Barcelona, Spain
December, 2005

©2006 James A. Teitelbaum.  All rights reserved.
v1.3

When some music industry types offered me some work in Spain for December of 2005, of course I accepted.  I have been flat broke lately, but somehow I keep managing to find myself in another part of the world.  At this point in my career in music, any gig (such as this one) that I do may be the last, and I intend to savor the free travel (if nothing else) as long as I can. I requested that the people paying for my flight make the arrival and departure dates a few days before and after the work was to take place.  This didn’t cost them anything extra, so they didn’t mind.  All I had to do was pay for the extra nights in the hotel.  Also sharp to recognize an opportunity, the one and only International Rebecca decided to fly herself out, stay in my room, and participate in the day-off activities with me.  Better still. Since part of this trip was for work, I’ll spare the reader details about that stuff, and I also want to structure this as a series of observations or mini articles about Barcelona, rather than a day-by-day diary type of thing as I always have done in the past... simply because it interests and amuses me to do it in this way, this time. Note(1): a Euro is about $1.20. Note(2): I took a side trip / pilgrimage to the nearby towns of Pubol, Figueres, and Cadaques, to see the museums, homes, and stomping grounds of the genius Salvador Dali.  I am working on an article about this trip for publication elsewhere.  HERE IS THE LINK TO IT.  The traveloge you now read focuses purely on Barcelona proper. Note(3): This year (2005) marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of one of my favorite books, Don Quixote.  Madrid and nearby La Mancha would have been the place to celebrate this anniversary, but alas, there was no feasible way for me to make that 400-mile side trip. Note(4): G# And now...

Transportation
or: the first thing you have to know about is how to get around!

Boarded a plane at 6:00 PM on a Thursday, arrived at 2:30 PM on Friday.  Layover in London is notable for chaise lounges at the gates.  Naps are attempted and are futile.  Kids should not be allowed to travel without ball gags.  Arrival in Barcelona.  Customs were the laziest ever, they just waved everyone through the line, half asleep in their little glass booths.  Barely glanced at us as they stamped the passports without uttering a word. 

Bags arrived without mishap. Immediate culture shock: hope those Spanish lessons (what, Spanish lessons are we talking about?  The menu at the Taqueria?) sunk in.  Una mas cervesa, por favor.  The pedway over the road to the train station from the airport is not only closed, but it has been severed into two sections by some large industrial machine.  Free bus to the train station leaves us behind.  We already feel welcome here.  Another arrives.  Train station.  I peer over the shoulder of several people buying tickets at an automated kiosk.  Dirty looks are cast suspiciously over tensed rotator cuffs.  Way to ingratiate myself with the locals, ingrate.  The computer terminal is sussed.  Euros are inserted.  Tickets and change are spewed.  Train to the city leaves, another arrives.  Two transfers later, we’re at Plaça de Catalunya, Barcelona’s Times Square - minus all of the neon and advertising. 
Well, minus most of the neon and advertising. 

One of the many streets spreading out from the compass of the Plaça de Catalunya is La Rambla.  It is one of Barcelona’s main tourist sites, and the most direct route to the hotel.
More on Rambla and hotel later.

Barcelona has an astounding array of transportation options.  The locals use cars, bikes, scooters, and their feet.  Scooters are everywhere, lined up by the dozen outside of any major building or shopping district.  Cars are small and fuel efficient (are you listening, America?).  Some of the models we saw made Mini Coopers look like SUVs... and speaking of which, proper SUVs are a distinct rarity (are you listening America?).  And deisel-fueled economy cars?  You betcha.  Business men and housewives, students and octogenerians all drive these tiny little one-passenger cars.  Deisel fuel, no less.

People seem to park wherever the heck they want to.  There are signs posted, but the legal parking spots are insane.  People park their cars lined up in columns in the middle of the road, between opposing lanes of traffic.  Many blocks have the corners sheared off, giving the block an octagonal shape.  Cars fill up the empty triangle of space, lined up in a row, and then piled out behind the first row in a big steel triangle, making the block square again!  These people would definitely get towed within five minutes of their first Chicago parking experience.  I couldn’t wait to get behind the wheel of a car just so I could revel in the novelty of parking in some crazy anarchistic manner, and to have it be completely okay.

The Plaça de Catalunya, as stated, is a hub for trains and busses and hustle and bustle, but the major place to catch a ride is Sants station.  At Sants, you can get completely lost, or get where you’re going, depending on your acumen.  Fortunately, all twenty-seven(?) of Barcelona’s discreet and unrelated public transportation systems stop at Sants, so I suppose that if you get on the wrong line, at least you’ll end up where you started, eventually.  All roads lead to Sants.  You can get RENFE trains, Metro trains, SAFRA busses, SABA, MOAN busses, and Euro trains.  You can also get Avis cars, taxis, and probably hitchhike as well.  I think we tried them all at one point or another.

The fare machines communicate in at least five languages, dispense tickets for several of the aforementioned transport systems, and actually provide change (are you listening CTA?).  I calculated that the two-day pass (at 8.80 Euro) becomes a bargain if more than eight trips (at 1.15 Euro) are taken.  I discovered this fact on the last day of the trip.  Another discovery (the hard way): Metro trains stop running before midnight.  Considering that most of the restaurants don’t even open until 8:00 PM, and the bars don’t get going until at least midnight, don’t plan on taking Metro or bus transportation home after the legendary Barcelona night life.

On the other hand, the trains and busses all run on time, are easy to navigate, are clean, and go just about everywhere.  The station maps are easy to decipher, and the Metro trains run a maximum of eight minutes apart - usually less.  Electronic countdowns in the train stations - and even some of the bus stops - tell you how long it will be until the next train/bus arrives. 
Hey: this system works! 
It is so nice, when standing at a freezing bus station, to know when the next one is going to arrive.  The bus drivers will make change, and then give up a receipt!


Tourisimo
or: all the stuff the tourist guides will send you to, but run through the James filter

From the 15th century until 1860, the whole of Barcelona was contained behind a wall encompassing the pentagon-shaped part of town now known as the Gothic Quarter (or Barrio Gotic).  The only large street in the Gothic Quarter, and the one that ran right through the then-middle of the city, was La Rambla.

The Rambla is one of the main tourist attractions in Barcelona.  As my friend Sally Miller advised me: “walk it once right after you get to town, and then avoid it at all costs”.  Good advice.  Too bad the hotel was half a block from it.  The Rambla is basically a half-mile long road with a big pedestrian walkway down the middle of it.  The pedway is, in fact, so wide that the car and bus traffic is confined to one very tiny narrow lane in each direction.  The pedway is about four lanes wide.

