Blogorrhea Junior

Barcelona, Day 10: MMMMojitos!

Not hungover yet, actually, but it may still happen. Kind of a nothing day. After the Long March yesterday, I gave my feet another rest and hung out in a cafe, reading the new Terry Pratchett (Wintersmith) I scored at the English bookstore, then did a little shopping, and I mean a very little. I've been trying valiantly to find a piece of jewelry to come home with me, but nothing is begging to be bought, believe it or not. It's all very chunky and modern, or it's prohibitively expensive, or it's junk. There's nothing in the middle, because I haven't yet managed to find the artisans who aren't catering to base tourista taste. Either that, or Spanish style is not speaking to me. Not luck with the jewelry, But I'm off to do more shopping tomorrow after I visit the museum of city history in,  you guessed it, the Barri Gotic, which I cannot seem to get enough of.

Though I did walk around the Eixample a bit today, and take a few more pics. There are some charming buildings in this area, which reminds me a bit of Bath, except that the architecture is obviously made more for a warm climate with balconies and shutters, and the kind of building materials that hold the coolness of morning through the day, and the heat at night. I like the way they open up behind their forbidding doors to little courtyards with staircases and elevators and open lightwells. So here's a pic of the ridiculous plaster work in one of the nearby buildings. Isn't it lovely? And there's an equally ridiculous Art Nouveau elevator to go with it.

So the pending hangover is due to two mojitos I had at Moon, while having a snack before I go to dinner at 10:30 tonight at Cinque Sentits. Let you know how that is later. The mojitos were way yummy and I'm anticipating a very groovy dinner. If I can stay awake.

Barcelona, Day 9: Avast, Me Hearties!

I am such a weirdo. Geek. Nerd. Whatever. It was out in full force today at the Maritime Museum, which is located in what used to Barcelona's shipyards. I am a complete and utter freak for anything to do with sailing ships, new or old, which I will grudgingly stretch to include Great Lakes freighters though I don't much care about anything from the age of steam on. I love great expanses of canvas and the skill it takes to make a ship fly beneath them. Propellers seem like cheating to me. If I'd been a boy 200 years ago, I'd have run away to sea, muggery, buggery, and thuggery notwithstanding.

Now, New York has the Brooklyn Navy Yards but they're mostly closed down now and largely 20th Century industrial, for the building of big iron ships. South Street Seaport is, frankly, a sad substitute. But Barcelona's been a port for longer than New York even existed, and its shipyards were covered over in the Middle Ages and there's a big ol' sailing ship still sitting smack in the middle of it (sans masts, which are too tall and would have been added later) along with a small fleet of fishing boats of various kinds, and loads of models. My fat little galleon model from the Museum of Catalan History was there again too, but in reproduction. And there was a near life-size wooden model of the first submarine built in Spain, sitting in the courtyard, which sent me into a little fit of delight. I have a thing for submarines too. So I spent an ecstatic couple of hours wandering around in this huge barn of a building, which has about a dozen drydock bays.

Once again, I eschewed the recorded tour and just wandered around, which was fine. I mean, I know what navigational instruments and bits of boats look like. Special treats were the diorama of ropemaking, the vintage steamship posters, the inlaid quarterdeck on the replica galley Galera Real and the replica officer's cabin, seamen's hammocks, and ship's stores recreated in old wooden packing crates, and the walkthrough replica of belowdecks on a sailing ship. I took crappy pictures because it was dark and I apparently have a hard time standing still on long exposures.  Tripod, anyone? Nice little gallery of nautical paintings, too. This put me in a very good mood for the rest of the day.

I'd expected rain and thus hauled my umbrella (what is it with Accuweather Barcelona? It's completely wrong 80% of the time), but it was a beautiful warm, sunny day, so I walked around (guess where?) Ribera up to Santa Maria del Mar, a quick-build Gothic cathedral (done in 60 years, rather than the usual couple of hundred) so it's as purely Gothic as they usually get. It's another church without a transept (is this a feature only of monastic churches?), but has wide side aisles and cozy little chapels, one of which was home to a monument to some poor cavalier who looked like he was just napping. Such a heartwrenchingly beautiful carving, in wood, not the usual stone, so it had an unexpected warmth to it as well. The church has some very new windows, several from the last century, and a number of lovely roses, both over the porch and little ones along the clerestory. Less cozy than the barn I was in yesterday, but somehow warmer in its expansiveness. From outside, the back of the apse looks like the ribs of a ship, except for this tacked on Baroque lady chapel that juts off it like a boxy tumor. Hideous, inside and out.

Walked and walked and walked for about six or seven hours today, all told.  Found a small art store where I picked up four sheets of handmade Catalan paper to make a few books with. The inclusions are bright and fun and a little mosaic-y, so they're perfect. Now I just have to get them home without crushing them. Trying to lay off the coffee, which is hard to do here, but I didn't get to sleep until 3 AM this morning, and that won't do.  Although it does make for a comfortably Barcelonan late start.

