Eating, Meeting, Living.

Last night's rain has passed, and the sun is pouring down on Barcelona again. The evenings are still cool enough for an extra layer, but during the day short sleeves are enough. Outside, it smells like a Barcelona summer. It was the summers here that captivated me, and they are why I am who I am today. That familiar smell. The summer in this place that changed my values, and my life. I quietly feel it arriving, and I spend my days with my heart racing at the thought of a future here that I can't yet see.

It has only been a few weeks since we started living here. Even so, there is something new to discover almost every day, and when I walk around the city, I keep realizing how wonderful and how interesting a place it is for people to live.

One of those things is eating.

Barcelona has so many choices when it comes to food. Many supermarkets don't sell imports from faraway lands where you have no idea who made them or where; instead they bring in food with a clear origin, from their own farms or from local growers. The shelves are lined with organic vegetables and fruit.

The pasta is truly wonderful too. When I lived in Vancouver, I had carbonara for the first time at the home of a Japanese person I got to know there, and from then on I loved pasta. Sometimes I made it myself from the recipe I'd been taught, I always ordered carbonara whenever a restaurant had it, and I even went all the way to Rome to try it at one famous place after another. It wasn't just carbonara; I liked bolognese and oil-based pastas too, and whenever there was pasta on the menu, I usually ate it. But whenever I ate pasta, I would feel bloated or constipated, and my body just never felt right. I went through life thinking that if only that didn't happen, I'd eat so much more of it. A few years ago I learned about gluten-free pasta and ancient grains, and once I started eating those, the problems stopped completely. Since then, whenever I eat pasta, I always choose gluten-free or ancient grain.

In Japan, and in almost any country in the world, it's hard to find good gluten-free pasta, especially pasta made from ancient grains. At those times I reluctantly give up on pasta and choose steak instead. But what surprised me in Barcelona was how easily I could find the gluten-free and ancient grain pasta I was looking for, right there in the supermarket.

The organic supermarket I go to carries several kinds of both gluten-free and ancient grain pasta, and I've already bought and eaten my way through most of the shelf. The other day, on a walk, I found a small Italian grocery and decided to go in, and the entire back wall was lined with pasta from Italy. Just looking at it made me happy. When it comes to eating, I think this city has a healthy infrastructure in place.

For the past few years I hadn't really lived anywhere in Japan that you could call settled, so for the most part I got by eating out. But during the period when we lived in a camper van, we mostly cooked for ourselves, and I went into supermarkets all over Japan. The big supermarket chains in Japan sometimes have seasonal produce from the area, but much of what's on the shelves is vegetables shipped from the continent across the sea, or meat brought in from even farther away, lined up under the banner of being "cheap." It seems to me that most people consume without ever noticing what we lose that way, something like the real value of things. They walk past the shelves without thinking much about gluten, or about refined wheat. Gluten-free pasta costs several times more than regular pasta, and I think people pass it over simply because it's expensive.

But in Barcelona's supermarkets, local produce, vegetables straight from the farm, and fruit and meat that have met strict standards are all there as a matter of course. And the prices are far lower than in Japan. Drawn to vegetables I'd never eaten before, like artichokes and fennel, I toss one after another into my basket, buy fruit and meat too, and cook and eat it all every day. Everything I eat is genuinely delicious; the ingredients have so much flavor of their own that they barely need seasoning. The potatoes especially are so good that, though I hardly ever ate them in Japan, here I eat them almost every day. I've been trying all kinds of pasta too, and each one is different, and delicious, and fun.

Barcelona has many wonderful restaurants. But at the same time, you can enjoy cooking for yourself with good ingredients. I think this is truly a place where you can enjoy eating.

When eating itself becomes a daily joy, your sense of happiness in being alive changes a great deal. Since coming to this city, I've felt that for myself. Add to that a climate where the pouring sunshine mixes with a pleasant breeze. I feel my body already understands how good this is for a person. In this Mediterranean city, where human civilization was nurtured, what did people feel, what did they think, and what did they do? People are changed greatly by climate and by food. If those are pleasant, then surely what they think, what they feel, and how they act will grow healthier too.

Eating isn't the only thing that has changed in these few weeks.

I've met so many people. I've talked a lot, and been helped a lot. Not only Spaniards, but people born and raised in Eastern Europe, Africa, South America, countries I had never met anyone from or been to, have moved to this city, and every time I talked with one of them, I discovered something new. That I can be here now, that I can greet today in this place, is truly thanks to so many people. Their faces overlap with the scenery of Barcelona and always come back to me vividly.

As digital technology develops and the world slowly moves toward a place without people, if you keep living somewhere with only the same language and the same people, sometimes everything starts to feel somehow empty. You're supposed to be talking to a person, yet you lose track of what you're actually talking to, or everything moves forward through machines that have been fully automated. People try to exclude those who aren't like them, staying within the same values without ever sharing their differences. They refuse anything new and keep doing what they've always done, resisting change. Accepting whatever is handed to us in the name of convenience, we probably fail to notice what we're losing along the way.

When you step away from a place like that for a while, you notice it.

Trying somehow to get across words you don't know. Looking the other person in the eye as you talk, reading their feelings in their expression. Embarrassing yourself. Learning a new culture. Learning differences. Each of these lets me experience again what it means to live as a human being, something that had been lost in exchange for digital technology and convenience. It's only been a few weeks, but by actually living in a land far from the country where I was born and raised, I feel I've become able to see Japan objectively. It's a perspective I couldn't have imagined when I was in Japan. When I lived in Canada and Australia, I was also living away from Japan, but I think that because I'm a little older now than I was then, I'm seeing things from a different angle.

And I can make that happen while continuing to work through digital technology, in the place where I'm meant to be right now. It suddenly occurred to me that maybe this is the essence of being a digital nomad. For me, Barcelona is that kind of city. It has big problems, overtourism among them, but even so, I think it's a truly wonderful city.

There is a real reason why so many tourists come from all over the world, and why so many people from all over the world long to move here. I want to get to know this city better from here on. And I want to see with my own eyes how my life here will unfold. Right now, I simply can't wait.