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Wednesday, April 29, 2009

The Surface Catalan Attitude

First Impressions of the Catalan attitude

Honestly, hardly any one smiles. It’s a hard difference to take after the eager smiles of Malaysia and Cambodia.

To put it in context, it is Spring, and its still cold, and people are wrapped in black and dark grey.
There seems to be a few distinct groups. There are the obvious foreigners, of varying colour and traditional clothing. There’s a small, darker more voluptuous and vocally expressive people who say ‘de nada’ and there is a lighter, slimmer more reserved people who say ‘de res’.


Many of the women are dress conscious. Especially from the ages of 30 up. The younger women seem to carefully attired as discreet brand hippies. Loose hair and baggy clothes, but perfect eye brows and accessories. Strange mix.

The men are pretty non descript at this stage. Nobody struts. Nobody really does anything out of order. Its obviously not the Spain one reads about or sees on TV.

I did meet one really friendly woman, but it turned out she was from the South.

2 comments:

K said...

Honestly, hardly any one smiles.

Yea - we noticed that!!! We thought it was because they were al drained from the heat. But then I argued that, during my time in Africa, everyone smiled alllll the time.....soooo....?

I want to know why that is. Really hope you find some like-minded people with which to bounce ideas off and frustrations etc.

You're grooooovy.

Tiffany at Patheya said...

:) Thank you Katrine! You're so nice.
There's a real 'pride' in the people here. Its quite citified and I think they take their role as 'cool and hip' to mean hard faced cows - but that could be way off here.
I heard a girl speaking English the other day, but it was inappropriate timing to grab her. :)