Slow travel offers a different kind of sightseeing

LaBar - Laundry Bar, Barcelona. 07/01/22

There’s one thing I particularly love about slow travel (and by that, I mean staying a while in one place, and working from there or at least having some kind of routine in that place that isn’t exclusively about hitting as many tourist sites as I can in as short a time as possible -- though I have done my fair share of that style of travel, too). What I like about the slow style is I get to see the local characters and local life.

I’ve been working from a laundromat café called LaBar in Barcelona this week. Every day, an elderly man in a wheelchair comes in at least twice. I’m not sure that he even buys anything. He wheels himself in, sometimes rolling in backwards, and up to the counter, where he sits parked for a few minutes and makes conversation with whoever is on duty at the time. He’s thin, his skin wrinkled and tan from what I imagine must have been a whole life spent in this oceanside city, and he wears a mesh trucker hat with a logo I can't make out. A few minutes later, he rolls out, and a few hours after that, he rolls back in for more chit-chat.

There’s an older woman who frequents the cafe, too. She’s probably in her late 70s. She may be 80. Yesterday, around 2:45 pm, she sat at a table with a glass of cava and laughed out loud (very loud) at YouTube videos she watched on her phone. One video in particular was so funny that after she watched it, she turned around in her seat looking for anyone she could share it with. I can’t be sure what was going through her mind, but I got the impression that when she looked around and saw that she was surrounded by people who, like me, appear to be non-Spanish-speaking foreigners (this city in general and this café in particular are very international), she thought she didn’t have much of an audience for this video. She then flagged over the young woman from behind the counter.

“Mira este video,” she said to her. Watch this video.

The woman obliged and laughed, and as the elder one watched along with her, she laughed as if she were seeing it again for the first time. The barista went back to her post, and the elder watched the video one last time, laughing no less heartily.