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Comment by stevoski | Hacker News Reader

I live in Barcelona. It is a _noisy_ city. It is just normal for young locals to sit outside in plaças or on wide streets on weekend evenings, socialising, having a drink, talking loudly, and even sometimes singing. By evenings I mean the Spanish definition of evenings, which last until way after midnight.

As a foreigner living here, I try to accept the noise as part of the culture, even though the noise annoys me. So it is great to read of locals actively campaigning to reduce noise levels.

On Friday I was in the very plaça (Plaça del Sol) mentioned in the article with a friend, and it was crowded and loud. All the tables were full, people were sitting on the steps, and indeed all over the plaça. My friend said, "it must be bad for the residents". It is good to know at least one plaça in Barcelona is now moving the crowds on after 11:30pm.

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Yep, same experience.

I'm Canadian but living in Barcelona, in El Born district. I had no idea drunk Brits on vacation could make so much noise at nights. I live above a cafe/bar frequented by locals, and I have no issue with their late night (late night for this Canadian anyhow, around 10-midnight) enjoyment of tapas, wine and friends. Sure the Spaniards aren't exactly known for being quiet people, but it's not unreasonable levels of noise and they're quite quite after midnight. Its the bloody tourists that fly down on a 30 quid Ryanair flight with their lads for a weekend of fun in Barcelona and scream bloody marry at 3 am that get under my skin.

Likewise in Barcelona in a touristy area. Crazy noisy. With the summer just starting, I'm anticipating a few sleepless nights!

I lived in Spain for 3 years and moved constantly due to noise. Very few people I spoke to seemed to understand what my problem was. The few who did had long since accepted that it was just how things were.

I did make the mistake of living in a busy tourist area once, it's not a mistake I ever intend to repeat.

I will, however, apologise for the behaviour of my fellow countrymen and, if it's any comfort, please understand that a lot of us hate the 'drunken Brits' as much as everyone else does.

I can only apologise. You're suffering from one of the lesser-known aspects of Theresa May's "hostile environment" policy. Many of my fellow countrymen are staunchly opposed to immigration, so we engage in a kind of reverse diplomacy. By exporting our loudest, rudest arseholes to destinations across Europe every weekend, we advertise the very worst aspects of British life and create a powerful deterrent against immigration.

In greece, said tourists are limited into specific resort towns where they can enjoy their general raucousness and binge drinking from their morning breakfast till almost the next one without generally infesting the streets of working people. I don't know why barcelona does not do that - they can arrange that with tour operators.

But that would neuter the GP's purported purpose, wouldn't it?

If there is a particularly noisy group, don't be shy to yell at them "calleu d'una puta vegada".

You shouldn't recommend people to scream to a group of people "Shut the fuck up" because it's not only unpolite but it can be the source of a lot of problems for that person. Be considerate with your recommendations and aware that you could cause problems to others with them.

In Barcelona, "Calleu d'una puta vegada" from a balcony, late at night, is not something that can cause a problem.

What would probably happen is that the people being noisy will appologize, try to be more quiet, forget about the incident after about 5 minutes, and go back to the previous amount of noise until some other neighbour complains.

First, it was never stated to do that from a balcony so how would have known that the person to whom it was suggested? But leaving that aside, can you grant me for sure that there won't be any problem? for every place in Barcelona? what about if they people making noise aren't Barcelonian? what if they are too drunk and make even more noise? what if they recognize the balcony from where you screamed at them and start to throw you things as retribution? or ringing at your door? The possible developments of that situation are so many that you can't lightly ignore them, specially when it's another person the one who is going to be in that situation.

Well that would be a pretty noisy thing to do, yelling, that is

im my youth in barcelona it was quite common to throw a bucket of cold water towards the noisy drunks. This usually solved the problem quite well (at least, when i was among the noisemakers...)

I've only been in Madrid and Seville and Granada (from the states), but that sentence looks like Portuguese to me. Does Barcelona speak a different dialect of Spanish or did you just type out a Portuguese sentence?

I don't know enough Spanish to talk to that, but its definitely not Portuguese.

calleu d'una puta vegada

There is at least two words, calleu, and vegada that don't exist in any Portuguese I've encountered. Also, d'una is... not something I've seen in Portuguese before.

But I'm a new speaker so I may be missing something.

I found this slang for shut the fuck up in Portuguese, not sure how cromulent it is: https://en.bab.la/dictionary/english-portuguese/shut-the-fuc...

Definitely not Portuguese, you're right (source: I'm Brazilian.)

Thought as much, not enough a's at the ends tripped my spidey sense. >.<

It’s Catalan

They speak a lot of Catalan there so perhaps it's colored by that?

It is not "colored by" catalan. It is grammatically correct catalan.

Sweet. I've only been around the area enough to know they speak Catalan, not enough to recognize it when it's written. :)

It’s one of the dialects of Spanish they speak there.

Do you consider Portuguese to be a dialect of Spanish?

It’s actually quite the opposite IIRC

Glad that you emphasize it's Plaça del Sol, not Plaza del Sol or Square of the Sun

Is that that in the funny dialect they speak? Why do people waste their time with that? After all, they speak the first or second most spoken language in the world, why bother with a dying dialect?

> Is that in the funny dialect they speak?

Catalan is not a dialect of Spanish, if anything it would be a dialect of Occitan. And seeing how condescending are hurtful you are trying to be I suspect you already knew that.

> Why do people waste their time with that?

It's the native language of ~5 million people. We learn it for the same reason Swedish people learn Swedish, Danish people learn Danish, etc. It's just the language we speak in our country.

There is already a de facto international language (which is not Spanish BTW), and we also learn it.

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