Life in Barcelona

“You what!? I don´t believe you! I´m looking at rubbish, sitting on rubbish, using just rubbish… all this NICE STUFF is from the street??!!”

This was a comment from a non-Spanish friend of mine who was really surprised when, in answer to her questions about the cost of my furniture, I just said: “It’s all recycled!”, “It’s from the street!” or “I found it just around the corner!” Then I had to explain this super-duper Spanish habit, or better: a trick that the Barcelona inhabitants employ to get rid of the old, or to find new things!

In every district of the city there is one special day during the week on which you can chuck out all of your unwanted beds, chairs, tables, shelves, mirrors, televisions, DVDs…and other random household objects that you perhaps just can´t stand the sight of anymore! 
The objects then get piled high in the middle of the street, always next to the recycling bins, where passers-by can mootch around and grab what they fancy! Old for some, but brand new for others!

Anyone looking for a cheap way to furnish their house then has all of the evening and sometimes the following morning to make their choices and to work out how in the world they will then drag home the 2m long bed they have picked up!
It goes without saying that you have to move really fast! Any quality items are snatched by watchful neighbours at the blink of an eye!

Here are my stories, one with a happy end and one without:

I was having lunch out on my balcony (on the 4th floor), with a view over the street below, when a guy in the street starting banging around and chucking out his stuff! A PC…a whole library of books…a crash-helmet… all thrown out on to the street and then the last thing he moved was a bicycle…a mountain bike! Looks to be in perfect condition! Wow! I dived out of my apartment to the elevator, thinking I was lucky to be so close…But just as I arrived to claim my prize, a faster man had got to the ‘junk’ before me to swipe the bike…Bad luck for me!  

But then there was the day when I found my DVD player! That was an incredible day! Don’t forget that I’m a foreigner here too and in my home country we don’t have these kind of amazing piles of free furniture lying across our streets!!!
Well, we were just leaving the house and a few metres from the front door, amongst a pile of things, we noticed a large box with a plug wrapped in cellophane. Hmmmmm…it didn´t look much like junk to us!
….OH YES! There was a DVD player WITH remote control included! New! BRAND NEW I tell you! And just left there to get dusty? It was really close to Christmas already, so I figured that Santa Claus must be real after all! Unfortunately, the batteries were not included! ?

In any case, if you need some new things for your house or your room, don’t hesitate to take a look around the streets in the evenings. This is a perfectly normal thing to do in Barcelona, a city which takes its recycling very serioulsly. Maybe other countries should follow this example! There would be less consumerism and more space for creativity!

/Eugenia

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 16th, 2007 at 1:38 pm and is filed under General Barcelona, Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.