Day One
We got in last night, and took the shuttle bus one stop too few. After a twenty minute walk to the pension, a bunch of us wandered down to a tapas bar, where I learned that there aren't many vegetarian Catalans. To get into the pension, I have to ring a bell and wake up the owner, but he doesn't seem to mind.
Frank and Marco woke me up at about ten o'clock for a coffee and croissant breakfast. The coffee was Spanish style, at least. They then wandered the Barri Gothic while I did my back exercises (and napped; what a great excuse the back surgery has turned out to be).
In a few hours, we met at Plaza Cataluna, the main square in Barcelona, and took the metro up to Parc Guell, which was designed around the turn of the century by everyone's favorite wacky Catalan architect, Gaudi. It's way up on a hill with a beautiful view of the city, and spans quite a bit of space. It's filled with lots of little passageways and elevated walkways, all of which were designed to look very organic. The pillars supporting elevated walkways seem to have been extruded up from the earth, and the handrails look like they were put together out of pieces of rock the builders found lying around.
The centerpiece of the park is a big, multilayered plaza.The top of the plaza is just a dirt field, edged with a long, wavy bench covered in a mosaic made of broken tiles (a style for which there's a definite term that escapes me). The field serves as the roof of a chamber crowded with 88 pillars, all of them slightly out of vertical. When we walked through it, there was a flute player playing something that sounded dodecaphonic and ethereal. Very fitting. Stairs lead down from the chamber and surround a couple of fountains in the shape of lizard, again with the broken pottery mosaic covering. It turns out that the whole structure also catches the rain - the columns are pipes leading to a reservoir under the chamber - to feed the fountain lizards.
Finally, at the bottom, there's a couple of toyish houses; one of them I think is a chapel, and the other used to be Gaudi's studio or a house for his protege or something. Go buy a guide book if you want accuracy.
So, minds reeling from Parc Guell, we wandered down the hill back into the city and found la Sagrada Familia, the big cathedral that Gaudi designed. Unbelievable - I don't think there's more than a square meter or two not covered by some form of symbolic decoration or writing. The view from the top (which coincidentally took 372 steps) wasn't too bad either, although I was dripping and dizzy by the time I got all they way up..They say the cathedral should be finished by about the year 2050. If I'm still around by then, it'd be nice to see it.
Thank God, it was siesta time. The whole siesta thing is kind of weird - even on days when it wasn't hellishly hot (to someone used to mild Dutch summers) and when we hadn't been running around all day, my body still slowed down around 3 or 4 every afternoon. There must be something in the air that does that to you. It's probably the same thing that drives all those smooching couples out into the street
That night was the big group dinner. All 30 or 40 of us headed out to the Olympic Village to a seafood restaurant for a huge feast. Well, some feasted; I was pretty much limited to salad and bread. This wasn't necessarily a bad thing, as the bread was unbelievably good. Take a piece of bread, drizzle olive oil all over it, then rasp half a tomato over it until it's just dripping with juice. Yum. I could exist on it (and did for about four days, I guess).
Day Two
Well, we stayed out until about 4:30 last night. Not so late, actually; dinner ended around 1:30 in the morning (they eat late here), so we were only really out for a couple hours. Not surprisingly, I slept late, then met up with Kieran and Julia to wander the town. We hit Casa Mila, the big apartment building by Gaudi, and wandered around on the rooftop and the museum in the attic. After that, it was down into the Barri Gotic, the really old part of town, where we ran into Mike and Becky at the cathedral. Went back to the hotel for a siesta since my back was hurting a bit, and ended up falling asleep for about four hours. What the hell, it's a vacation. After my nap, I met up with Katy and Catriana for dinner in (big surprise) a seafood place (and ate more bread and salad). We jumped in a cab out to la Sagrada Familia, since they hadn't yet seen it, walked back to the pension, and I crashed again.
Day Three
Packed up early, and went to Plaza Espana to meet the bus heading out to Will and Eva's wedding. It turned out that Rory was indeed in town, but had lost his instructions and was waiting at Plaza Cataluna instead. Damn. Everyone jumped on the bus, and we were off. The wedding was about 80 km to the west of Barcelona. I have no idea what the name of the town was, but it was a good twenty minutes or half hour past Montserrat. Very scenic drive: at one point, we saw a castle on a hill in the distance, and joked that that's where the wedding would be.
Then the bus started going uphill. Turns out that that was indeed the site. We were all running a bit late, so everyone ran to their hotel room, suited up, and went down to the church. It was the absolute best setting for a wedding I've ever seen - the church looked medieval, with almost bare stone walls and aisles full of fresh flowers. Eva took her time showing up, and Will looked back a little nervously once or twice. She eventually showed, they went through the ceremony without a hitch, and lived happily ever after. The dinner and reception were great - the first reception I've ever been to in the courtyard of a castle. However, after one or two exceptionally poorly executed waltzes, I went upstairs and crashed.
Day Four
There's nothing like a free hotel breakfast with a hangover. We took the bus back into town, and I checked back into the pension and went for a walk, trying to find the Olympic Stadium. I got hopelessly lost, and decided the thing to do was just to walk uphill wherever possible. I ended up going up a trail through a vacant lot that turned into a sort of scrubby brush, pockmarked with incredibly intense blue flowers. I stopped to take a picture of the flowers, and startled an old man in the middle of the field who seemed to be picking up bottles or something. I was a bit nervous, since I didn't know if I was trespassing or in gang territory or what, and he seemed a bit edgy as well, but then I said buenos and he said hola and things were cool.
The Olympic Stadium did turn out to be at the top of that hill; it was a bit of a letdown, though. The palace next to it on the hill was pretty cool, though; evidently they do a sort of water show with colored lights and music in the fountain at the foot of the stairs. One more thing to see next time.
Another dinner in the Olympic Village tonight - Italian this time, so I actually got a full meal. Preeti brought a woman she had met in her pension who seemed interesting (hey, it's Barcelona and it's in the air) who I ended up chatting most of the night. She ended up claiming sleepiness and going back to the hotel at around 2 in the morning. However, as we were waiting for cabs, I saw her jumping into a taxi with a young cabellero. No joy. Anyway, five of us ended up going to a club - Fibra Optika - at about 5:30 in the morning. When two of our group (of whom I was not one) started snogging away about an hour later, the rest of us decided it was time to leave. The line to get into the club at 6:30 (on a Sunday night / Monday morning) was about three times as long as it was when we went in. I guess Barcelonans don't have to work or something.
We went for a walk, and I ended up sprawled in the marble middle of the Plaza Catlunya, watching the sun rise with Niko and Sander. It was a bit of a weird scene; there was a group of backpackers in one corner of the square doing something that, if a Tai Chi movement, would be called "the stork stalks and purges," and another group of folks were trying to set a park bench on fire by burning litter underneath it. Well, the one group seemed to get it out of their system, the other gave up their incendiary ambitions, and we decided it was time to find some coffee, since I had to catch a flight in a few hours and we were starting to sag.
Wandered down Los Ramblas, and found a big market that was just opening up. There was a coffee counter with a couple of Americans still drinking beer and vendors getting their morning cup, so we parked oursleves. The old man tending bar seemed pretty amused when we kept ordered tres mas, tres mas. A word of advice: three cups of Barcelonan coffee when you haven't slept is not an exceptionally bright idea. My stomach wasn't very happy, but at least I made my flight and got back to Amsterdam.
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