hookers propositioned me my first night, for Christ's sake.

A few Irish pubs exist in Barcelona though. Most offered a special green hat for customers who drank two pints of Guinness. This was the real incentive to attend, and both my friend and I walked away from the night with two plastic-wrapped green Guinness crowns.

Yet later, when we were eating some tapas at a cafe at midnight, the workers and I started chatting in Spanish, and I discovered they had barely heard of St. Patrick's Day. More shockingly, our waitress said she had no clue what Guinness was. The manager said she spotted all these tourists wearing green hats throughout the day and hadn't a clue as to the source until St. Patrick's Day was ending.

Now I suppose this shouldn't be too shocking. The holiday isn't earth-shakingly global, and there's a world wider than the one of verdant leprechauns and rainbows.

Personally, I don't even celebrate it in any real sense back in the states, so there was nothing substantial I missed. My wardrobe contains virtually no green and my blood no Irish (though I'm open to both.) It was all just bizarre.

The situation was also refreshing because it was outside the typical tourist bubble following around most of the people in our program, particularly in England and in London especially. Other cultures should disorient me. The language barrier is fun and makes the accompanying situations that much more interesting.

American culture chases you in Europe. Even when I was on a backstreet bar called Ménage a trois with no English-speakers whatsoever, I recognized Massive Attack's big '90s trip-hop album Mezzanine playing in the background. The same music pervades your ambient noise in more or less every country I've traveled through so far. The same tends to be true with films — "Epic Movie" is just being advertised in Spain now, for instance.

But how can you quantify culture? Everyone talks about wanting that "deep, moving cultural experience" half the time shrouded with the money-hungry, plastic industry of tourism. Real culture can be found in a tapas bar, wandering around lost in a foreign city in the middle of the night and conversation with a random taxi driver.

Moments matter more than highlighted markings on any map.