Cruising is like listening to a Beatles greatest hits record. Yeah (yeah, yeah) you admire Hey Jude and Yesterday, but you miss out on the hidden gems (for me, Norwegian Wood is an almost perfect song) and get no feel for the history and depth of the band.
Even our brief time in Barcelona allowed us to relish some of the B-sides. We spent only two days there, but we were able to walk at leisurely length around this magnificent, quirky city, doing it justice in way that a six-hour tour never would have permitted. (Barcelona is eminently walkable – much of it is flat, and the drivers notice pedestrians and sometimes yield to them, unlike in Italy.)
From our base at the Hotel Espana, a tasteful and sleek establishment on Carrer Sant Pau just off La Rambla, we set off in search of Gaudi’s best-known buildings. His unique style – sandcastle spires, amoeboid balconies, splashes of color – contrasts with and complements the city’s stately older structures.
The Sagrada Familia (still under construction almost 90 years after Gaudi’s death), which somehow is reminiscent of a building in one of the early Star Wars movies, is a powerful amalgam of emotion, spirituality, and modernity.
The Casa Batllo is the only building I’ve ever seen that reminds of a Smurf.
Its neighbor to the left (Casa Amatller), designed by another famed architect (Josep Puig i Cadafalch) could not be more different: its stair-step, Moorish/Gothic design is all sharp angles to Gaudi’s soft curves.
These houses sit on a stretch of Passeig Gracia known as the Block of Discord, replete with remarkable and sometimes bizarre structures from competing architects. Unfortunately, Gaudi’s famed La Pedrera, a mansion on the corner of Passeig Gracia and Provenca, currently is wrapped for renovation and surrounded by scaffolding.
We also explored the Gothic Quarter, whose seemingly random alleys are filled with taperias, curio shops, and as many Xarcuterias/Pernilerias (basically, ham stores) as most cities have Starbucks. (Barcelona is a bad place to be a pig: bacon, ham, pork sausages and the like are staples of all three major meals and many snacks, and rows of pigs’ legs hang in shop after shop.)
This part of Barcelona is filled with enchanting details: meticulously carved wooden doors, filigreed balconies, and plaques identifying not just the name of the street, but a few details about the person whom the street honors.
The Gothic Quarter also is home to the Catedral de Barcelona, a massive, majestic structure dating back to the 14th century which sits on the site of a cathedral built a millennium before that.
Just across La Rambla, a tourist-drenched avenue running from the statue of Columbus near the harbor up to the Placa de Catalunya, is the Mercat de la Boqueria.
We entered in search of breakfast and found stalls packed with spectacular produce, almost every imaginable type of marine life, various whole animals and parts thereof, delicious baked goods, freshly squeezed fruit juices, and other random edibles such as emu and ostrich eggs.
For me, the sensory experience ranged from bliss (a scrumptious chocolate croissant) to disgust (goats’ heads). By mid-afternoon, the stalls had been picked clean.
I’ll finish up with some notes on language, food, and music. First, Catalan – not Spanish – is the primary language in Barcelona. On paper many of the words look similar, but the spoken languages are distinct. Although everyone seems to speak Spanish, there’s no doubt that Catalan is the preferred tongue.
Second, Barcelona is a wonderful place to practice your Spanish if, like me, you’re not fluent but know enough to get by. Spaniards enunciate in a way that Spanish-speakers from many other countries don’t, making it easier to identify individual words and draw meaning from the context of the conversation. What’s more, people in Barcelona welcome efforts to communicate in Spanish, even though almost all of them speak far better English than I do Spanish (a welcome change from Marseille, where shopkeepers either don’t understand English or simply pretend not to).
Third, if you don’t eat beef or pork, you can still get by quite nicely on fresh fish. It’s available everywhere and it’s delicious. In fact, I had the best salmon of my life at a restaurant called Brasserie Catedra on Via Laitana, which also serves outstanding paella and superb sangria. If you’re a vegetarian things are more difficult, although living on chocolate croissants for a couple of days isn’t such a bad alternative.
Finally, shops and restaurants are filled with American or British pop music, but none of it is performed by the original artists. There must be some weird licensing dispute underlying this phenomenon. The nadir came at lunch in an otherwise very nice restaurant, where the soundtrack consisted of godawful smooth jazz arrangements of Beatles songs, including for some reason Honey Pie – probably the only time that particular tune has been covered.
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Ending this post with the Beatles would be symmetrical, but I’m not quite done. I cannot wrap up this wonderful trip without expressing boundless gratitude to my parents, whose overwhelming generosity made it all possible. Ever since my siblings and I were small, my parents have made travel a central part of our lives. Time and again, they’ve brought us – and now our own spouses and children – on marvelous voyages, enlightening, educating and entertaining us beyond measure. Mom and Dad, thank you, thank you, thank you and tanto quiero.