High-speed trains, protest marches and Barcelona: A journey of reflection

On Saturday, I caught a train from Paris to Barcelona. A screen at the end of the carriage kept track of our speed. At one point, we hit 298km/h. Apart from the time a police dog chased me in Umbilo, it was the fastest I’d ever gone on land. Nobody else seemed as excited as I was. They stared at their phones or nodded off in their comfy seats.

I was transfixed, silently urging the bullet-nosed beast to go faster. Just two kilometres an hour more! Inexplicably, the perverse driver kept it at 298. I certainly would’ve taken it to 300 if I were behind the wheel. But then I’d push it to 310 and 320 and wouldn’t stop until the passengers were screaming and soiling themselves while the train came perilously close to leaving the rails and smashing through a village on the outskirts of Perpignan.

Imagine if we had a train like that. Joburg to Durban in under two hours. Or Cape Town in four and a bit. Imagine the carnage when it came around a corner and one of the tracks had been stolen. Or a head-on with an oncoming train because the signalling equipment had been vandalised. We just can’t have nice things.

There were even police officers on the train. For a while, anyway. Just long enough to escort a couple of black passengers off. Probably not because they were black, although you never can tell with the French, but more likely because when the cops asked to see their papers, they couldn’t produce much more than a box of Rizlas between them.

Barcelona, like Paris, has too many people in it. But unlike Paris, you can walk around many of the streets without risk of being smashed into by cars, buses, taxis and hordes of insane people travelling at high speed on bicycles, motorised scooters and electric unicycles.

The mayor of Paris is apparently trying to make it more of a walkable city, but the people aren’t buying it. The French hate being told what to do, even if it’s in their best interests.

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I like Barcelona. I lived there a few years after Franco, when the city was licentious and lawless, in a good way. It was still flexing its wings and trying on new outfits after 35 years of brutal repression and, weirdly, economic prosperity. Good for some, less so for others. Like any political system, I guess, although dictatorships generally do get worse reviews than democracies.

I stayed with friends from Pinetown who were teaching English in between dropping acid and drinking absinthe.

Chances are there are more than a few middle-aged locals living in the back streets of the Gothic Quarter still speaking a curious mixture of Durban slang and Catalan.

The barrios feel less dangerous than they did in those days when North African muggers in tracksuits and running shoes would loiter on street corners and beautiful half-dressed Andalusian hookers plied their trade from behind beaded curtains in darkened doorways.

The streets are cleaner and safer today. Pickpockets and bag-nickers in tourist areas are fairly common but you’re not going to have your hand cut off because the wedding ring is stuck on your finger. South Africa can only aspire to one day reaching Barcelona’s levels of petty thievery rather than the cruel savagery we have come to know.

What hasn’t changed is my inability to find my way out of the labyrinth once I stray from La Rambla. Back then, I’d get hopelessly lost and wander the narrow cobbled streets at 3am. It’s a miracle I’m still alive.

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This time, I was accompanied by the Bad Green-Eyed Woman, who has an in-built GPS that is relatively reliable for the most part. She can sniff out a good tapas bar and has a nose for fine leather goods, which isn’t always helpful.

On Sunday night, after a confusing argument about rape and domestic violence in which I took the side of militant feminists while she came at me with the “not all men” defence – the exclusive preserve of people who are not women – I heard the sound of someone shouting angrily through a megaphone a block or two away. It sounded like trouble was brewing so I insisted we check it out right away.

It turned out to be a pro-Palestine march. Maybe it was an anti-Israel march. Did it matter? Not to me. But to the Bad GreenEyed Woman, there was a world of difference.

Apparently, she has many Jewish friends and even though I have repeatedly assured her that I am not anti-Semitic but simply opposed to the Israeli government’s indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, she can’t quite make the leap.

I was hoping the march might make her see reason but it’s not easy to get someone to chant “Free, free Palestine!” when they’re still furious with you because of the fight you had minutes earlier.

There were several other protests in Barcelona while we were there and I found myself supporting some or other cause in Peru, taking the side of a socialist housing collective and signing up for missionary work in Ukraine. My grumpy sidekick said it was in fact mercenaries they were recruiting and offered to help me pack. If anyone’s looking for me, I’ll be on the outskirts of Kharkiv.

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