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Calm down
Babèlia
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It’s a good story, the one about two friends in Barcelona – one Irish, from Shannon, the other Catalan, from Badalona – who quit jobs at a production company to create their own something. Louise wanted to open a second-hand bookshop. Berta wanted a cultural association. Babèlia is what happened.
They met in the middle, and while it seems an odd middle where they end up making a lot of coffee, they’ve carved out a warm nook you can crawl up into with a book. Louise got her laden shelves, running along the right-hand wall from the door to the back of the locale, loaded with real paper books in various languages. Not a kindle in sight. Bless. And Berta got her small cultural affairs, book clubs (in English and Catalan) and language exchanges to start. You get a place to be calm, a sanctuary where you can sit with a book or a conversation or the two together. Read any book off the shelves while you coffee. You can buy it if it grabs you. Also, small but big detail: the hazelnut and raisin oatmeal cookie (Larkin’s Bakery) is out of this world.
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