Dinner at a nice place around the corner on Balmes and Rosello, but a late one, so I'm really stuffed now: tomato, mozzarella, avocado salad; mushroom foie risotto; panacotta with raspberry sauce, the inevitable cafe con leche, glass of wine. My reservation at Cinq Sentits is for 10:30 tomorrow, so it'll be just as bad, but lighter, I suspect.

Barcelona, Day 8: Chillin'

Takin' a day off and restin' my dawgs, since Barcelona rolls up the sidewalks on Sunday anyway. This seemed like a good day to take a little break. We had a time change here in Europe last night, so I lost any hour anyway, and didn't sleep well for some reason. I think the last cafe de leche caught up with me. Went for more tapas at a little local place around the corner called Moon, which serves cava & sangria. The sangria looked great, and they made champagne sangria too, but you need a couple of people to scarf down a pitcher, since you can't get it by the class. One disadvantage to traveling alone: nobody to split stuff with. Blissfully, I got a whole plate of those yummy olives, this time stuffed with anchovies, along with chorizo and grilled mushrooms, bread, and local beer (which Cerveceria Catalana didn't have, despite its name, unless it was only on tap at the bar). Great dinner. But it was 10 by the time I had the last cafe de leche of the night. Shoulda had a mojito instead; they looked great.

So I got a late start today, not until 1, then walked a block west instead, away from Las Ramblas, to check out the location of the restaurant I made reservations at for Tuesday night, Cinc Sentits. I've been staying away, for the most part, from guidebook restaurants, but this one looks pretty spiffy. (Jen & Sean, there's foam!) Wound up at a little place on c. Enric Granados called Origens 99.9% (this post about it is a little too eco-organic-PC for my taste; there's something to be said for traditional slow food too), which was "99.9% Catalan" food, from around the region. Had a slab of toasted bread, a rough peasant pate and grilled tomatoes, which I didn't figure out until later you're supposed to rub over the bread and sprinkle with olive oil. Duh!  The pate was rich and wonderful, and the restaurant deserves a better write-up. They've got an entire catalog and philosophy going on, and sell wines and Catalan foodstuffs too. Might go back and do a bit more exploring of the menu. Here's the little square right near the university where I had brunch and caught a bit of a chill.

I wish it had been a little warmer. The square was really pleasant to sit in, full of young families and kids with soccer balls, skateboards, scooters, and roller blades, and dogs. Lots of dogs around, though not much dog shit, which is nice. And I just spotted my first imperious cat today too, on the way back to the hotel, sunning himself on the lawn and ignoring me. Spring is starting up here, with leaflets on the trees and the wisteria starting to come out, but it was pretty nippy today, with the wind. I think I'll come back in April next time, when it's just a little warmer. This sitting outside for hours thing could get really addictive.

Tomorrow, off to the maritime museum and Santa Maria del Mar, and possibly some paella.

Barcelona, Day 7: Just Visiting

I'd originally thought I'd go wander along the Avinguda Diagonal today, but it was supposed to be such a nice day, that I thought I'd go down to the Boqueria, in part because Kristin mentioned it in another comment. Glad I went. What a great place! New York really needs a market like this. It would be great if the Bronx Terminal turned into something like those, but I don't have very high hopes for that. (Location, location, location, for one thing.) There's a little—no, a lot—of everything there, and it's all gorgeous: produce, meat, seafood, cheese, olives, dried fruit, chocolate, tropical produce, cooking gear, even, uh, dried bugs (which reminded me of the fit everybody's throwing on Eater about finding a grasshopper in a wrap. This made me laugh, having found all kinds of bugs and spiders in my garden-fresh food when I was a kid.).

No pics because it's too crowded, and well, food looks pretty much the same, wherever, even if the cuts of meat are a little different. There were some innards I couldn't quite identify (brains, I think), plus some of the biggest pig trotters I've ever seen, and poor skinned little wabbits with just a tiny bit of fur on them but sans ears; an entire stall of mushrooms, wild and otherwise, dry and fresh, including big fat morels which were astonishingly cheap, I thought; the biggest damn strawberries I've ever seen—don't they test those things for steroids?—lacking only cream to go with them; a giant pile of brown eggs; stalls and stalls of fresh asparagus, tomatoes, artichokes, shucked fresh peas and peapods, avocados, blood oranges, grapes, clementines, apples; fresh bread of all kinds, a stall selling yakitori and teeny sushi rolls; cheese, lots of cheese (I bought a chunk of Manxhego to munch on, which is delish); stalls that sell cooked food (talk about fresh!), and a kind of theatre in the round of fish, right in the middle of it, both fin- and shellfish. Piles of oysters, clams, cockles, razor clams (which, I gotta say, look a little obscene) . . . okay, I'll stop now.  You get the idea. I would love to have a market like this (let alone the three or four of them that Barcelona seems to have) in New York. It makes the Greenmarket at Union Square look like nothing.

