Power is back in Barcelona
By Thomas Steiner. Written on . Life
Since yesterday, 11:00 at night, power is completely back in Barcelona. For us, Laura and me, the power outage took exactly 60 hours. During my daily walks to the library, I saw power slowly coming back from day to day, more and more houses had light each time the library forced me to have a lunch break. Our house remained stubbornly dark though. Yesterday I celebrated the national yoghurt commemoration day and ate like eight yoghurts that had survived the fridge hell.The most fun part was yesterday evening. The Spanish have this old tradition of expressing dissatisfaction with the government by hammering on pots, pans, or whatever makes a reasonable amount of noise. Laura and me were having a forced - however romantic - candlelight dinner, when at about 9:30pm people started making noise. We went out on the balcony and joined the party. Suddenly, as if the Endesa folks had heard our protest, power came back. But not to our house. It was like surrealistic. Across the street we could see people starting to watch TV, and turning their lights and vacuum cleaners back on, but we, and three or four other houses in Carrer Verdi, were still sitting in the dark. People on the balconies started shouting "Falta una casa!" (One house is missing!) expressing their solidarity with us, but power did not reach us.
We went to bed early with candlelight and were getting ready for the third night without electricity, however way more romance, and when the night just started to get interesting, all of a sudden power came back to our house. I got up, switched the few lights off that now had gone on, and continued a fantastic night in the dark.