Take Thursday night for example: I went for my usual evening stroll around 5:30 p.m. and after about a half hour stopped at a small cafe for a cappucinno in Placa Mercadal. I nursed my coffee for another 20 or 30 minutes while reading (I should probably say re-reading) Isaac Asimov's "I, Robot" collection of novels. (It's one of my favorite old books for a lot of reasons but chief among them is the fact that I find it absolutely amazing how many of his casual predictions about life in the far future have already come true.)
As I was reading, I saw a man across the placa start setting up some speakers and before long some weird music started playing. (I say "weird" because it was a sort of techno-punk-Asian blend... turned out to be entirely appropriate for what he would later do.) Curious, I wandered over to join a small crowd that had surrounded him as he talked in rapid Catalan. My grasp of the language is still tenuous but I got the drift: He was telling jokes while arranging a series of props on the placa and people were laughing at his observations of the current political scene. The more he talked the more people gathered until he had a good-sized crowd watching him.
For the next 45 minutes he told jokes, juggled, rode a unicycle (while juggling flaming torches) and flirted with a number of pretty women in outrageous fashion. It was great fun and when it was over and he passed the hat people gave generously.
From there I wandered down the Calle Major (despite its name - which translates to Main Street - it's a narrow thoroughfare with a few hundred brightly colored umbrellas suspended over it) to the Centre de Lectura. The center is something of a cultural icon in Reus. It's 150 years old and contains a small library, a movie theater, a lecture hall and assorted exhibition rooms. I went there to see a free exhibit of paintings by Polish artists and sculptors from Gdansk and I wasn't disappointed.
Contemporary art in this part of Spain tends toward the fantastic with bright colors and surreal images. Of course, there is also a lot of classical art on display around the city (it is the home of Fortuny, after all) but it, too, is very colorful.
The paintings and sculptures by the Polish artists were much different: The paintings, for example, were darker; the colors muted, the themes more primal. One sculpture of dark metal and dark wood was particularly powerful depicting the torsos of two men in obvious agony.
As I was leaving the exhibit my friend Elena and her friend Manuela came down from the second-floor lecture hall where they had been listening to a talk about Fortuny. They were heading for a small jazz bar across town called The Keynote where, on the last Thursday of every month, poets gather to read their works on stage so I tagged along.
The poetry was, as you might expect, varied. A young poet with requisite long hair and pale complexion, for example, wrote about death, suicide and torment. An older poet, solid through the middle with close cropped hair and glasses, commented on the political situation and wrote about the kind of mature love that you, if you're lucky, grow into over the years.
The scotch was excellent.
Just an ordinary Thursday night in Reus... the kind of night that makes me glad I moved here.
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| This street performer, who went by the name Frankie, entertained a good-sized crowd Thursday night with his juggling and jokes. |
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| One of his tricks was mounting a unicycle... which he got a volunteer from the crowd to hold while he pretended that he was going to run and jump onto it. |
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| Instead of jumping, however, he climbed up the volunteer's body and eventually wound up on his shoulders where he told a few more jokes before actually getting onto his unicycle. |
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| Once on it he did a pretty impressive juggling routine with flaming torches. |
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