Afterwards, I headed off in the opposite direction I've generally gone, into the Barri Xines, or Chinatown, which was oddly full of Arabs and devoid of Chinese. Immigration at work. I went looking for Sant Pau Del Camp and got completely turned around and caught in yet another unforcasted downpour. This time, I had to duck into an expensive tourist trap for not very good fish soup and bitter burned coffee, which I'm hoping to erase from my mind with some good food tonight. By the time I got out and found the church, it was closed to visitors, so I only have outside pics. It's a thousand years old, which boggles my mind, but it looks it. And it looks as if it's sitting in the middle of a Byzantine desert somewhere.

Went in search of Palau Guell, which, like every other modernist building I want to see, is being renovated and is completely draped in scaffolding and netting and inaccessible, dammit. Wonder what I'll find at Park Guell?  So I took myself back off into the Barri Gotic and ended up at Santa Maria del Pi, where I stayed for vespers, contemplating the vaulting. It's not anywhere near the size of the cathedral, but it's still a big, old cold barn of a church, with some very pretty windows, but no crossing or transept, just a nave and chapels. If it felt cold to me, in a coat, in March, I can only imagine it freezing the bones of its old parishioners in January, especially before the acquisition of the electric heaters I spotted. And in the Middle Ages, when it was new? Brrrrrrrr! You'd be able to see your breath, I'm sure, the choir's notes rising up to God on a cloud of exhalations.

One of the things I was contemplating, along with the Gothic vaulting and how it compares to the vaulting in the attic of Casa Mila, was how different this trip to Europe feels than my previous ones. I don't know whether it's a function of age and jadedness, having lived in New York for so long now, and no longer being fresh off the farm (probably in part), but I haven't had any pings of recognition here, that this is "home," the way I did in Edinburgh (but not London, though I liked London). It's a little ironic, because at least four people have come up to ask me for directions here. I suspect that's a function of my NYC "always look like you know where you're going" stride, not walking around clutching a map or guidebook, not caring much if I get turned around or lost as I plunge off the beaten path, and because I'm not wearing sneakers and jeans or sweats like the rest of the touristas. Anyway, I like Barcelona very much, but I don't think I'd want to live here, despite the lovely disposition of its people, the great food, and the beauty of the city. It's not even the language thing. That's bothered me a lot less than I thought it would, less than it did in Wales or France. But I'm definitely just visiting, though I couldn't say why.

Barcelona, Day 6: Dos Casas

Well, tres, really, as I went back to Casa Amatller too, to take a couple more pics. But most of my day was spent wandering around Casa Batllo and Casa Mila, or La Pedrera (The Stone Quarry, which it does not resemble to my mind. Go figure.) First, had my first taste of Serrano ham today, at a little cafe not far from the hotel. OMG! Wonderful stuff, and on the usual wonderful bread. Yum. I could take about four tons of the stuff home and eat it every day, especially if I could get it on the bread here.

Then I trudged around looking for another place to change my traveler's cheques, only to get to the rude bank after it had closed. Annoying. Did a little shopping along the way: a couple of jazz CDs, some soap. But Las Ramblas and Passeig de Gracia are both high-end chain store hell for the most part: Gucci, Yves St. Laurent, Armani. When it's not a boutique, it's shoes, when it's not shoes, its a perfumery, when it's not a perfumery, it's lingerie, and when it's none of those four things, it's a cafe or restaurant, many of which are tourist traps. At least I know where the cool and fun stores are in NYC now. I feel sorta like I'm trapped in the new Soho now, when I really wanna be in the old one. The shopping here is really wasted on me, with one exception, which I'll get to later.

So it was on to sightseeing, which made everything all right again. First stop was Casa Amatller, which I'd popped into the other day, and taken some crummy pictures in.  Since only the lobby is open, and it's free, I popped in again. It's right next door to Casa Batllo and given its Neo-Gothic style, it's surprising how well it works sitting cheek by jowl with Gaudi's modernism. Here's a corner of the lobby with its lovely tilework and half of the amazing stained glass door that leads to a gift shop. The facade is all Gothic curlicues and gargoyles and saints, including St. George and the Dragon, which is Barcelona's patron Saint.

