Tourist in my own city

From Germany I flew to Barcelona to spend a long weekend. Every now and then, I feel the uncontrollable desire to go back to my beloved and heavily criticized city, and the €45.00 two hour flight from Stuttgart was too enticing to reject.
It’s been a long weekend here, they call it an aqueduct, because both Tuesday and Thursday were a holiday (the day of the Spanish Constitution and the day of the Immaculate Conception). So many people take the week off.
My arrival was impeccable, they have either fired the operations manager at the airport as I requested last time, or the guy went for some training to Schiphol or Changi (the airport, not the prison) and learnt something. My flight was on the monitors and the right conveyor belt was mentioned and, you are not going to believe it, my luggage was already standing there, someone had already removed it from the belt. Luck or improvements? I hope for the latter.
On Friday night I met my old friend Jordi, the creative director of a BCN based on-line fashion magazine called dRESSLAb. It was refreshing to talk to someone who was neither an engineer, nor a financial controller and in my own mother tongue.
We went for dinner to a restaurant I had never been in, it’s run by two young Basque entrepreneurs and serves what I would describe as Mediterranean “nouvelle cuisine” with an excellent presentation. The restaurant is called Freud b’ART and it is very close to the BCN Town Hall. That’s what we ate (unedited copy directly from their English menu):
o Bites of shrimps over black pepper pears and “ajoblanco” soup of coconut with duck ham oil.
o Sautéed scallops with mushroom vinaigrette and caramelized almonds
o Codfish loin candied at low temperatures with juice of red fruits and sweet pepper to the vanilla
o Black chocolate creamy cake in a soup of white chocolate and Brazil nut powder

We had a nice conversation about the new Catalan Estatut seen from inside and outside Catalonia only interrupted a dozen of times by his palindromic Polish girlfriend who sent constantly incomprehensible SMS messages.

Then we went to visit the controversial “caganer”-less Nativity display in front of the building of the Catalan government. It is a sterilized sort of environment and I have to agree that the “caganer” does not fit there at all, there is nowhere to hide.
After that we went to have a drink (or maybe two) at an area called Born (used to be BCN central food market). It has not changed much since I was a regular 20 years ago, it looked to me safer than before (although I always carry the wallet in the front pocket) and with many more fashion shops. We continued our nice conversation with Scotch at a bar called Mudanzas while the SMS messages continued to come.
And all these stories about people not willing to speak Spanish, nothing I came across, maybe just the opposite. I went to the central government representative office (“Delegación del Gobierno”) and absolutely no one spoke Catalan, so if you have to deal with any immigration issue, your Spanish is more than enough, none of the waiters that attended us were either Catalan or spoke a word of Catalan, and when I got close to a couple of Mossos d’Esquadra, the Catalan police that has just been deployed in Barcelona, they were speaking in Spanish!!!, in front of the Catalan government building. Everything is fine to me, I am glad that everyone talks in the language that he or she wants, but please stop telling false “hear-say” stories about Catalan language being forced onto visitors, because they have nothing to do with reality. And did I write a complaint because no one would reply me in my mother tongue? No, I switched to Spanish and continued with my speech, something I have always done and will always do. That’s why I learnt 9 languages.