Beginning at Plaça Catalunya (and ending at the big statue of Colom, near the sea), the street has five different sections, each with a descriptive name.  It is only a half-mile long, but is rich with history.  And tourists.  And shady people.  And street performers.  The sections are: La Rambla de Canaletes, named for the Font de les Canaletes fountain. Folk tales claim that those who drink from this fountain will return to Barcelona. Next is La Rambla dels Estudis, named for the mid-15th century building called Estudi General or Universitat.  This school was demolished in 1843, but the name remains.  La Rambla de les Flors was, in 19th-century Barcelona, the only place you could buy flowers in the whole city. La Rambla del Centre (aka La Rambla dels Caputxins), was the former home of Capuchin friars.  Last, near the sea, is La Rambla de Santa Mònica, named for the church that was once home to the Agustins Descalços (a Barefoot Augustinian order).

(three vastly different architectural styles juxtaposed in the Gothic Quarter)

The Colom monument that marks the end of the Rambla is your typical European monument. 
Think: statue of Liberty, but much smaller. 
And it’s a guy. 
And in Spain. 
And not on an island. 
And not donated by France. 
...but it is many stories tall, is covered with smaller sculptures of angels and knights, and can be climbed via an internal staircase.  For a fee, natch.  You’ll definitely see it at the end of the Rambla.

In addition to many shops, theaters, and hotels along both sides of the Rambla, there is all sorts of chaos going on in that wide strip of walkway down the center of the road.  People are wandering up and down the Rambla at all times of the day and night. 

The human statue is a really big attraction on the Rambla.  There are people who make a living doing themselves up in crazy costumes and then standing absolutely still for a really long time.  The only time they break character is to:
a) scare little kids, and
b) reprimand you for not tipping them if you take their picture.

Over the course of ten days, I saw the same people out there every damned day, doing nothing at all but collecting Euros for standing really still.  There was the ship’s captain, the golden Bogart, the Grim Reaper (see: scaring kids), and a few dozen others.  Some of their costumes are really elaborate, and in many cases their makeup is applied skillfully enough to really resemble aged bronze or iron.  Or gold, if you’re Bogart.  It only occurs to me now that the reason that there are so few other street performers on the Rambla - say jugglers, fire dancers, trained animals, mimes, magicians - is that it is always so crowded that there is no room to move.  So the art of standing still is how they all make their living.

I did note one human statue whistling “Carmen”. 
Two blocks later I noted and old man whistling “Carmen”. 
Coincidence - or conspiracy?

In addition to the street performers, the Rambla is also clogged with florists (see above re: flowers) and news stands.  The other type of vendor that pops up is plethora of little mobile pet stores.  I can’t figure out why very single pet store I saw in Barcelona was self-contained in collapsible kiosk on the Rambla.  There must be eight of ten of them in the half-mile stretch of road, and they’re all identical: a little corrugated metal bunker that unfolds each morning to become a pet shop in the middle of the street.  A crack appears down the center of the metal box, and like two wings unfolding, the inside expanding, inverting, to reveal itself and the menagerie within.  Why pet shops in such quantity, and in such proximity to each other?

I don’t know -  I figured out the possible reasoning behind the human statue infestation, you figure out the pet shops yourself.

They seem to specialize in birds, including a lot of really strange ones (what the hell is a gallina de Guinea? - that’s one seriously weird bird!) mixed in with things like chickens, and baby chicks, and pigeons.  Bunnies.  Gerbils.  Lots of budgies and finches, and plenty of very expensive tortoises too (250 Euro!).  The chicks are only 1 Euro (about a buck and a quarter), and the goldfish are .1 Euro (about 13 cents).  But Tortuges del Tierra (tortoises) fetch a princely sum. 

Saw a trio of street musicians.  One was playing a bass and the other two were using Nintendo GameBoys to make electronic noise in real time.  Godawful sound, but kind of an amusing concept.  For about a minute.  Also, one night, I saw a guy playing a berimbau.  Cool.

Aside from street performers, pet shops, florists, and news stands, there isn’t much along the center strip of the Rambla besides more tourists than you want to deal with - even if you’re one of them - and a big mosaic made by Joan Miro that you can only see if you arrive very, very early in the morning - because it is on the ground.

The larger buildings along the two sides of the street contain a variety of wonders.  We refrained from getting inked at Can Can tattoo, and also passed up the opportunity to take in a show at the Felinni.  Don’t let the name fool you - this strip club has nothing to do with the famous Italian film director.  We also skipped the Museum of Sex, and chose not to patronize any one of the few dozen shady guys selling single cans of Estrella beer after midnight. 
They are another mystery.  Standing there with single beers, bought at retail, and selling them individually, they can’t be making any money.
I theorized that they probably proposition you for drugs or hookers or something while you’re buying their beer... but I never found out.

We wanted to see an opera while in town, since the Liceu Opera House is virtually across the street from the hotel, but at over 100 Euros for a production that was of marginal interest, we opted out.  We also chose to skip the local production of “We Will Rock You”.  Indeed.

Also along the Rambla about halfway down, is the Boqueria.  This is a giant old market where vendors sell all manner of fresh foods from little stalls.  You can get fresh fruit and produce, mostly.  Lots of it.  But there is more variety than that - vendors sell all kinds of cheese, all kinds of nuts, all kids of chocolate, and all kinds of baby sheep’s heads with the skin flailed off and the eyeballs intact. 
Yum!
Flounders too.
And rolly polly fish heads.
The place is always crowded with people stocking up on fresh food, ignoring the grocery store just a few blocks down the street.  As we ran around the city exploring, it was quite nice to have some fruit and nuts and cheese (no sheep heads) on hand for snacks, as opposed to eating expensive and less entertaining lunches in randomly chosen restaurants.  We had a lot of impromptu picnics under the shadows of amazing buildings and on millenia-old stone benches in public parks.
We noticed that for some reason there is no bread here (in the Boqueria that is, not in the whole of Barcelona), and also that there are almost no pre-packaged foods at all.  Just stuff fresh from the farms and fisheries.

The cheese is very, very expensive.
The fruits and vegetables are very, very cheap, except for the cherries, which are very, very expensive.
This leads me to believe that things that begin with ‘ch’ cost more in Spain.
Note that chocolate is reasonably priced, but they spell it xocolat.
This proves my theory.