Casa Mila, next door, has more open than Casa Amatller, but not a lot. I think the open rooms rotate. There seems to be a lot of maintenance going on right now everywhere, which is thwarting my attempts to see things. First Sagrada Familia, then the central skylight at Casa Mila, which darkened the courtyard/lightwell down significantly. Like Casa Amatller, Casa Batllo was a private house. It was gutted and renovated, rather than built from scratch and is a swoopy, colorful fantasia full of stained glass, interesting doors, and lots of sunlight, thanks both to the large windows front and back, and the central lightwell and rear terrace. The windows that open on the light well have movable wooden louvers for ventilation as well, which went a long way towards temperature control. The stairwell was comfortable all the way up to the top floor. The rooms flow, almost literally, from one to the other because of the sinuous lines of staircases and doorways and windows. As one American college kid on spring break remarked to her pal on the street outside, there's something sort of "Nightmare Before Christmas" about it. The windows, especially, look a little too mouth-like for comfort. But the interior isn't creepy or sinister, only beautiful and organic looking. On the first floor, there's a cozy little nook with a built-in seats flanking a wood stove where I could easily envision curling up with a book on a cold rainy day. The chimney's on the roof were tiled in mosaic, but not especially whimsical.

Casa Mila is a different animal, mostly because it's an apartment house. The layout is similar in that it has a central courtyard (much larger than Casa Battlo's lightwell) overlooked by Juliette balconies. At right is a shot of the model apartment's foyer, which overlooks the courtyard. The rest of the apartment, which is furnished in a style contemporary to the building's construction (i.e., Art Nouveau), curves around from either side. The rooms are light and airy and it would be a great place to live. Lots of square footage (4 bedrooms, two baths, big kitchen, maid's room, sewing/laundry room, dining room, study, living room). One of the things that struck me in both the latter buildings was the ornate plasterwork, which you just don't see anymore. Not only around the doors, but also in rosettes on the ceiling. Gorgeous. And the roof terrace here, which has some really ridiculous chimneys (and more maintenance going on), gives some great views of Barcelona (straight down c./Provenca to the towers of Sagrada Familia).

Off to dinner now, in the hotel restaurant tonight, because I'm bushed. The tapas last night were good, though the calamari was not as tender as it was at the greasy spoon earlier in the day. The bacon and date was really yummy, the steak was perfect, the fish was fantastic, the prawns, well, you get the idea. I may go back and try some other stuff, too. The trick is to go a bit early, before the natives descend on it.

Barcelona, Day 5: Too Much Fun, Smoke, Coffee

First purchase of the day: band aids for my heel, which is blistered and bloody. I guess the honeymoon had to end sometime. I'm kinda cranky today, after being misled by a guidebook and winding up sucked back into the Barri Gotic while looking for a cafe I'd planned to go to for breakfast. The numbering is really peculiar here.  What's 83 on one block is 148 the next block over, so it's hard to tell precisely where you are.  Here's a suggestion for the writers of guidebooks: give the damn cross streets.  A lot of Barcelona is laid out in a grid; why not use it? If you're looking for a specific address, the reference grid on the map is not all that useful even if you're a good judge of distance.

So I have not a lot to report today except that I saw a bit more of the city that I hadn't seen before, and found a nice cafe on Via Laietana to hang out in for a while, until it filled up with smokers and gave me a headache. It's just as well that I'm too busy absorbing atmosphere to bother writing, because I have yet to see anybody with a laptop in a cafe here, and I absolutely refuse to set foot in Starfuck's while I'm here, although I've seen at least three of them. They're not quite legion yet, like in NYC, and I suspect they're mostly tourist havens here, because honestly who would bother with their overpriced burnt crap when the coffee and espresso here is so delicious and cheap? Even I, who am not a coffee person, am deeply enjoying the cafe con leche. Roger, I think at least some of it is Lavazza brand (which I've also seen in NYC), but not sure about the others.  I'll poke around and see what I can find out.

Perused the flea market outside the cathedral where I nearly bought an antique microscope, and the not very interesting craft market on Portal de l'Angel. Wandered into the Cortes de Ingles (like Macy's, kinda but more generic in the basement). Figured out that the building across the street from where I almost got stiffed the other day was the Palau de Musica Catalunya, which is gorgeously ornate and has been added onto by enclosing part of it in glass (which warrants two pics today, the old front [L] and the new addition [R]), as though displaying it in a cabinet. This may have been done, in part, to improve the acoustics, which are apparently notoriously bad.

Ran into my first rude Spaniard today too, at the currency exchange in the bank of all places. Superior about my rotten Spanish, when everyone else has been so understanding and nice; lecture about getting the street name wrong ("There is no street named only Granados; it is Enrique Granados," and yet clearly he knew which street I meant); huge rigamarole about exchanging an American Express traveler's cheque which it was clearly posted that they honor. And I'm really kind of surprised that the tellers working the Exchange spoke less English than I spoke Spanish, which is saying something. Almost worth the less favorable exchange rate at the hotel just to avoid the hassle. Assholes, like con artists, are everywhere. But I must say that the vast majority of people are very patient, friendly.and nice, even when I hand them the wrong change. Duh! How hard is it to get the damn coins right? (It's my new glasses, I swear!)

