"The Taco Bell at la Sagrada Familia" by Will Williams

Credit to Reddit user u/tkenny691 on subreddit r/pics

    In the summer of 2025, I took a month-long trip throughout Europe, taking trains through eight different countries. On one of the final days of my time there, I found myself sitting in a Barcelona Taco Bell, directly across the street overshadowed by the towering la Sagrada Familia cathedral of famed architect Antonio Gaudí. As I write this, I am reminded of the guilt I felt in that moment. Although, at the time, I could not place exactly the nature of it. Now, though, I understand it was rooted in a desire, seemingly inane at first glance, to have an experience of Europe I deemed “authentic.” I begrudgingly sat in this Taco Bell alongside my friend who was enthusiastic to try the beer there, which was admittedly very good, staring at the ongoing construction of la Sagrada Familia. In that moment, I found it odd that this structure of massive artistic and cultural magnificence had sat unfinished for over 100 years in plenty of time for the Taco Bell corporation to come along and sit down right next door. By all popular measures, Europeans had appeared to me as a more intentional group of people, a slower moving group, emphasizing highly their own cultural relevance in the post-industrial period. I realized in this moment that I was mistaken to group the entirety of Europe in this manner. In my life I have enjoyed romantic notions of a continent devoid of the pitfalls of modernity that had befell the urban sprawl of America. While I still found this to be true from my short time there in many areas, it was disappointing to come to the realization that the more urban, especially touristy areas, were subject to the sort of “advancement” that is rooted in mass appeal and bottom lines.

     My desire for an authentic experience at the time seems to be an inherent aspect of modern life, it seems, due to altered perceptions of reality. These perceptions come from some grand narrative formed from the collection of representations of an object or concept. Essayist Walker Percy described this in his essay “The Loss of the Creature,” in which he explains the multitude of ways that people lose the ability to have an authentic experience because of purported narratives about the experience. As he describes of authentic experiences, “It is now apparent that as between the many measures which may be taken to overcome the opacity, the boredom, of the direct confrontation of the thing or creature in its citadel of symbolic investiture, some are less authentic than others” (2). In this, Percy means to summarize his argument that there exists a divide between what is real and what is believed to be real, and that we must explore the different options for overcoming this divide to ever hope to have our own authentic experiences.

     One well-documented modern case of this divide between reality and expectation is what has been called Paris Syndrome, in which a trend of over-romanticization of the city of Paris leads to severe culture shock and disappointment upon first visit. Many, including myself, watched films like Midnight in Paris and were presented with views of a city beyond any semblance of reality, that of a fairy tale because, as it happens, the Paris we have been presented, the one that is real in our minds, does not in fact exist. If you are familiar with Midnight in Paris, you will know that the romanticization of the city is intentional, as to show the protagonist’s own flaws, so it is ironic that the audience falls into the same trap unknowingly. Or at least, I did. When I arrived in Paris early in my trip, it was during a massive heat wave, at the time providing for the warmest European summer in history. It was a humid evening when I stepped out of the train station, and the entire street block in front of me had been torn up to be repaved. A thirty-minute taxi ride introduced me to a Paris decidedly less romantic in outer appearance than the reality my subconscious had attached to, so that by the time I reached my hotel, I was more focused on the differences from my expectation rather than the obvious beauty in front of me. The human subconscious, it seems, has a habit of creating ideas without substance, facts without evidence. It has a habit of filling in gaps of reality when we ourselves have not experienced the truth of something. In this moment, the city of Paris had presented me with its truth, and it was clashing with my own.

     While there does occur to be a loss of reality that takes place when we develop preconceived notions of an experience, I would argue against Walker on how to address it. In “The Loss of the Creature,” Percy presents an idea of authenticity that feels black and white; that is, each experience has a sole, idealized version of authenticity. He describes the goal of an experience as singular, while outlining some of the many possible routes by which we may strive for that goal. In this way, he proposes an active search for reality that relies on choices being made. In Percy’s example of experiencing the Grand Canyon with authenticity, he proposes a man who bypasses the visitor center, with all its guidebooks, and enters the Grand Canyon from behind, taking the path unknown, literally perceiving the sight from a new angle. The issue with this lies in Percy’s presupposition of a singular reality, when in truth, reality is inherently highly variable, and thus authenticity can never be singular. We know it to be true that the man’s perspective in this previous example has a different experience than someone viewing the Grand Canyon in any other way, visitor center or otherwise. Imagine this man further, for a moment. How does his own experience shift his experience? Is he a geologist, therefore paying extra attention to the rock layers of the canyon? Or is he a botanist, studying every flower he sees on his path? In the course of any life, bias will arise to change the fundamental experiences of a person. This is impossible to account for, and always will be. Ignoring preconceived notions of an experience may lead to greater authenticity, but this authenticity will never be the same for any two people. So, does this make authentic experiences impossible? Or does it simply mean there are multiple definitions of authentic? I suggest the latter, if not for seeking the truth of the matter, then for simply finding a version of reality to be happy with.