The letter 'x' in Catalonian is pronounced like 'ch'.
This is to keep costs down.

Expect to pay 7 Euro for a slice of crusty dried-out pizza along the Rambla at night.
Plan ahead.
Have snacks in your room.

As you get to the sea-end of the Rambla, by the Colom monument, there’s a larger cafe called La Cava (skippable).  Next door to it is a foreboding little door that leads up a few flights of stairs into an ancient apartment building.  On the 2nd floor (really the third floor - the level above the street level is considered the first) there is an art gallery advertising an homage to Salvador Dali.  See it.  This is definitely one for a guide to ‘wacky Europe’. 

There must be a hundred paintings in there, and most of them are of Dali, Don Quixote, and 1970s pin up girls, usually all in the same painting.  My ‘favorite’ is two ‘sexy’ female derrieres, a snail, and Dali’s face, all superimposed on a surrealists landscape.  Quimet Sabate Cassanova is the artist; I don’t whether or not he is the friendly old coot who ran around turning all the lights on when we walked into the darkened galleries.  Wanna see Dali as Christ on a movie screen partly covered by fishnet stocking-clad legs?  This is the place.  The old bass player from Night Watch is not here, but may as well be (that’s an in joke).   Cesc Sonera Lopez is showing work in this gallery too - more homage to Don Quixote.

Across the street (stoplights seem optional, be careful) is the water and a marina.  We discovered a flea market just closing up during the first Friday evening in town.  Rather than the tube socks and the other crap you see at most North American flea markets, this one seemed populated with largely interesting items of antiquity and oddity.  Would have been worth seeing it all, had we arrived earlier.  Old coins, pictures, postcards, half-century old books about Hollywood stars (printed in European nations), all with a European twist, of course.

Walking along the marina will take you to a peninsula called Barceloneta.  This is just another neighborhood of Barcelona, not entirely dissimilar to the nearby Gothic Quarter.  The street facing the water - Pg. Joan de Borbo - is where you’ll find a long strip of decent restaurants.

Also right near Barceloneta -  and actually forming one border of the Gothic Quarter - is the Parc de la Ciutadella.  This large, walled-in park is home to the zoo, the Museum of Modern Art (as opposed to the Museum of Contemporary Art, found elsewhere in the city, and discussed elsewhere in this document), and the Parliament building.  Funkadelic.  We walked through the gigantic, dark, and deserted park at night, and felt safe.  There were some beautiful gardens, and some lovely architecture... I think.  It was dark.  I plan to make seeing more of this large park, including the Museum of Modern Art, a priority next time I make it to Barcelona.

We walked out of the park at about 6:30 PM on New Year’s Eve after a late afternoon stroll, and were flabbergasted to find a marathon in progress along the Pg. Picasso, headed towards Barceloneta.  Hundreds of people were running by in the cold, dark, December evening.  One thinks of many appropriate times and places for a marathon to occur, but on New Year’s Eve after dark is not one of them.  And how surreal to stumble across, of all things, a foot race like this, so unexpectedly.  We emerged through the gate in the fifteen-foot tall stone wall surrounding that park, and were almost trampled by the unexpected stampede of runners, huffing down the street.  We had to engage in some precision timing and careful maneuvering to dart across the street between the (well-spaced) runners so as not to disturb any of them!
Keep reading for the sorry tale of what happened later on that New Year’s night!

Exiting the park on the end opposite Barceloneta, you’ll discover a long plaza called the Pg. L. Companys, which ends at the Arc del Triomf, a monument celebrating Spain’s victory in something or other.  Quite dramatic.

Not far from there, near the corner of the Pg. de Gracia and Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, is some sort of monument to Spanish literature.  Since I am illiterate in Spanish, it didn’t move me much, but I liked it in theory.

The last few paragraphs represent a nice walk around the perimeter of three sides of the pentangular Gothic Quarter.  Starting from the Colon statue, to Barceloneta, to the Parc de la Ciutadella, to the Arc del Triomf, to the literary monument, will take you around three of the five streets that border the Gothic Quarter.  Turning away from the Quarter, up the Pasig de Gracia from the literary monument, will take you past a few of the major Antoni Gaudi sites.  Gaudi was an architect of the Modernist school, discussed in detail below.

Hey kids!  Let’s have fun with language!
What we call lawn ornaments, the Spanish call ‘souvenirs’.
What we call ‘souvenirs’, the Spanish call ‘records’. 
What we call ‘records’ the Spanish call ‘discos’. 
What we call ‘discos’ the Spanish call... um, el night clubbimos. 
No, it’s ‘discotequa’. 

At the bustling and always busy Plaça de Catalunya, several large streets come together, and it is a hub for theaters, shopping, transportation, and more.  El Conte Ingles is here - a famous gigantic department store that Rebecca wanted to look at.  It is like Saks Fifth Avenue or Macy’s or something, and eight stories worth at that. 
The shoe selection was, apparently, disappointing. 
Or so I am told.
Gaudi-inspired tea cups and snack trays were acquired (not by me).
They were playing ‘Souvenir’ by OMD in the store.
Some of you will realize how weird this is.
Most of you won’t.

About an hour south of Barcelona is Port Aventura, a theme park.  The RENFE trains have a line that goes there.  It being off-season for amusement parks when we visited, admission was only 34 Euro.  Rebecca has never been to an amusement park in her life - and it’s been a good ten years since my last visit to one - so we went.  We picked the day after Christmas, when we figured that it would be dead - no lines for rides and things. 
Should you ever make the trip, ask very carefully about your tickets at the RENFE station.  We went to the ticket window, and were told that the train would be 20 Euro each, one-way.  The total of 80 Euros for round-trip was completely unacceptable for train fare, especially with the 34 Euro admission (each), at the park.  This sounded like way too much money, so we asked again at another window, and were given another answer, a completely different amount.  So Rebecca got some gummi bears (her go-to crisis solver) and then we asked a third employee how much the fare was.  This third person told us that there was a special going on: round trip train fare and park admission for only 38 Euro each.  Well - that’s only 4 Euro round trip for the train fare! 
So we went. 
Ask around, and make sure you get the special!
Or try gummi bears.
I am told that the best brand is Harribo.