Tapas tonight, I hope, a little earlier than usual, and then definitely a close to home day tomorrow of Casa Mila and Casa Batllo. I'll be glad when Sunday rolls around and there's not much open. Phew! Vacation is hard work!

Barcelona, Day 4: Witches & Water

Took the metro down to the harbor today to go to the Museum of Catalan History, which is in the Palau de Mar in Barceloneta, about five stops away from L'Eixample where my hotel is.  Instead of changing trains, I walked over halfway to Sagrada Familia and caught a direct line (not very far, either way). So, the inevitable comparison: Ours have cooler stations and newer trains; theirs are cleaner and have better announcements and signs. We stay open 24/7; they close at midnight, 2 AM on the weekends, like DC and London, which seems especially weird in a town that eats as late as Barcelona does.  Public transportation seems really good here, and they have their own versions of Music in the Subway and the little shops in the stations we have (again, cleaner and nicer for the most part). There's even a bar in the Verdaguer station, which is one up on the dive bar whose name I forget now (Siberia? Something Russian.) that only fronts one of the stations in NYC. They've one-upped us on trams and funicular, too, but their cable car is just for sightseeing, not actual transportation like Roosevelt Island's. All in all, between taxis, buses, trams, and various trains, it's a really easy city to get from here to there in.

The waterfront is really lovely, but it was a little odd that there didn't seem to be benches actually facing it, so you could sit and look at the harbor and the boats, at least where I was. There were plenty of swanky restaurants with terraces fronting it though, and that's perhaps why. I sat in the sun for a while and just soaked up the fresh air and Vitamin D, then wandered in to the museum, which cost me a whopping 4.33 euros. It was extra for the witch show, a whole 1.33. Sheesh. Pic of the day (the harborfront):

The show was a little thin and a little frustrating, and kinda sensationalized. I already knew enough about the topic and could puzzle out the Spanish and Catalan enough to understand that this was a pretty toothless show. No feminist slant, no political explanation of why the witch hunting continued to be virulent in Catalonia after it had been quelled in the rest of Spain (something I didn't know), no real discussion of witches as "other" or some of the motivations neighbors might have had in accusing people they'd known all their lives. There was some discussion of both the change in church doctrine and the sociological motivations (climate change, immigration, bad harvests) but nothing deep at all. Between the low lighting and the creepy soundtrack, it gave the whole thing a kind of Blair Witch feel, more funhouse than history. Mostly it was a display of various texts, from various copies of the Malleus Malificarum to  exorcism manuals and records of the trials. One really affecting artifact was a death warrant for one woman: a small, wormholed piece of paper with just her name, the date, and "sentenced to death" on it in Latin. That made me shiver.

I went through the permanent exhibition too, but only the first half, from prehistory through the Middle Ages. It's interactive in places, though not everything works. You could try on bits of armor, grind wheat between smallish and larger millstones, see how much an amphora weighed, how medieval scales worked, hear a medieval Catalan poem recited, hear some Gregorian chant, turn a waterwheel for irrigation, and peek into a tiny chapel where a priest's effigy stands with his arms raised, celebrating mass beneath a Byzantine fresco of Christ Pantocrater. That was somehow a little creepy, because the effigy is all in shadow and you keep expecting it to move. The dioramas were especially well done, showing the living conditions at various periods of history. It was great that you could touch just about,t everything on exhibit, rather than viewing it all through a glass, darkly, the way museums usually set up their exhibits. And I didn't realize there were so many megaliths across Spain, too. Duh. The ship models were fascinating too.  One was about half life-size, I think, in a cutaway, packed with amphora which were cushioned with pine branches instead of (as I would have expected) straw. The other I wanted to take home with me. It was an antique model of a galleon, about three feet from figurehead to stern and four high. The proportions weren't quite right, and it only had one mast, so it was wider in the beam than it should have been, and kind of rolypoly and cute, like a 3D caricature.

Wound up in a "greasy spoon" for a very late lunch, where the goat cheese on the salad was grilled and smoky, the olives were pitted but still wonderful, and alas, the calamari was really fresh and had lovely breading, but the grease was old and the frites were soggy. The great bread again made up for that, however, and I'm still full. Couldn't actually finish the calamari. The place had about eight tables, one of which was occupied by an old man, obviously a regular, who asked if his cigarette would bother me, which I thought was very kind. Cracks me up that even tiny places like this have winebuckets beside the tables. My fellow diner was drinking the almost black house red out of a small square glass bottle about the size of a split. Oh, and lunch was like, $12 again.

Broke in the new shoes, which are goingto be very comfortable when my feets aren't swollen. Casa Batllo and Casa Mila tomorrow, I think, since they're in the hood. I should save them for a rainy day for that reason, but I think I'll go to the big art museum then.

