Going to Barcelona? Bring Your Fan and Your Pesetas

I am sweating as I write this.

I was sweating before I wrote this.

And I will be sweating after I write this and transmit this back to the home office and pack my computer bag and head for the metro and break for dinner and walk back to my flat and climb into bed, where the sheets hit the fan only if you’re willing to spend 3,800 pesetas ($38 in American currency) for a plug-in model.

It is hot. Sweltering hot. Withering hot. Keep-the-fat-people-away-from-the-leather-chairs hot.

The natives have a saying for it, or so I have heard:

No es la humedad, es el calor.

It’s not the humidity, it’s the heat.

The natives also have interesting means for dealing with it. Air-conditioning is, largely, a state of mind. You want BTUs, go back to the States. Here, if you don’t have a credential to the climate-controlled main press center, ventilation and hydration are pretty much left to one’s own devices, store-bought or otherwise.

On the streets of Barcelona, women wear sleeveless blouses, short shorts and shorter skirts. Men can be seen carrying elaborately detailed fold-out fans, waving them in front of their faces as a blushing flamenco dancer would. And the clear-plastic water bottle is de rigueur for foot travelers everywhere--whatever gets you to the nearest cerveseria .

Barcelonans take their beer halls very seriously because, without them, the citizenry would be passed out on the cobblestone. Life-giving as they are, some have attained mythic reputation, such as Els Quatre Gats in the Gothic Quarter--”The Four Cats,” named after Casas, Rusinyol, Utrillo and Romeu, the four Modernist masters who founded the tavern around the turn of the century.

Els Quatre Gats , Rusinyol wrote, was to serve as “an inn for the disillusioned . . . a warm nook for the homesick . . . a Gothic beer-hall for lovers of the north, and an Andalusian patio for lovers of the South . . . a place to cure the ills of our century.”

Rusinyol would be disappointed today. Gats is a quiet, polite little pub that serves breaded veal and “Milan-style potatoes”--in Costa Mesa, they are known as “French fries”--although the gazpacho has been known to cure the ills of hungry tourists craving cold tomato soup.

Pub-crawling, though a necessity, is tough on a wallet. Often compared to New York because of its dense population and intense work-play habits, Barcelona has zoomed past the Big Apple inside its stores, restaurants and hotels.

Some prices:

Hamburger and fries: $16.

Plate of asparagus in vinaigrette: $10.

Dinner of green salad, grilled clams, half bottle of house wine and lemon sorbet: $40.

Bedroom (with closet) at the Olympic media village: $165 a night.

Without air conditioning.

You are charged this because you are helping foot the bill of urban renewal that has been the theme in Barcelona ever since the city was awarded the Summer Games six years ago. Hosting an Olympics means different things to different cities. In Montreal, it meant near-bankruptcy; in Los Angeles, it opened up the freeways and got a few trees planted.

For Barcelona, it has meant a new Barcelona. The decaying, depressed city of a dozen years ago is now framed by steel cranes and scaffolds--building and rebuilding.

The once-seedy waterfront has been completely renovated, modeled after the yuppie-fied Baltimore Harbor, and now houses Barcelona’s first true skyscrapers--the athlete and media Olympic villages. New freeways traverse the city. So much construction has taken place in so short a time that the architectural mix looks like its famed Picasso Museum turned inside out--13th-century cathedrals and 1890s cafes brushing against gray cement apartment blocks, high-rise department stores and still-in-progress luxury hotels.

Barcelona’s most renowned piece of construction, or non-construction, is, of course, the Sagrada Familia cathedral, that monument to Iberian indecisiveness. Antoni Gaudi, the city’s legendary architect, broke ground on the project in 1869 and 66 years after his death, the church is barely two-thirds complete.

Sagrada Familia is Barcelona in a 558-foot-high nutshell. An American would look at this 12-spired monstrosity and say either knock it down or sell it to Donald Trump. Barcelonans, however, can’t figure out what to do with it, and haven’t been able to for decades.

If they finish it, they risk defiling Gaudi’s original vision. That and turn their leading moneymaking tourist attraction into just another Gothic cathedral.

But if they don’t finish it, the consequences are undeniably worse. Barcelonans regard themselves as Catalonians, not Spaniards, and detest the Spanish stereotype they believe Sagrada Familia represents--lazy, inert, unable to finish a task.

This isn’t Madrid, Barcelona wants the world to know, so the church is under construction again, due for completion around 2020, give or take a few work stoppages.

Or an Olympics. First, the ’92 Games mobilized this city, then they immobilized it, to the point where you cannot walk 100 yards without being reminded that the Olympics are here, at last, after 68 years and three failed attempts.

Cobi, the mysterious Olympic mascot (Is it a dog? A cat? A bear? “Picasso: The Preschool Years”?), is everywhere, on pins, buttons, T-shirts, magazine covers, computer screens, store windows--even bakeries, where you can eat Cobi, or dip him in olive oil.

Five-ringed Olympic banners hang outside apartment windows, alongside the yellow and red-striped Catalan flags, and Olympic pin buying has reached such a pitch that a gold-plated ’84 Los Angeles pin reportedly received one bid of one million pesetas, or $10,000.

Visitors take in the craziness, marvel at this Paris wannabe on the make, wring out their T-shirts and pray for an end to the heat wave.

Heat wave? What heat wave? Barcelonans ask.

What you are experiencing, they will want to explain, is simply Olympic fever.