Pip Speaks

UPDATE: Posted this video earlier this week, but took it down shortly thereafter. A helpful reader (thank you!) alerted me to the fact that it hadn't loaded properly. I think I've found a solid wifi connection at this hostel, so I'll try to have the video back up and working properly as soon as possible.

The last time I visited Barcelona, during a second year break in February of 2008, the hectic city overwhelmed me. My friends and I could barely navigate the streets or squeeze into a panadería for a cheap bite. Along with hundreds of other tourists, from the top of Montjuic we gaped at the fuming city and a homemade sign propped on a roof: “Tourist Hunting Season Now Open.” This June, the city feels different—quieter. Whither the hustle and bustle? The buskers?

Now, I can actually see the pavement tiles in front of me on the sidewalk. I often have to duck around street sweepers and power washers, garbage collectors and policemen on duty, keeping the city clean and orderly. Perhaps because the city is supported so heavily by tourism—the city was visited by over 7 million in 2011—signs of distress are few. Children still set off noise crackers near midnight in the city’s squares, and the mile-long queue for the Sagrada Familia does not seem to shorten.

Unlike Paris, the (literal) signs of the Great Recession (yes, we’re now officially calling it that) only appear when you look up, not down. For sale signs dot apartments above the shops on every street, little red flags. The Spanish real estate boom was even more over the top than that of Ireland, and 46% fewer mortgages were signed this February than in 2011.

The 51% of unemployed youth in Spain reveals itself in unusual ways; you notice the lack of employed rather than the number of people who can't find work. The 23.6% unemployment rate here is over double the 10.3% average for Europe, and nearly matches the United States’ unemployment numbers at the peak of the Great Depression. However, there are no bread lines. No open begging. The first human signs distress appeared when I ventured into a grocery store near my hostel on Carrer Casp.

It looked like a grocery store might after a zombie apocalypse (seen Zombieland?). The store is a franchise of a large national chain and appeared to be about 2500 square feet. The signs for the products and wilting produce were hand-printed, at the lowest prices I've seen in Europe. A litre of olive oil for 2 euros! Baby powder for 50 cents!

The aisle shelves, formerly bolted to the floor, had been removed and replaced with cardboard boxes. I wandered for about ten minutes, looking for an employee who could tell me where to find shampoo. However, no employees were on the floor—all the cash registers were closed. 

A few other customers had queued near the checkout point, and I joined them. After much clanging from the store’s back room, a young, harried woman rushed out, sprang open a register, and began ringing people through. Before she reached me, she was interrupted twice by a faulty exit door that refused to open.

On a busy Saturday afternoon in central Barcelona, she was the only employee at work in the store. Since then, I’ve noticed understaffing everywhere: two employees for a clothing store at peak hours, a waiter/dishwasher/chef on deck for an entire patio on Friday evening.

Spain’s unemployment rate in 2008 was a comparatively hopeful 10.4%. That number has more than doubled, and 474,000 of Barcelona Province's inhabitants are unemployed.  The doubling of unemployment in Barcelona over the past four years means that 200,000 fewer people are commuting to work, buying lunch, rushing from meeting to meeting during the day.

One of the most frequent insults lobbied at those darned kids today is that we’re immobile. Inert. Unwilling to move for work, our tendency to stay put in our hometowns contributes to economic decline. The veracity of the findings cited so frequently in news articles can’t really be questioned, but I’ve found several exceptions while travelling, apparent outliers in my generation’s sedentary patterns.

Obviously, staying in hostels has skewed my perspective. Everyone here is travelling somewhere else. Nevertheless, the mobility and the sheer number of these travellers—abroad to study, vacation or work—bears examination.

Even in Barcelona, one of the bleakest European cities for youth 18 to 24, I found several young people who had moved to the city for work. Ida, 25, a full-time hostel receptionist and live-in caretaker with her boyfriend, is an excellent emblem of the underreported moving, working segment of European youth. On June 30, she kindly agreed to an interview.

Pip Speaks: How did you come to Barcelona?

Ida: I came here last year in February, the end of February. I was traveling around and I just liked it, so I stayed.

Where are you from originally?

Sweden, the north of Sweden. 

How did you get to work in this hostel?

My boyfriend is the manager of this hostel, so it is through that that I originally found the job.

Do you like working here?

I do. I love the city. The city’s amazing, and I like to work here because I get to meet so many people.

Have you seen the recession affect Spain at all since you’ve been here?