Barcelona, Day 3: Tourista

A bit of everything today, but mostly playing tourista. Got a later start today, too, about noon instead of 10:30, hoping to skew the day more toward the Barcelona schedule. Walked over c. Provenca to Sagrada Familia, which is now mostly closed because of construction. The transept crossing is a forest of scaffolding for the tall cranes and the towers are closed, unfortunately, so I saw very little of the interior except some of the new construction in the nave. This was deeply disappointing, as I love the interiors of big churches. It's a little odd to walk around in one this big that's still in the works, especially now that St. John the Divine is no longer a work in progress, but it's fascinating to see how it's being built, even more so than it was to watch the St. John's stoneworks. I kept trying to imagine how this would have been constructed in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance and completely failed. The structure is too different from Romanesque or Gothic architecture and I think the engineering would have failed if something like this were attempted then. Pic of the day (new construction at Sagrada Familia):

Which is not to say there isn't something Gothic about the building. But everything is so terribly slender and insubstantial, like a honeycomb.  You wonder how it can possible hold itself up. Then you look at the sandbag model and get an inkling of how it was planned, and wonder why no one else ever thought of planning stresses that way before. I supposed because you couldn't rotate the model without photography. It's a very ingenious, Leonardo-like thing to have come up with. But it gives the building so much tension that it's almost palpable.

It's been a while since I was in a big cathedral, but this one seems a lot higher inside than the ones I remember. I'll have to check out Santa Maria Del Mar and make a comparison. And its piers are like nothing I've seen before.  Like slender pillars holding up a wedding cake, nothing like Durham's big substantial Romanesque monsters. And because the forms that Gaudi uses are so organic, there is also something very treelike about them. The roof (when it's there) becomes a canopy in a very redwood sort of way. It's far away and almost insubstantial.

And the facade, in real life, looks even more like it was grown, rather than built. It looks, actually, like something that rose out of the sea, dripping mud over a solid skeleton. What a boggling piece of work. I wish I'd been able to see more of it up close. If the admission price weren't going to support the construction, it wouldn't be worth paying for what you get to see now. I hope the thing is finished in my lifetime, because I need to come back and see it complete.

Lunch in a little cafe: amazing bread and ham. You were right about the ham, Dr. Em. Fabulous. And this wasn't even the Serrano ham yet.  Something else I could have scarfed down by the bale. Found an English bookstore on the way to Sagrada Familia and bought a translated Spanish detective novel, The Argentina Quintet by Manuel Vasquez Montalban and sat over lunch for a couple of hours, in the Spanish way, reading my book. Then wandered down the Passeig de Gracia to the Camper store and bought a pair of shoes and to H&M to buy a couple of shirts, since I wrecked one last night at dinner, as I am wont to do. Sigh.

Barcelona has a lot of bookstores, which always makes me feel good about a place. It signifies an intellectual life. What I'm missing is the artistic life, which I'll have to look for. I know it's here, I just haven't gotten to it yet.

Update: On my way to dinner down c. Enric Granados from the hotel, I dropped into a little gallery called N2 which was showing some very cool works by an artist named Laurent Martin "Lo." They're of split and bent bamboo, wire, and lead weights, mostly mobiles, but some mounted on wire mesh too. Very finely balanced, very complicated, very kinetic, even the mesh-mounted ones. The gallery doors were open to a very cool and windy night and everything was moving in the breeze. Lovely and delicate and fun. One piece was a metal tripod with very thin legs and a platform about 1/4 inch across, on which was balanced a very long bent piece of split bamboo, gently rocking up and down on the point of a notch. These all look like they were fun to make, as well as being fun to watch.

Thwarted in my hunt for tapas, though I found a place I'm going to try tomorrow. It was packed tonight at 9 so I think I'll go about 8 tomorrow. It's just off Las Ramblas though, so who knows how many tourists find it.  It's only a couple of blocks from my hotel too, which is nice.  But I wound up at a small place up the street called Buko, which does Thai fusion. Good rolls, and a very different crispy pork than I've had before, obviously with a totally different cut of meat and totally different type of pig and processing. Very good.

No idea what I'm up to tomorrow.  Maybe the Museum of Catalan History's exhibit on the medieval witch hunts. May give the metro a go tomorrow too, to save my feets a little. The main tourist office seems to be inaccessible as the building it's supposed to be is being renovated, so I'm out the money I spent on the transit pass through Expedia. Dammit.  I'll have to pick one up in the station. And I'd like to get a bus map. You miss so much taking the subway, and God knows I'm not in a hurry to get anywhere here.

