All the social phenomena produced in recent years in Barcelona can be explained through confinement. With the entrance of the city in phase 1, the first step towards this supposed new normality, life moves more from homes to the streets. But the circumstance arises, and there the experiment, that Carrer de Sants, where shops still have personal names (Montse, Baltà, Soriano, Marcos & mldr;) presents a much more human aspect than the once bustling Passeig de Gràcia, where it is nice to sit in front of the Milà and Batlló houses, unfinished on half-planet Instagram accounts. The deserted Barceloneta has nothing to do with the nerve of Major de Sarrià or the Rambla del Poblenou. All that of gentrification, commercial and residential, but now the other way around.
The Catalan capital shyly stretches, as the only major city that remains confined. Although 70 square meters (the average floor area) are not the same as the 100 square kilometers that Barcelona occupies, where one can already have a drink on a terrace that looks like a desert island or stroll along the beaches when the heat is no longer pressing. . On Riera Blanca street, the Pertús that separates the large city from l’Hospitalet, nothing and nobody should cross the crosswalk without justification. They are the things of the health regions that have now opened a new political front, with the metropolitan mayors demanding that the ‘minister’ of Salut, Alba Vergés, do the favor of unifying the entire area under the pretext that all these municipalities “ they make up an undeniable economic and social reality in their day to day & rdquor ;. The Govern has told them that they will think about it; surely more than one missed the old noise between the metropolitan belt and the Generalitat.
As we were saying, in Riera Blanca nothing invites us to think about borders, beyond that the street signs are different. On the Barcelona side, the security guard of a car park says that he has subscribers from the other side and that they use the car without any problem. “People go around here as if it were all the same city. And a little is, isn’t it?” It could be a metropolitan mayor. A few meters away, in the El Rellotge beer bar, several couples of men drink beers with the mask always at the level of the chin, like the bikers who in the 80s wore the helmet on their foreheads. The situation of the tables is now a more chaotic, unpredictable, less boxed point. In the Portal de Santa Madrona, in the lower Raval, the Bar Can Joan has two tables next to the plots where a couple of Praktik chain hotels were planned. That was a bureaucratic fight that is irrelevant and that was won by the Ada Colau government, but left as a result a golden triangle that now nothing and nobody takes advantage of beyond some homeless people. On the makeshift terrace and under an umbrella brandishing the LGTBI flag, a woman more than happy.
Not far from there, in the Plaza de Sant Agustí, a hundred people wait for the Missionaries of Charity, who have the soup kitchen closed, to give them a bag of food. People do not stop arriving, and with a very poorly defined profile. Many more men than women, to say the least. Many, due to the greeting they give to the nuns, are habitual of this queue, watched from a distance by five agents of the Urbana without a mask who only intervene when two men of different origins argue for a gesture that one of them did not like. . Sant Pau street is full of people, most of them store workers. In Robador’s, some prostitutes with facemasks smile with their eyes. Tourists? Not one. The Chinatown of a lifetime. Tamoco on the Rambla there are outsiders, but Jordi Palou, from the kiosk of the same name, which opens for the first time since March 19, does attend. He has five workers, all in one team, and he thinks the time has come to try. His father also had to have bad moments in this same place, and he overcame them.
Further down, on the Barceloneta beach, the Bo Kaap beach bar completes the details to reopen on Tuesday. They will lose seven tables and will keep thirty. They have allowed them to scratch the ground on the ride, which also, with a lot of bustle, makes it difficult for bikes and walkers. We will see. One of the workers details that they will start with a reduced letter, and with the doubt of whether people have understood what can and cannot be done with phase 1. The mess of de-escalation, certainly. So many doubts are generated that 66% of the restaurateurs will not open during this first stage of lack of confidence, reports Guillem Tapia.
By the way, in this long calm river towards the supposed normality, the end of the permissiveness in the blue and green parking areas has been added today. In short: to pay again. And also beware of motorcycles, because the consistory (finally) will enforce the ordinance of the last century in what has to do with the regulation of two-wheeled vehicles on sidewalks.
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