“When you first arrive in a new city, nothing makes sense. Everythings unknown, virgin… After you’ve lived here, walked these streets, you’ll know them inside out. You’ll know these people. Once you’ve lived here, crossed this street 10, 20, 1000 times… it’ll belong to you because you’ve lived there. That was about to happen to me, but I didn’t know it yet.”

L’auberge espagnole (literally The Spanish Inn or The Spanish Apartment) is a 2002 French film directed and written by Cédric Klapisch. It is about Xavier, an Economics graduate student studying for a year in Barcelona, Spain as part of the Erasmus programme, where he encounters and learns from a group of students who hail from all over Western Europe. The story follows him as he decides to go to Barcelona and leave his girlfriend, Martine (Audrey Tautou), behind in Paris.

There are a lot of happenings in the story, not only those that are in direct connection to Xavier (like his story with the “not cool” French couple that he met on the flight), but also to the other occupants of the flat. Wendy, the English girl, probably had the best if not the most lengthy story other than Isabelle, the Belgian.

Some of the memorable lines that I managed to store inside my very volatile memory space are:

“I told you that because I knew it would hurt you. I know you loved me. But sometimes, we need to hit where it’s going to hurt.” – Martine, referring to what she said (“but you never loved me, because you’re not able to love anyone”) to Xavier when they broke up.

“All this complicated path, to arrive here today, without her,” – Xavier, after seeing Martine for the last time.

“I found myself in the streets of Paris where no Parisian go. I was a stranger among strangers, ” – Xavier, end sequence.