Happy 2026! The NYE display in Barcelona was gorgeous: Artistic, complex, evolving, evocative, fun, high-tech, and creative, with zero nods to jingoism and a dearth of religious exhortations. That is, a world-class effort by a world-class city. Although digital reproduction is a poor substitute for real life, you can view a simulacrum here. It’s the same one I watched the next day.
So why was I trapped in the metro during the festivities? I was going to call it a perfect storm, but that implies a lot of things went wrong, and really most things were very right that day. Our kids were here, and we had a fun afternoon checking out La Rambla and the Gotic, watching the light show at Casa Battló, and finishing off with a spectacular dinner/fun crowd scene at a restaurant reserved by our daughter-in-law, who has a knack for such things. She and our older son had to leave early on January first, so we said our goodbyes and three of us headed to the show.
Except we didn’t exactly. We left the restaurant at 23:15 without much of a sense of urgency. Alcohol may have been involved? But a bigger factor was our first mistake: No Prep. We’d been doing fun things during the proceeding days and somehow didn’t bother to find out how many usually attend, or to research the changes in public transportation on that day, or even check on the timing of the show, which was 23:50 to 00:10.
[We did have grapes. The tradition here is to eat one grape per peal as the clock strikes midnight. I had the grapes, so since I didn’t make it, the other two did not have grapes, and I couldn’t hear the bells. Happily we are not superstitious so we do not believe this will result in 12 months of bad luck, though it may be a convenient scapegoat if something bad happens, the current most likely candidate being our rogue shipping container, now scheduled to dock in Barcelona on January 14th.]
End of digression. The second mistake was Not Specifying the Goal. My husband decided to walk home while my son and I decided to take a bus. The solution we needed at the time was How can we get to the festivities on time? rather than How are we getting home?
The navigator found a bus for my son and I which came but did not stop, simply drifted by silently, a ghost bus. That’s when we made our third mistake, Reacting to Immediate Needs. My son proceeded to walk to our apartment to meet his father, while I decided that not waiting in the 15-person line at the ladies’ before leaving had been a mistake so I headed back to the restaurant, planning to meet them at the event.
[They later got on a train that discharged all passengers one station short of their goal, because the metro system was paused during the display. However, they got out of the station while the display was underway and managed to see some of the latter half between two intervening buildings.]
End of digression. I made it to the metro stop near the university where I made the fourth mistake, Not Incorporating New Data. Crowd control was very much better than expected onto the platform, but the first train was PACKED. It stopped and a few agile students squeezed in. I body-surfed my way onto the second one, in which we were JAMMED together, all breathing each others’ CO2. I was fated not to see the sky again until after the event.
[Since this blog is supposed to be about Spain, I should note that these crowds were in a very good mood, happy to be out and going to a show. Two co-eds even chatted with me, and why not? Our faces were inches apart. I suspect an American version might have involved snarling or spitting.]
End of digression. We were discharged at the correct station and poured out in a much looser formation, only to hit a wall of people completely occupying the stairs and the street above. We milled around at the bottom, but no one from the first stair tread upward was moving an inch. We could hear fireworks and see faces on the street level being illuminated. That was as close as I got.
I then made the fifth mistake, Hubris. I proceeded to try to find another way, which possibly had occurred to others, but I had to find out for myself. I engaged attendants, failed to activate the lift, and walked around cordons into dead ends.
After wandering around for a while it occurred to me that the show would be over soon–by this time I had learned the schedule-and so maybe I should just head back. This I think was Not a Mistake. I was able to board a nearly empty train which pulled out before it was inundated. I decided to get off after one stop because it was headed toward the university rather than home. When I got to the surface though, I didn’t recognize anything.
My final mistake was Procrastination. I have been struggling with my phone navigator mightily, actually getting lost with it in hand, because the interface makes no sense to me, and I have been thinking, I should really buckle down and understand this, but hadn’t, Natch. So I got on a bus that didn’t go where I wanted, then tried to navigate a walk and kept getting off track: The next street should be Arabo, puff puff puff, No, it’s not, check phone again. Ok, the next street should be Villaroel, puff puff puff, oh dear, I can’t see any street signs here. And so it went. I had been walking all day and I was tired, plus the crowds were thinning. I wasn’t scared, but walking around unknown areas in the wee hours didn’t seem like an improving situation.
Finally I noticed a familiar market on the phone map and managed to get there, and from there I knew my way home, whence I arrived a few minutes after 1:00. I was bemused by the experience until I saw a shadow of what I had missed, and realized that Barcelona parties are worth making a serious effort to experience. I am motivated to apply my lessons-learned for NYE 2027, or maybe sooner; celebrations are thick on the ground here.