The train tickets had a picture of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza on them. The train travels right alongthe shore of the Mediterranean sea for most of the way, and is pretty enough, but not at all spectacular.  Towards the end you get into an industrial corridor that goes on for many miles.  The train goes right through endless acres of liquid chemical storage tanks, refineries, and other puzzling industrial structures belching filth and chemistry into the sky.  Mile after desolate mile of filth and decay whiz past, until - there! - on a hilltop overlooking all of this, you can see a rollercoaster... Port Aventura is located on a small mountain, overlooking all of this loveliness! Off season at a theme park is interesting.  Shrill pop music blares forth from speakers with volume levels pre-set for the normal large and noisy crowds.  The sparse population made the music seem achingly loud. A guy in a Woody Woodpecker costume greets the kids; his statue by the train station is covered in graffiti.  Even given my aversion to crowds, and my constant determination to visit movies, bars, art galleries, and yes, amusement parks when they’re least crowded, seeing poor Woody with no kids asking for photos, standing all alone in the ghost town theme park was sort of depressing.  I got over it pretty quickly when we discovered that there was no lines, and no waiting for anything, all day.  Poor Rebecca is in for a rude awakening next time she goes to a theme park during the normal season. Port Aventura is divided into five sections: China, Polynesia, Wild West, Mexico, and Mediterranean.  In each section, the rides, the food, and the architecture are all themed after the appropriate part of the world.  Rebecca couldn’t stomach most of the rides, but seeing that there were no lines at all for most of them, I went on all of the coasters (she joined me on the final one, an old-skool wooden affair) and a few others.  It was pretty cold, and riding a roller coaster in an overcoat and scarf in 40 degree weather is something quite new.  Click here for a video clip of Rebecca  in the Chinese teacups (5 seconds)! We also caught a competent magic show in China (in fact, I thought it was too short, I was ready for more), and a show featuring live exotic birds in Mexico.  There was also a mind bogglingly horrible ice show in Polynesia.  The fact that the park chose to locate their seasonal ice skating spectacular in Polynesia - a place where (in real life) there is never any ice, ever - is weird enough.  The fact that it supplanted the normal hula/fire juggling show is even worse.  The topper was the unintentional surreality of the show.  Ed Wood would have been proud.  Imagine ice skating elves and fairies participating in some sort of incomprehensible story that also brought Chilli Willi and Woody Woodpecker out on skates.  They were later joined by the Coca-cola polar bear.  It was miserable.  The stage setup was a fairly-land thing with giant mushrooms everywhere.  The gigantic tikis from the usual hula show were still overlooking the fairlyland mushroom set, and were forced to endure the huniliation of being tarted up in oversized Santa hats.   One of the ice skater girls playing a fairy was so chubby that she couldn’t get up off the ground for her leaps and twirls. Failure to launch.  One of the fairy dudes kept licking the mushroom props.  Nice.

Architecture
or: buildings.  Lots and lots of buildings.

I have been told by many people that Prague is the city to see for amazing classical architecture.

Barcelona, however, is pretty spellbinding in it’s own right.  Walking down just about any street in any neighborhood will reveal a wealth of treasures in unexpected places.  Styles are mixed between half-millennia old Gothic structures, the Modernist works of Antoni Gaudi and his contemporaries, and the crazy sci-fi decor of the 1960s and 1970s (as documented in the book and web site Barcelona: City in Space).  The word ‘Modernist’, by the way, is a late 19th/early 20th century term, when used in this Spanish context.  Think of Art Nouveau mixed with mosaics made of broken tile fragments, add a philosophy of using nature as an inspiration for the designs, and you’re on the right track. 

One cannot visit Barcelona without paying special attention to the works of Gaudi, which have become synonymous with the look and feel of the city.  I had all of Christmas day free, and with few other options that day, International Rebecca and I decided to walk the city with Gaudi map in hand.  The weather was pleasant, if a little chilly (but far warmer than Chicago at this time of year), and it was nice to have a whole day set aside with nothing to do but gaze at buildings and get a real feel for the city.  With most people staying indoors to observe their Christmas celebrations, the streets were deserted, and it seemed as though we had the whole city to ourselves.  We must have walked fifteen miles that day, in a path that looked, very roughly, like a question mark laying on it’s side.

We saw all of the key residential sites designed by Gaudi, such as Casa Battlo, Casa Milla, Casa Vicenes, and of course, many, many other non-Gaudi buildings as we strolled around the dead city.

Most of the Gaudi buildings are in the part of the city called The Expansion, which was built beginning around 1890, when the walls around the Gothic Quarter came down, and the city became about ten times bigger than it was.  In particular, there is the menacingly named area called the Block of Dischord, which was not named for some bloody revolution or heated political scuffle, but for the fact that all of the buildings are designed in completely different styles.

The two must-see Gaudi sites are the Sagrada Familia and Parc Guell.

Sagrada Familia is an astonishing cathedral, which Gaudi began building in 1891, after taking over the project from another architect who had begun work in 1882.  Gaudi’s ambitious design was not yet completed at the time of  his death in 1926 -  and it still isn’t, although construction continues daily. 
Just a few more decades...
Looking at the structure from the outside, one can observe that one face of the building is in a Modernist style, and the other is in a neo-Gothic idiom, so the two main styles for which Barcelona is most well-known are represented.  Even on Christmas, this place was packed with tourists, and I can’t imagine getting anywhere near it on a normal day. 

Although fascinating, and a must-see, I have a strong caveat: do NOT pay to get in! 

Everything worth seeing can be seen from the sidewalk through the iron gates.  Paying admission will get you a little closer to the building, but is it really worth 10 Euros to be thirty feet closer to it?  Not really.  You also get to go inside if you pay, but guess what - there’s nothing to see inside! 

They haven’t even begun to do anything with the interior yet, so all you will see is scaffolding and tools.  That, and a few vending machines for Jesus.  There is a small museum in the basement with photos, blueprints, and models of the Sagrada Familia, but this exhibit is not even nearly worth the cost of admission.

Definitely walk to the Sagrada Familia.
Definitely spend fifteen or twenty minutes on each side admiring the intensity of the building’s features and details.
Definitely take some pictures.

But only pay if you want to: see scaffolding inside, see a yawner of a museum inside, and be marginally closer for your outside photos.

There is one other thing you can do inside: take the staircase to the top of one of the bell towers and see what is supposedly a spectacular view of the city.  What they do not tell you outside, as you are paying, is that you have to pay again to climb the staircase.  So lame.  Don’t do it.

I’d like to take this opportunity to note that it just happened to be Christmas day when we walked to the Sagrada Familia, and it occurred to me a few days later that this was the first time I have ever been anywhere near a church on Christmas in my life.