[...] I remember when I got here the first time and I realized I wanted to stay, there were no jobs. There were like, I don’t know, 20 percent unemployment rate, I remember hearing. So, yeah, it is obvious. It’s something that’s noticeable here.

Has the recession at all affected your career or your career choices?

I guess, maybe. I studied psychology back in Sweden, and when I graduated there weren’t really any jobs that I thought were... You know. So I just thought, okay, use the time to do something else like travel instead. Yeah, of course, it affects. I have so many things that I’d like to do, but it’s difficult and I can’t. And I feel that I’m privileged. I come from a good place and I studied, and it’s still difficult. So, for all the other people, it’s tough.

Do you find that your friends are having trouble finding work, or finding meaningful work?

In Sweden it’s better. Here, it’s more difficult. Here, you take what you get.

Do you think that there are any sort of generational divides, do you find that at all in Spain where young people are having harder time than older people, or vice versa?

[…] From what I know–the young Spanish people I know–it’s very difficult. I met one guy who was living on the streets here, he’s from another city in Spain, and he didn’t want to live there. So he came here, he got a job, it didn’t work out, and there was no other jobs. So, he was living on the streets, and he’s about to again. So, yeah, it’s difficult.

What advice would you give to your friends who are struggling?

Paris, June 2012. A couple sits after a ceremony this morning at Notre Dame. In 2011, 76.8 million tourists visited France, according to the World Tourism Organization. About 30 million come to Paris each year; I'm pretty sure that most of them were at Notre Dame this morning.

Paris! The weather has been kind to me here, and yesterday I took advantage of the sunshine with a stroll from the Louvre to the Arc de Triomphe. The mythical boulevard through the Tuileries Garden is dotted with gleaming, white neoclassical statues, and crowded with tourists who step over smaller statues underfoot to snap photos.

These smaller statues are in a radically different style--fully clothed, as original Greek statues would have been, but in patterned skirts and scarves. They crouch along the Tuileries Gardens and the Champs-Élysées at about the same interval as the stone statues on pedestals, every 10 metres or so. Unlike their glittering counterparts, these smaller lower works garner no camera flashes, or even glances from the passing masses. Each of these statues is frozen in an identical position, bent over on the ground with hands clasped in front of an empty paper cup. They do not move; they do not seem to breathe. They wouldn't speak to me, and I wondered if they could speak at all.

But, of course they can; the rare, tiny flinch of their hips and the whitening of their knuckles told me they were indeed alive. They are women beggars who crouch for hours on end, hiding their faces, waiting for change. I counted over 20 of these women on my mid-afternoon stroll, and found more in the metro, curled around the bottoms of staircases and pillars on the platforms.

Europe and France do not consistently measure homelessness and illegal immigration, putting out comprehensive reports only about once every five years. The data on unemployment, however, could partially explain the rash of homelessness and poverty visible mostly below ground and occasionally above in Paris.

Unemployment has remained high in France, hovering at about 10 percent, about half of the overall youth unemployment rate for the country: 23.8 percent. The number of its citizens actively looking for work is 2.89 million.

While in London, I tried to find which rug all the city's poverty had been swept under in the great Olympic clean up. I think I've found that dusty underneath in Paris - it's the city itself, in its entirety.

I haven't been to Paris before. My frame of reference for the city is a fragile assembly of images from Midnight in Paris, exerts from Down and Out in Paris and London, and what I've read on news sites about endless protests. I knew the city wasn't all romantic streetlight, charming cobbled streets and glittering Siene--the Paris that belongs to movies and Monseigneur. The sheer number, however, of men like George Orwell's Paddy in the city surprises me.

The glowing street life here abruptly ends the moment you descent into the metro, or proceed up the Boulevard de Magenta towards Gare du Nord.

Above ground, the city is a bustling international diplomatic and financial centre, and the romantic Disneyland fetishized in the media. The city shines in the rain, just like it does for Woody Allen's Gil, and walking through the Latin Quarter, you can imagine that you too have been whisked back to a more beautiful, refined time. This Paris is filled with snap-happy touristes and professionals bustling back and forth, stopping for lunches, using headsets to talk into their iPhones, and smoking constantly.

Underground, the people who stoop to pick up their cigarette butts have fallen into half-mad grooves, their actions or possible professions completely indecipherable to me. Who are the dozens that wait on the platforms at Château Rouge, watching one train after another pass them by? The clumps of teenagers who hang out inside the Gare du Nord past midnight, asking around for lighters? The ragged wanderers who you can glimpse through the well-heeled swarms only if you're looking for them, who seem to disappear as soon as they're spotted?