Barcelona, Day 2: Food

It's early days yet, and one of those days was a Sunday, which is a notoriously bad day in any town for eating out. The bad thing about being from New York (and I say "being from" after a mere 20 years there, which does not, in the eyes of born & bred New Yorkers, confer legal bragging rights), is that you can eat so damn well there that it has a tendency to spoil you. Despite that jadedness, I've liked everything and been wowed by a couple of very simple things here so far: that wicked flaky croissant I had for breakfast yesterday, and the olives I had last night. I don't know what kind of olives they were, just little green ones, but they were almost buttery, and a little salty without being briny or oily. It was all I could do not to scarf them down like popcorn at a scary movie (hey, come to think of it, Lou calls olives Italian popcorn). That might just be the perfect snack along with the ubiquitous Catalan bread and fresh pureed tomato spread, and a glass of wine. There's lunch.

The tomato-bread thing is interesting. It's not like tapenade, or bruschetta, though closer to the latter than the former. Just a thin scrape of pureed fresh tomato over crusty bread, suitable for dunking in whatever saucy thing you happen to be eating, or just for munching on. Sometimes it's salted, sometimes it's not. But it's the fresh thing that makes it work. I suspect it's pureed every day.

The olives were not at the Cuban restaurant I'd planned on, which turned out to be farther away than I wanted to walk last night. I ended up a couple blocks away at an Italian brasserie instead, where the warm goat cheese salad and garlic prawns were just fine, if nothing to shout about. But those olives! Astonishing! Actually, the goat cheese was pretty darn good too.

Today, the chocolate croissant, while no means soggy and greasy like the ones I've gotten all too often in New York, was not as good as the custard-filled one. It was still flaky, but not in quite the same way (different bakery). Lunch (at Taller de Tapas in the Barri Gotic) was a spectacular deal at about $15, which is not much more than I pay for a sandwich and a bottle of fresh juice at home: foie gras sausage, grilled spud, fresh salad, and "creamed spinach" which was not at all what I expected. This was actually soup, pureed very fine, with bits of crispy Catalan ham in it. Yummy yummy yummy! And that ham, man, some of it that I've seen in the windows here looks like, well, not to put too fine a point on it, like a shriveled corpse. Which proves that I will try anything once. The foie gras was so rich I could barely finish it, but I'm glad I did, considering what came after.

This is the second night in a row that I've ironically eaten Italian. This at a rather nicer place just down the block again, called Ottimo (95 c/ Enric Granados, corner of c/ Rosello), which came recommended in my Wallpaper City Guide. I like Italian and it was a block away after a really long day, and turned out to be a good, if more expensive choice. Really excellent fresh salad Caprese with fab buffalo mozzarella, and tagliatelle with white truffle shavings, a bit of freshly shaved Parmesan and a poached egg on top. Disgustingly simple (well, if you can get the truffles) and delish. Again, though, the thing that most impressed me was the olive oil and bread sticks. The French olive oil that O & Co. keep trying to sell me is always grassy or bitter. This, which is probably either Spanish or Italian, had a wonderful, soft nutty finish, and the damn bread here is just perfect, no matter what form it comes in. The crust is crunchy, but not so hard that it slices the inside of your mouth, and the inside is just a little chewy but never gummy or dry. The breadsticks had olives in them. I might stay here just for the food.

I thought I'd have a really hard time getting used to the eating at 10 pm thing, but I seem to be falling into the Catalan rhythm pretty easily. Surprisingly, it doesn't seem to bother me to eat this late, here. Although I'm really stuffed tonight. Depends on what you eat, and pasta's kinda heavy. What I really am is wired after 4 cafes con leche today. I might not sleep again until next week.

On the other hand, today was a sort of inadvertent "Death March to Bataan," and I'm really whipped. After bragging about my navigator's nose yesterday, I got good and darned turned around (though not really lost, per se) and ended up way east of where I thought I was going to come out. I semi-duplicated my steps of yesterday, heading down Las Ramblas to the Barri Gotic again, just to see what it was like on a work day. (Pic of the day: wrought iron door in the Barri Gotic):

Wow, what a difference a day makes! Everybody out in force, tourists and natives alike, bustling about. Shops open (well, until about 2, when most close up for a couple of hours, like sane people). With everything open, the Barri Gotic is an odd mix of nice boutiques, tourist traps, crappy souvenir shops, and restaurants of varying credibility. Get off Las Ramblas, whatever you do. The good stuff is in the little streets and squares beyond it. I was mildly disappointed by not finding any cool jewelry there, though. Totally different energy too, than NYC (thank goodness). People doing errands and going about their lives still seem to have time to window shop, gossip, hang out, and mosey around. None of that gotta get there right now! thing that I've developed either. So I'm trying to mosey again.

Anyway, it was a loooong walk home, what felt like miles and miles, but I hate to take a cab or the metro and I don't have a bus map yet. Got caught in an unforecasted rain shower, in a day that was colder than it was supposed to be, too, and ducked inside a neighborhood cafe full of locals: men loafing around between 2 & 4 in their business suits with cups of espresso and a paper (and a cigarette—something I do miss about NYC, those no smoking laws), students, housewives, where I had another cafe con leche (breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner. Mmmm, caffeine!). I was glad I did though, because it was definitely not a tourist joint (corner of c/ d'Ortigosa de Trafalgar right by the Arc de Triomf): little coffee bar, cigarette machine, video gambling machines, cracked vinyl upholstery in the booths. Cute.