Parc Guell (Park Jewel) is on another mountain, across the city from Montujic (see museums, below).  Gaudi originally designed this mountain-top park as a retreat for the wealthy, but they ran out of money (so much for being wealthy) and the land eventually became public park. Power to the people!  It’s a World Heritage site too.

The paths winding through a coniferous forest, snaking in and around the hills, make this a relaxing place to visit.  Occasional terraces, balconies, and plazas throughout the hills are clearly Gaudi’s work, and provide places to rest and to take in the very best example of Gaudi’s philosophies about combining architecture with nature.  The entrance to the park has the largest concentration of Gaudi’s architecture in one place, with a few buildings all clustered together.  It is also the site of his famous lizard sculpture, which has become a symbol of sorts for the city of Barcelona itself.  You will not, at any time of day, be able to get a photo of the lizard without lots of other people in it.  Deal with it.

From any of the several great vantage points within Parc Guell, the whole of Barcelona is spread out before you, and it is quite amazing to see landmarks like Sagrada Familia and Encants Vells (a contemporary building which can be described no other way but as a gigantic chrome dildo) from this perspective.

Note that you will have to hike up some extremely steep hills to get to Parc Guell.  These are hills  that put San Francisco to shame.  They are so steep in fact, that the city has installed escalators outdoors, built right onto the side of the mountain.  Find them and use them.  We found out about them after the fact.  D’oh!  Hiking up the hill, not yet into the park, we found a little bakery called Panadarea le Estrella, where we got some delicious hot fresh baguettes for only .45 Euro each (fifty-some cents).

Onward...
The Gothic Quarter is a section of town that is amazing in and of itself.  Built many centuries before anyone ever imagined the idea of a car, or of traffic, or of speeding tickets, it is a warren of tiny, dark, narrow streets.  The roads wind around in a seemingly random and chaotic mess. 
You will get lost. 
You will not mind. 
Few of the buildings along these stone streets are taller than four stories (no elevators back in 1609 either).  One can spend many, many days and nights wandering the maze of little streets, which are dusky at all times of day, due to the sunlight being largely blocked by the close proximity of the big stone buildings to one another.  There is an endless array of tiny cafes, restaurants, bars, clubs, museums, shops, architecture, and history to discover.

In some ways, the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona is like the French Quarter of New Orleans.  Lots of little streets that wind around, not going anywhere in particular, all very old, lots of nice architecture, fairly dangerous, you may never see the same place twice.  If you don’t take advantage of seeing something when you see it, you may never find your way back to it.  They also both draw in the tourists.  And they both have ‘quarter’ in the name.  Gothic Quarter’s streets are even smaller and darker and more interesting than French Quarter’s. 
Rambla = Bourbon St.

Some more things of interest in the Gothic Quarter are the Basilica de Sana Maria de la Mar (above picture).  This is a gigantic and amazing cathedral that you’ll find halfway between the Rambla and the Picasso museum.  Unlike the Sagrada Familia, this one is definitely worth a walk through, and it is free. There are also some Roman ruins near there, and even bits of buildings that have survived since Roman times, often being incorporated into more (relatively) modern buildings.

Halfway between Gothic Quarter and Montujic is the Mercat de Saint Antoni (pic below and to the right of the next paragraph).  This is a gorgeous building with a bustling market inside.  Unfortunately, all you can buy in there is baby clothes and socks, or so it seemed.  Walk by.

A word about street addresses in Barcelona.    
They seem to be completely random.
They are not...-ish.
They (might) definitely work like this:
Each building has a number consecutive to the one before it (1, 2, 3, 4... 805, 806, 807, etc.).  If one side of the street has larger buildings or fewer buildings than the other side, the street numbers can get out of sync between the two sides of the street pretty quickly.  For example, you may be in the 600 block on one side of the street and the 800 block on the other. 
You have been warned.

Looking at a map of Barcelona, we see a jumbled and random maze of streets in the Gothic Quarter near the Mediterranean, and similar messes in the parks of Montujic and on the mountain housing Parc Guell.  Right in the middle of the triangle formed by these three areas, is the trapezoidal flat area in which the Expansion was built.  Here, and only here, the streets are a perfect grid.  Leave this zone, and they immediately go back to utter chaos.

No matter which of these parts of town you are in, there are almost no street signs telling you what street you are on.  Every once in a while you can locate a metal plaque bolted to the side of a building announcing the name of the street, but these things are scarce, and if you are driving, you absolutely cannot see them from the road.  If you are on foot, and are standing right next to the building they are probably not bolted to, you still cannot see them, when and if they (improbably) exist.  This is because they are small, and are the same color as the building, and are in a lovely shade of cast iron, so the words are the same color as the background.  They are camoflaged, so that you will have no idea what street you are on. 
Ever.
Except for the Rambla.
Maybe.

You can, however, look down at your feet and see the brilliant Gaudi-designed hexagonal tiles all over the sidewalks, that are miraculously stolen rather seldomly.  Either that, or they are replaced both frequently and quickly.

Walking around Barcelona, you see buildings that are four, five, or six centuries - or more - old, and look like they’re brand new.  That’s some civic pride and attention to history that is sorely missing in North America. 
When something breaks down in Barcelona, they say: this is a beautiful structure, let’s fix it up. 
Here, we say: let’s rip this old thing down and put up some shitty new condo units!  Europe has pride in their history.  It isn’t about the cost, so much as it is about the quality of living. 
Will we ever understand that here?


Museums
or: click here if you can't hack my opinions on modern art

If you like art, this is the town for you.