   This idea of multiple definitions of authenticity will allow for the consideration of how preconceived notions impact experience on a much larger scale—such as with vast, dynamic cultures—and perhaps one can explore how to reach the reality of culture more fully. Culture is a complicated topic to define as it changes under varying levels of human organization, but at its most basic, it is how a group of people express the complexity of human experience with art, food, religion, and social rituals. The issue with searching for authenticity in a cultural context comes with the fact that culture develops antithetically to preconceived notions of what is real. That is, perception never catches up with actual authenticity. Percy’s approach to recovering authenticity does work on the scale of specific cultural artifacts, as he describes of a Shakespearean sonnet, when he explains that “The sonnet is obscured by the symbolic package which is formulated not by the sonnet itself but by the media through which the sonnet is transmitted, the media which the educators believe for some reason to be transparent” (4). In this example, Percy is speaking of the environment of a classroom taking away from the content of the educational material, and cultural artifact, at hand. He speaks of recovering the truth of the sonnet by looking past what is presented, yet presentation of culture in a broader context becomes as variable as culture itself, thus making each difficult to recognize. It is helpful in this case, though, to understand that there does exist variation in the truth of a culture, or multiple definitions of authenticity within culture, and Percy’s approach of recovering authenticity is incomplete as it applies to culture.

     It is true that with the input of unavoidable human bias, no two cultural experiences will ever be the same; therefore, there are infinite versions of Paris, and there are infinite versions of Barcelona, none of which can be labeled as inauthentic and thrown out without disregarding very real individual experiences. In modern media representation of global cultures, social media has largely furthered purported views of authenticity amongst the continuing human desire to find it. As an example, there is extensive rhetoric on social media and the difference between tourists and travelers as they pertain to culture. Percy would appreciate this conversation, as tourists are most commonly described as those who take in culture as it is presented to them, akin to Percy’s idea of a layman, whereas a traveler is someone who breaks the mold of preconceived notions, such as Percy’s Grand Canyon visitor.

     More practically, tourists are those who see the notable sights, such as the Eiffel Tower or Great Pyramids, in the easily accessible manner that they have been presented, while travelers pride themselves on their own reach for authenticity. This is entirely a pointless conversation, though. While true that the visitor who goes to the Eiffel Tower is presented with a constructed view of the reality of Paris, it is also true that the visitor who sits in the corner café sipping on an espresso is also subject to their own preconceived notions. This is because the city of Paris is not static, but dynamic. It is built upon the cultural expressions of the millions of people in the city. Alternatively, the Taco Bell I found myself at in Barcelona may not have been Spanish in origin, but it’s inclusion in the city makes it part of the truth of the city.

     The evening after my Taco Bell experience, a walk through the cobblestone streets of old Barcelona landed me in an Irish pub. I ordered a Guinness from a Catalan bartender, while American pop music was playing in the room and French tourists sat down the bar from myself. It took until the foam of my third Guinness, though, to come to the realizations I have outlined here. I had spent much time, on this trip and in my life, searching for the objectively true experiences that I imagined would make my time living more worthwhile. In that moment, I knew that the very concept of an objective truth of reality had predisposed me to my own subconscious bias. The culture I had subjected myself to in this moment was inherently Spanish, of course, but to define it solely as such would be to miss what was right in front of me. Within the modern setting of widespread human connection comes constant cultural fluctuation, so much that giving a singular definition of a culture will never find the truth of the matter. The Taco Bell outside la Sagrada Familia belonged as a cultural artifact to the city of Barcelona to the same degree that Taco Bell belongs to the cultural expression of any American city that has one. In that pub in Barcelona, there existed no singular “real” experience to be had. Rather, it existed as a microcosm of human experience and expression, regardless of observer bias, constantly in motion, never the same. Once I came to this conclusion, I stopped looking at Europe with any expectation of reality, and I became much more content in my time on the continent.

Works Cited

Ledsom, Alex. “Paris Syndrome: When Shock and Disappointment Take Over.” Forbes, 10 July 2024, www.forbes.com/sites/alexledsom/2024/07/08/what-is-the-paris-syndrome/.

Percy, Walker. "The Loss of the Creature Walker Percy." 1953, www.thinkingtogether.org/120/percy.pdf.