A Nightmare in Barcelona

Juan Sebastián Uribe
Pablo Isaza
8°C
16-10-2008
Writing activity
A Nightmare in Barcelona

It was the 14th of January 2007, I woke up in a non familiar place, I didn´t remember anything, It seemed like somebody had erased my memory. Suddenly I tried to stand up but I wasn´t able to at all, I realized that the problem was that I couldn´t move my legs and that this weird room in which I was lying was a hospital room, I had several machines around me. From one moment to another some images started to appear in my mind, and I began to remember all the previous things that had happened to me the night before. I´m Felipe Perez and this is my tragic story, searching for one dream that was disturbed by a group of skin heads.
I´m from Colombia, I was born in a very humble family. A scholarship was given to me and two of my best friends for studying in an European university in Barcelona. I had dreamt this for many years, because the best design Universities are located there, I was able to achieve it thanks to my good performance at school. I was very happy with this decision that was made by my school´s principal. However, during the previous days of my trip I was warned about some people in Spain that hated immigrants, I turned a deaf ear to their warnings. I was sure that in the twenty-first century we couldn´t be victim of racism problems.
We fixed the trip very quickly and a few days later we were already at the airport ready to begin this new adventure. I got on that huge airplane hoping that this new life that I was going to start would bring me a lot of good things. It was a ten-hour flight, even though we were very happy, it was the first time we flew and it was a nice experience that I would never forget. When we arrived in Barcelona it was all what I expected.
Since I arrived there I got to know that all the things that those people in Colombia warned me were true. Some people in Barcelona treated us in a horrible way, only because we were “Sudacas´” students. In some places we felt as if we were animals, but this didn´t keep us from following our dream.
After one month of being in Barcelona it was very annoying, the people on the streets stared at us, even our classmates at the university. At the university we were the only three Colombians. This was a reason for bothering us. At the beginning we tried to ignore them, but it wasn´t possible. All the time we were about to quit our studies, but we thought that opportunities like this were unusual and we had to take advantage of it.
0ne day we went to a Bar in the “Ramblas” to enjoy ourselves a little bit and to leave aside all the problems that we had in those days. We stayed at the Bar until it was 2 am, we took the way to our apartment ignoring that it was going to be the last time I could move my legs or even walk. We were just a few blocks away from it. While we were walking we started to hear some noises behind us: Crash! Pump, pump! Crash!. We realized that all that noises came from a group of people behind us. They were about 20 or more and each of them carried a baseball bat. We started to run but it was too late. They were already on our heels. They threw us to the floor and began to hit us with their bats and to stamp us. After that I don’t remember anything else. And I got to know after that my two friends didn´t survive, they weren´t as lucky as I was, the hate and the xenophobia against immigrants had finished with their lives and the life of many other immigrants around the European continent. This is my tragic story.