Have these two cities always been such equals? I'm not sure. From my own experiences, Paris' underworld seems much more vast than that of London, even before the Olympic polishing began there.

The last time I visited the UK, Londoners still grinned smugly toward reports of the recession in the US. Those Americans and their silly subprimes! Pip pip, tut tut, tsk tsk.

Unfortunately, the American recession's ripples turned into a tsunami that crashed into Europe not long after the summer of 2008. The most dire effects were felt in the UK the winter of 2008, when unemployment soared from 5 percent to about 8. "Unemployment soared" - sick of that phrase yet?

I've been in London for a couple of days now, and I'm wondering where the poverty has gone. The few beggars and sketchy curbside hangers-on I'm accustomed to guiltily passing on the street have vanished. Presumably, to prepare for the upcoming fitness festival, the 9.7 percent of unemployed Londoners have been packed into a storage container. Perhaps they're being trained en masse for a closing ceremony spectacular on August 12.

It's hard for me to communicate how surprised I was to see London more spotless and sparkling than I've ever seen it; the city looks like a gleaming beacon of prosperity. What recession? The $17.3 billion of Olympic spending does shine when you visit the city, which looks like it's been power washed in its entirety.

Finding said tales of woe (and their silver linings) hasn't been difficult, however. Everyone I speak to - university friends, Pret a Manger servers, taxi drivers, physicists, bookstore cashiers - has been affected. Wrangling them into doing a video interview about how they've been affected? Slightly more difficult. I did, however, find a few brave volunteers, and will post their stories here as soon as I've edited them together.

How does the economy in the UK look now for young people? The overall unemployment rate for the general public has just fallen to 8.2 percent, while the 21.9 rate for youth 16 to 24 hasn't budged. Ouch. It's less than half of the 50 percent of jobless youth in Spain and Greece, but still. Additionally, 15.9 percent of the same British youth are NEET, a nifty acronym for not in employment, education or training. 15.9 percent of whippersnappers are presumably applying for jobs, applying to grad school, and/or playing Angry Birds all day every day.

How does it feel to be young and either jobless yourself or surrounded by unemployed friends? I'm excited to share what I've found here - check back later this week for videos.

Who are the broke 18 to 24 year-old statistics I read about? The 50% of funemployed youth in Spain? The unpaid interns of Toronto, my hometown, or the recently-fired factory workers of Ontario? 

I know how the recent economic downturn has affected me—yesterday, I turned 24. I graduated with a degree in English and Film Studies—the horror!—in 2010. I wrote my final exams exactly two years after the sub-prime mortgage crisis tore the golden veil off the American economy, revealing not the solid brick institution citizens and investors expected to find, but instead, a popsicle-stick-and-glue shack built on a pile of sand.

Sadly, my flair for terrible metaphors and staggeringly convoluted sentences was not a skill employers were looking for. Lucky for me and my similarly situated friends, older generations had several metric tons of career advice to offer:

Crane operators in Alberta make $600 an hour. Only two weeks of training.

When I was your age, I put on a snappy suit, marched into that office, and said, “I’m not leaving without a job”. It worked.

Have you considered welding?

You know what the problem with your generation is? You think you don’t have to work hard to be successful. Work hard, and you’ll be fine.

Why don’t you learn computer programming? You’ll be a millionaire by next year.

After a pathetic stab at computer programming, I found a job in web communications. From my sturdy work desk, I still couldn’t stop clicking on headlines with jawdropping statistics about people my age. The lost generation. I found an apartment, and furnished it with equal-parts Goodwill and Pinterest DIY disasters. Like most of my friends, I squirreled away my pay cheques as if preparing for a nuclear winter.

When the year-long contract ended this past spring, I resisted the urge to re-open my old cover letters. Like most people my age, I fully expected to never find meaningful, full-time work again, and I had saved enough for an emergency fund and adventure. Which is why I just stumbled off a winged sardine tin, and am writing this as I wait for my phone to charge at Heathrow.

Why did I flee the relatively fancy-free Canada for crowded, collapsing Europe? The same reason, I expect, that I chose to study English and Film Studies at university: a touch of masochism, and a fascination with reading stories from the inside.

Hence, the purpose of this blog: getting to know the young, thoroughly furrowed souls of broke Europe. Then, I'll share what I find here. Along the way I hope to improve my writing, which is currently as graceful as a walrus on a stair master. It goes nowhere, hideously. 

I hope to have my first video done in London by the end of this week. Here's my itinerary:

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