We took a side trip to Cadaques, Figueres, and Pubol to see the major sites related to the life of Salvador Dali; that trip has been recounted in detail for a magazine article (I’ll link to it when it is published).  But you don’t need to leave Barcelona to have your mind melted, art-wise.  This town is chock full of museums.  There are plenty of galleries too, but I didn’t have time to dig in to that area of things: knowing which galleries show good stuff, and timing your visits to decent exhibitions requires a bit more knowledge of a given city than I had of Barcelona prior to this visit.  So it’s museums for now. Within the Gothic Quarter is the Picasso museum.  Frankly, I have always felt that ol’ Pablo was over-rated.  I acknowledge his influence on those that came after him, but I find that it is often clearly a case of the student(s) surpassing the master.  Still, I was a little curious to see his museum, simply because I thought that deep immersion in his work might change my mind. Nope. Still can’t hang with Picasso. The museum building itself is very interesting, however.  It is made up of five adjacent Gothic mansions on what was once a residential block.  They’ve been seamlessly connected to each other to create one very large labyrinth of rooms - perfect for a museum.  Keep in mind that the streets of the Gothic quarter are dark and narrow, and that some of these mansions (think of oversized townhouses) are centuries old.  The place doesn’t look, from the outside, at all like what we think about when we think of a museum.  In fact, you could walk right by it and not realize what was inside. What is inside is an overview of Picasso’s career.  As is the case with the Dali museum(s), don’t expect to come here and see all of Pablo’s most famous works.  They were all sold during his lifetime, and hang in museums and private collections around the world.  Instead, look for a sampling of works that give the viewer a perception of who Pablo Picasso was as a person and as an artist.  There are a few famous, major works here, but they are vastly outnumbered by minor works, and ephemera like designs he did for books, prints, and etchings.  There is also an annoyingly huge preponderance of work from his earliest period; it feels as though there are thousands of works from his art school days preserved here.  Room after room of young Pablo.  Those interested in the early development of the artist will find this fascinating, but I thought that having so many of these formative paintings all on display only served to diminish the impact of the later, better works.  Someone who is not familiar with Picasso’s history will walk away from this museum thinking that Picasso’s art school experiments were the bulk of his lifetime output. There was a really cool echo in the lobby. Once a cellar and made of brick domes separated via arched passageways, the lobby was my fave part of the building! And it sounds cool in there too. The security guards in the Picasso museum are awful.  There are at least one, if not two, guards in every single room (plus security cameras) at all times, and they watch you like hawks, unceasingly scrutinizing every move you make.  This makes the experience of visiting the museum quite an uncomfortable one.  They even ‘more than suggest’ the order in which you see the rooms, and sort of herd you through the place.  It was not a relaxing afternoon.

A bit to the south of the Gothic Quarter is a small mountain that has been turned into a big park, called Montujic.  The parkland was originally designed for the Universal Exhibition of 1929, and decades later it was the site of some of the Barcelona Olympics.  Winding roads (or a Metro funicular) lead uphill through lush forest, bringing the visitor to a variety of cultural sites.  The Olympic stadium is here, as well as botanical gardens, and a castle.  There are also several museums up in the hills, such as the ethnological museum, the archeological museum, and the Foundation Miro.  The Foundation Miro is mid-century modern building dedicated on one side to Joan Miro, and to a rotating series of exhibits on the other. 

Although a fan of Miro’s work, I sometimes cringe at what popular acceptance of his work has done to the art of the past sixty years. 

In a Chicago gallery recently, I saw someone who had drawn on a small piece of paper, badly, in crayon, in an imitation of what a child might draw.  This piece of shit was intended as some sort of meditation on, errr, something or other, something that isn’t really worth pondering.  It had no business hanging anywhere other than on the artist’s mother’s refrigerator.

How does this relate to Joan Miro?
I always thought there was a whimsical and childlike thread through all of is work.  His use of simple shapes, primary colors, and one dimensional designs are very much coming from a part of the artist that is still a child.  In Miro’s case it works.  In Miro’s case, he was working in a time when his ideas were fresh.  In Miro’s case his innate talent transcended the deceptively simplistic outward nature of the work, revealing something of substance underneath.  That's the point.

But post-Miro, one can find thousands of examples of people using his economy of form and his references to the artistic methods of children as an excuse to - ironically - justify a lack of artistic maturity.  I’ve spent the past few decades in galleries and museums looking at second, third, fourth (etc.) rate art that has only been given permission to exist because the artist can hoodwink the viewer into thinking that there is legitimacy in the art by pointing (directly or indirectly) back to Miro.

We can also look to Miro (and some of his contemporaries such as the sculptor Calder, Giacomo Balla, and Piet Mondrian of course) as being a primary influence on middle 20th century industrial design, textiles, graphic design, etc.  The entire look of the 1950s owes a debt to Joan Miro.  However, that time is past, and people outside of mainstream cuture, eople in the so-called fine art world are still legitimizing crayon drawings by calling on the spirit of Miro.  These contemporary imitators have inspired nothing but themselves. 
Someone put them out of my misery.

On a completely different note, I must note that a notable exhibit on the lower level is a series of video projections by Laurence Pernot.  I don’t normally like video art  - Bill Viola is worthless (more on that later) - but this stuff was pretty good.  Understated, and ahead of the (usually lackluster) pack.

A security guard came up to me and told me that I couldn’t have my backpack slung over my shoulder, but that I could carry it in front of me.  It is little.  What is up with these Spanish museums? 

(a sculpture in the Miro Foundation, with the entire city in the background, and Parc Guell on the mountain at the horzon)

In the half of the museum dedicated to rotating exhibitions, there was a very good installation called Masters of Collage: Picasso to Rauschenberg.  This overview illustrated the history of collage, and the use of mixed media in art.  Heavy emphasis was placed on Miro (who was represented with three pieces in the exhibition) and his contemporaries, which suited me just fine. 

The exhibition catalogue was 32.50 Euro, and was worth it, being a large and substantial book.  I didn’t have enough Euros in cash on me, so I thought I might order it on-line when I got home.  The internet has proved fallible however: I haven’t been able to find the book so far.  If any of the resourceful among you want to buy me a birthday present, the ISBN is 84-934730-0-6, and the title is: “Masters of Collage - Picasso to Rauschenberg”.

The exhibit began with a room full of Picasso and his (superior) contemporary Georges Braque, who was represented with some nice works.  The dada and futurist rooms followed, with some great stuff from Hans Arp, some fairly nice work by Hanna Hoch and Carlo Cara, and some less interesting works from Kurt Schwitters.  I liked the Russian stuff that followed, by Laszlo Nagy, Lissitzki, Alexandre Rodchenko, Nikolai Sidelnikov, and Solomon Telingater. I wasn’t quite as thrilled with the Gildewart.  The mighty surrealists followed the Russians, with outstanding contributions by Breton, Tanguy, Lambda, Miro, and not unpleasing works from Julio Gonzalez.  The master of cut-and-paste, Max Ernst, was well represented (natch) with a single painting and a slew of cut-ups.  Joseph Cornell (who is so well known for his box sculptures - visitors to the Chicago Art Institute can see a few dozen of ‘em) contributed no less than nine Ernst-ish collages, all from the 1930s.  Not quite what we’re used to seeing from Cornell, and superior to some of his boxes, even if derivative of Ernst.  Man Ray - always the prankster - and Georges Hugnet wrap up the surrealists section with some lighter pieces.

