barcelona

I just spent the better part of a week in Barcelona, on and off with my friend Suz. I say "on and off" because I arrived on the morning of the 20th, was there by myself for the first day, met her on 21st, hung out on the 21st and 22nd, and then she left the night of the 22nd to go to Figueres (although she ended up somewhere entirely different, never mind), she came back the next day around two and we hung out until we left on Saturday morning the 24th, me by train and she by plane. I hadn't realized Suz's travel schedule was going to overlap with mine as much as it did -- I thought she was arriving on Thursday rather than on Wednesday -- but it was fun to have an unexpected travel buddy.

So Barcelona's really cool. The architect Antoni Gaudí is basically the city's darling, and with good reason. He designed and worked on La Sagrada Familia, the huge and nowhere-near-finished cathedral (started in 1882 and still under construction), and also built all kinds of cool palaces, houses and parks, like Park Güell. Originally Gaudí designed Park Güell to be a settlement for all the rich people in Barcelona; it would have everything they needed, and they could all live up on this hill overlooking the city and, presumably, be proud of how awesome they were. That's what I'd be doing if I were living in Park Güell, at any rate. We checked out a little Gaudí museum in the park, which wasn't all that cool, but we did first become acquainted with the awesomeness that is Gaudí's woodwork.

We became much, much more acquainted with Gaudí's woodwork a couple of days later, when we sucked it up and paid the ridiculous €13,20 to visit Casa Batlló, a house on Passeig de Gràcia that Gaudí redid the exterior, roof, attic and first floor of, if not more. (Those were the only parts we could visit, at any rate.) All the cool postcards we'd been seeing all over Barcelona were of Casa Batlló. And yeah, it was pretty darned cool. Gaudí was a little obsessed with the natural world, so there were all kinds of lovely shades of blue and woodwork all over the house. When you walk in they hand you an audio guide; you don't have a choice (except of what language you want) because a) you've already paid for it in the admission price; and b) there aren't any descriptions of anything in the house. And the audio guide is quite possibly the most ridiculous thing I have ever listened to. "The master Gaudí personally supervised the creation of every single piece of this house, from the doorhandles to the woodworking to the tiles . . . The darker shades on this wall might represent shapes from the undersea world . . . The bubbles in this glass panel have been there since the day they were blown." I kid you not. So Suz and I were joking that it should have said things like, "The soles of Gaudí's shoes personally caressed each individual floorboard." Truly beautiful place, though.

We did things other than stalk Gaudí's architecture across the city, I promise! We hung out on the beach for a while, and cooked twenty-nine cent spaghetti for dinner so we didn't feel so bad about spending €3,50 on hot chocolate two days in a row (xocolata in Catalán, which is spoken in Barcelona, as opposed to castellano, what you'd usually think of as Spanish, although pretty much everyone spoke castellano as well, as far as I could tell). We went to the market multiple times, where one can buy whole piglets (kind of reminded me of tenth grade bio and dissecting the fetal pig), and we wandered down Las Ramblas, where one can buy canaries, hamsters and chickens, among other things. The first day I was there I wandered lostly around the city for an hour or so (this is a tradition when I first arrive in a city, I don't know why it's even a surprise at this point -- I can never seem to find the places I've booked to stay at without getting lost for a good hour or so first) and then after dropping my stuff off wandered around lostly on purpose, eventually drinking a tiny coffee near the contemporary art museum. So yes -- basically Barcelona is lovely.