So not doing that again though. Sticking closer to "home" tomorrow and going up to Sagrada Familia.

Barcelona, Day 1: Getting My Bearings

Definitely on Barcelona time now.  Went to bed at midnight, woke up at 9, puttered around until 10:30, praying for my luggage (no such luck). Decided it was time the face the world in the same clothes I had on yesterday and went forth to scrounge. Headed down to Las Ramblas just because it's a nice landmark to work from and "downtown" toward the harbor into the Barri Gotic. Only the tourists and the religious were out that early, I discovered. Barcelonans like their Sunday mornings either at church or in bed, apparently. These are definitely my kinda people. About two thirds of the shops were closed, and remained so, which was a refreshing change from the greed-induced hours New York keeps. It was nice to wander around in the relatively uncrowded back streets and soak up the atmosphere. I love the incongruities that living in a part of town that's been standing since the Middle Ages brings: tiny narrow streets of stone with a decidedly antique atmosphere punctuated by neighborhood convenience stores and the sounds of Spanish rap.

I'd forgotten how much I love Europe, and how very, very different it is from even the old parts of the States. You can smell how old it is, and not in a bad way: there's just a little mustiness overlaying everything, like a well-aged cheese. It's not dank and nasty but you know it's old. And it's hard for me not to think of how much this really must have stunk in the Middle Ages, with folks emptying their nightsoil out the windows into the gutters. Of course, I would think of that.  But it's hard to escape how old everything is, especially in that part of town. Anyway, I was so happy to be abroad again that I almost burst into tears in the middle of the street. Here's the pic of the day, of the Barri Gotic:

Barcelona is an eminently walkable city. I expected to get repeatedly lost in the warren of streets, but though I can't say I always knew where I was, it was easy to figure it out from a map eventually because there's a courtyard or plaza or landmark at regularly punctuated intervals. It's good to know my sense of direction and navigator's nose is still sharp too. Only once did I wind up going in a circle and that was only because the streets wouldn't cooperate and kept making me go left. And I still found my way around easily. Street signs are the hardest part of navigating around. They're not always easily visible, perched up around the second story of some building on the corner—unless it's been recently renovated with display windows, in which case, there might be an actual street sign on a pole instead. Maybe.

But the blocks are short, and I have a hunch I walked a lot farther than I'd thought I would today, with stops for window shopping, breakfast (the flakiest custard-filled croissant I've ever had and a cafe con leche), lunch (at a place called Navarro on Passeig de Gracia, which I think I might go back to when I'm in that area, to try the fish soup and/or pulpo) and general people watching. I kept running into stuff that was familiar from the guidebooks (Casa Batllo, Casa Mila, the Camper Store, certain streets), so I almost felt like I knew where I was going already. The people I've met so far have been lovely, and language has only been a minor problem when I stopped to buy postcards and couldn't get the correct change from the old man in his tiny used bookstore. My spidey sense was telling me he was trying to gull an extra two euros out of the tourista, but maybe I'm just a suspicious New Yorker. Didn't work, anyway, so we could both pretend it was just a mistake without leaving anybody feeling mean. It was an incredibly beautiful day: sunny, breezy, around 60, so I spent as much time outdoors as my dogs could take.

Stumbled into the Cathedral (not Sagrada Familia, which is a temple, not the city's Cathedral) but confined myself to the cloister as it was Sunday (didn't want to gawk and disrupt other people's time in church). This is definitely not an English cloister. It was much smaller than, say, Westminster's, more like a courtyard, actually, and filled with a fountain, orange trees, palms, and a flock of geese. The pond had koi, too. And there was the original medieval drinking fountain with running taps that people are still drinking from. Uh, except me. Not that adventurous. Anyway, nothing chilly about this cloister. It's almost Moorish, except that it's all Gothic fan vaulting. It's the vegetation that makes it feel Arabic. You're lucky if you got a scraggly tree (Salisbury) in the English cloisters. I wasn't looking that close, but there were gravestones from the 17th century too, and some kind of decorative flagstones with a boot, clearly very old, but without an inscription. I wonder if they mark a guildsman's grave or or a guild contribution or something. Took lots of pictures today, but not an obnoxious tourist amount. I don't really want to spend my vacation editing photos, so I'll upload one a day, and then have a link to a new batch on Flickr after I get home.

Came back for a nap about 3:30. Luggage arrived shortly after (big sigh of relief) after making a round trip to NYC. Just glad it wasn't me. Now I'm gonna go get me some Cuban food for dinner.