Twentieth century art definitely turned a corner in the 1950s.  After the brilliance and innovations of the cubists, futurists, dadasts, surrealists, not to mention some of the other-ists of the time, things really got awful.  As this exhibit moved into that pivotal post-war era, it showed two works by Antoni Tapies, one pretty good and one awful.  And then: Joseph Buyes.  Can’t dig it.  From the same period, we have people like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenburg who were - and still are - so widely praised, and who are just hacks in my estimation.  Franz Kline isn’t quite as bad, but then we get to Robert Motherwell, and it’s more of the same shit.  Everything these guys did was based on the hard work of the people working during the fifty to eighty years before their time, but they didn’t choose to contribute anything new.  Their work feels like a second rate rehash of what came before them, and is almost always missing the spark of brilliance that comes through in their predecessor's work.

The abstract expressionism, pop art, and conceptualist works that dominated the next few decades are no better.  There’s a Jackson Pollack here that is worthless, and interestingly, some more Joseph Cornell from the 1970s and early 1980s, that illustrate one thing: he never had an original idea.  But I won’t go any farther with this, because my views on contemporary art could fill volumes.  Back to the lovely Montujic...

Right next to the Miro Foundation is a beautiful garden with many different kinds of plants and trees, stone paths, benches, ponds, fountains, and a nice view of the city below.  We had a pleasant picnic here, but had to eat the oranges we brought with us - I couldn’t reach the ones growing in the trees right there in the park.  I guess the people visiting before us got the low-hanging ones.  The oranges higher on the tree will grow larger because they get better sunlight, and are also less likely to get picked. 
Survival of the fittest. 
Or luckiest.

The centerpiece of the Montujic park is the Museu National d’Art Catalunya (MNAC), or Catalonian National Museum of Art.  As the name may imply, this museum is devoted entirely to the artists of Catalonia, or northeastern Spain.

This is a giant and very beautiful building, set into the hillside of Montujic in such a way that people in many parts of Barcelona can see it from all over the city.  The building was built in 1929 as part of the Universal Exposition, and became the museum in 1934.  Created in a classical style, the building could pass for one much older.  No expense was spared in making this ornate palace of art into an architectural masterpiece.

As you approach it along the Av. Reina Maria Cristina (from the Plaça Espanya), there are a series of terraces and majestic stone staircases making their way up the mountain.  Each level brings new stonework, new gardens, and new views of the city to enjoy.  For those not hearty enough to make the climb - even at the leisurely pace that enjoying the surroundings might dictate - escalators have been installed for part of the trip.  Fountains and waterfalls flow between the terraces, making their way to a main fountain far below.  Once you have climbed to the top of it all, turn around before entering the museum, and you will be rewarded with an amazing view of Barcelona.

The fountains and waterfalls cascading down the various levels, and particularly the main fountain at the bottom, are known as the Magic Fountains.  At night, the fountains are lit with colorful lights, and music plays as the fountains cycle through a half-hour presentation of water sculptures.  It was all designed by engineer Carles Buïgas, who pioneered the concept of kinetic water sculptures in the context of fountains.

Inside the museum, you’ll find that it is divided up into roughly four sections, two sections on each of two levels.

On the first floor, left side, is a ton of Roman-period art.  Many, many tons, in fact.  This entire wing of the museum consists of frescoes painted on the interiors of Roman-era churches.  As the crumbling churches were being demolished, large sections of the walls were rescued and installed in this museum.  In many cases, only a fragment of the wall was intact, so a new wall was created, with the existing fragment incorporated into the new wall in the appropriate position.  In most cases, the new wall sections were not painted, so that the original millennia-old art could be observed without any potential new material obstructing the experience.  There are a few exceptions where - in order to give the full effect - the missing portions have been recreated by contemporary craftsmen.  Little models of all of the buildings showing how the pieces on display fit into the original architecture are a cool addition.

This section of the museum got old for me after a while - no pun intended.  I fully support the museum’s efforts to rescue as much of this historical material as possible, but from the point of view of an observer, half of the quantity on display was twice what I needed to see.  But I wouldn’t remove any of it either - it needs to be preserved!  And let’s give props to the asses that carried these fragments down from mountaintop monasteries.  Those were some extra hard working pack animals.

Opposite the Roman period rooms are a wing devoted to Gothic art (late 13th century through the 14th), which is almost 100% religious in subject matter.  If you like gold leaf and/or Jesus, this is the place for you.  Gallery after gallery after gallery of Christ.... and gold leaf.  The one thing here that did capture my sense of morbid fascination were a whole bunch of large wooden panels that once hung in various churches, and that told the stories of various saints.  Some were painted by Bernat Martorell, a few attributted to Goncal, more by Cerra and Mestre Desixena, and many are unattributed.  Each of them were presented in an almost proto-comic book form, with eight or a dozen smaller images on each panel, telling a story when viewed in order.  And like so many comic books, these things were violent as hell.  Literally.  The poor victims depicted in these little kiddie tales were routinely tortured, maimed, humiliated, and generally made to look rather unhappy in every conceivable manner.  This art is full of demons and stonings and corpses and skeletons and blood and burnings-at-the-stake.  No wonder people in the 15th century were so religious.  They’d be deathly afraid to doubt. 
Rule by fear, in the name of Christ. 
Thanks, church! 
Writers of comics and horror films looking for fresh ideas on how to inflict misery need look no farther than this museum - there are plenty of ideas here which have not yet been fully exploited since being depicted by Martorell et al,  some five hundred years ago.

This wing then moves into Baroque art, which also doesn’t really move me much - too frou-frou, with tacky ornamentation on everything. 

And the portraits: I don’t know what it was with the 15th century, but everybody on Earth was ugly as hell. 

While looking at Claudio Coello’s 1683 portrait of king Carles II, I noticed that king Carles II was one seriously ugly dude.  Now you don’t have to be good looking to be the king or anything, but I soon realized that the reason that this guy looked so deformed is because, like all classical royalty, he was probably inbred.

This lead me to think about some of our current leaders, two generations worth (and counting) of a family from Texas who would probably enjoy running the USA as a monarchy instead of the corporate-feudal state, err... I mean, ‘democracy’, that they are currently presiding over. 
It occurs to me that inbreeding does not only produce an ugly countenance, but more importantly, it produces stupidity.

Could George Sr. and Jr. be not only father and son, but brothers?

I’m just sayin’...

