Barcelona is a lovely city with hills on its sides and the Mediterranean Sea just in front of it. The old city is surrounded by a fortress and is darker and older inside. The modern Barcelona with a happy, peaceful feeling is romantic like a fairytale basking in sunshine. Yet, according to friends who lived there, there had been a lot of bloodshed in the last century even up to today, due to terrorism.

The daily life in Barcelona is prosperous, dynamic, enchanting, full of contrasts and delightful surprises. One of the surprises was the Chinatown.

Yes, did you know there is a Chinatown in Barcelona? Friends said it used to be a place with dirty, urine-smelling roads, call girls on benches waiting for customers in front of run-down buildings, and even a black woman or an African lady hanging from a window, inviting the passers-by.

The Chinatown in the Gothic quarter that I visited felt different to me. One relic from the past in that same neighborhood was a church with nicely refurbished interior but a dilapidated exterior; yet, still very beautiful, surrounded by carefully restored gray stone buildings. In fact, gray seemed to be dominant on all these cobblestone roads. Such a contrast to the rest of the city!

The gray color here had a shine to it even on the pale faces of the residents. On the narrow, crooked lanes, gray was even better accented by the bridge-like overpasses from building to building. Those ancient cobblestone lanes appeared to be subterranean, as if carved out of one long tunnel, with sunlight coming from above the overpasses. This melancholic panorama of dark against light, shadow against sunshine, eerie yet with poetry appeared as if it came from an artist