And...
In 1616 Llouis Gaudin painted Sant Pere Matir Deverona.
Upon first glance, you notice a religious character posing seated, a book on his lap, and a sheaf of wheat in his hand.  Three symbolic crowns are floating in the air around the wheat.
Only on second glance do we see the curious addition of a sword through his heart and a machete through his skull.

He’s sitting there as though he doesn’t notice the sword through his heart and the machete through his skull.

Hey bro, you’ve got a sword through your heart and a machete through your skull.

Put down the wheat, stop bleeding on the bloody book, and go get a band aid or something.
“It’s a flesh wound!”.

Bush is probably responsible.

(You can't take pictures in the museum, but I haven't showed you

a picture in a while, so here's another shot of the Sagrada Familia)

Things progress upstairs, with the continuation of Renaissance and Baroque art, and then into the modern era (which in this context begins in the 18th century), and also includes a small photography exhibition.

I witnessed works that I very much liked by Maria Fortuny, who was considered the most important Spanish painter of the 19th century (died at age 36).  His gigantic masterwork, The Battle of Tetuan hangs in this museum.  It must be forty feet wide and twelve feet tall.  I actually preferred some of his smaller works, such as Las Cicaria and The Stamp Collector.

Some Modernist painters I discovered include: Joan Brull, Alexandre de Riquer, Francese Masriera, Roma Ribera, and Joan Busquets.  They were followed by a school based on ‘anecdotal modality’, which I found to be excellently executed, but hardly groundbreaking.  Overall I give them the thumbs up: Joan Ferrer Miro (that’s a different Joan Miro!), and Ramon Casas (who was said to be the last outstanding Modernist painter).

Modernism also extended to industrial design.  Joan Busquets created a beautiful church, Louis Masriera and Manolo Hugue did some nice jewelry.  Gaspar Homar was considered one of the two most important Modernist painters.  I didn’t care for his paintings, but he did some wonderful mosaics, some nice light fixtures, and some amazing furniture designs.  Homar was a talented guy, as long as you kept him away from the paint brush.

Antoni Tapies was a surrealist working in the 1950s.  The painting here reminded me of Georgio de Chirico’s work, but darker.  By 1968 Tapies had stopped following the great de Chirico and started aping the hack Mark Rothko, by creating complete shit in a abstract impressionist style: a big black square on a slightly lighter black square.  Note that my above comments on the Tapies works at the Miro Foundation are almost identical: I liked the earlier work on display there and hated the later one.

Juli Gonzales did a lot of sculptures, some in a traditionalist style and some in a modern, possibly Cubist style.  Is Cubist sculpture even possible?  She also did some jewelry and some painting.  None of it was spectacular, but the scope of the work was noteworthy.  The one that leapt out at me most turned out to be - upon later inspection - an abstract sculpt of Don Quixote.  It drew me towards it, and I knew it was my favorite, and only after getting close did I realize the coincidence of it also being a favorite subject matter.

Nowhere near Montujic is the MAC BA - Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, or Contemporary Art Museum of Barcelona.  Although I love so much of what is classified as modern art (approximately 1890s to early 1960s), I despise most of what is called contemporary art (Warhol to present).  So, as expected, this stark modern (as opposed to Modernist) building is full of very little worth seeing. 
So says me.

This museum starts of with some promise, as the first things you see are works by Matta and Calder.  It then disintegrates rapidly.

To wit:
My new least favorite artist is: Ignasa Aballi, who spews out worthless video projections.  This “genius” is also exhibiting an empty book case, and the title of the work is Books.  Give me a fucking break.  Who over the age of nine is going to find that clever or thought provoking?  Post modern my ass.  Wait, it gets worse: one wall of the otherwise pristine white gallery is all scuffed up with foot and hand prints, as though people had been shuffling past the wall for a few months.  This dirty section of wall is called People.  Ingoramus Appalling, that’s my name for this guy.  He needs to be Ignobly Abolished.

Robert Whitman also works - with no recognizable talent, effort, or justification - in projection.  His futile contribution includes a projector displaying a horizontal beam of light, about 12 feet long and less than 1 inch tall, on the wall of a darkened room.  The line slowly moves around the room, imperceptibly, over the course of hours.  This is like some sort of post-Bill Viola thing, and frankly, we didn’t need more of Viola either... or of whomever it was that inspired Viola for that matter.  Whitman has lots of other “clever” ideas like putting a sink and a mirror on the wall, and projecting movies of a woman putting on her makeup onto the wall opposite the mirror.  And a shopping bag on the floor in the corner of the gallery, with a piece of glass over the top, and a projector inside the bag casting pictures of food onto the glass.  Very clever - for a junior high school art student. 
Which this guy isn’t. 
Hack.

The Jo Spence exhibition would have functioned better as a book.  Very few examples of her actual art works (if I may use the term) are present here, and instead we have photos and memorabilia from throughout her life, and a lot of information about her accomplishments.  An impressive collection of artifacts, but they’d have been better off used in a biography or in a documentary film than in a gallery.

Finally, I’ll rant a bit on the Guther Brus display.  Action art is great in concept, but at the end of the day, the final works are not at all interesting to anyone but the artist, especially when seen without documentation.  The action of creating the art is far more important than the final product, and I therefore question the validity or usefulness of action art in the context of a museum.  Fortunately, this lengthy exhibit featured more photos of the art being created than it did finished works.  Does this prove my point?  Maybe.  The many photos on display made Gunter’s 1960s experiments with models wearing nothing but paint - spending their afternoons rolling around on Gunter’s blank canvases - somewhat more appealing. 

From my childhood, I vaguely remember an episode of the ultra-campy 1960s Batman television series, in which action art was parodied.  The results seen on that kiddie show were - and remain - every bit as legitimate as Bras’ best work.  Which is to say: not very legitimate at all.  The photos and accompanying text were thorough and informative.  Thusly informed, educated, enlightened, and with a full understanding of what he was trying to achieve, I say: it beats the shit out of Aballi or Whitman but it is still worthless.

It was only after visiting the Picasso, Miro, National, and Contemporary museums that I discovered the BCN Articket.  This lets you visit seven museums for 20 Euro.  This is a HUGE savings (most are 8 to 10 Euro each), and I highly recommend it.  In addition to the four museums I mentioned, you also get to see the Antoni Tapies Foundation (skip the second half, heh, heh), the Foundacio Caixa Catalunya, and the CCCB.  I’m not sure what those last two are, but you can find out at: www.articketbcn.org.


Food
or: food.

The first thing you have to learn about Barcelona is that none of the restaurants open for dinner until at least 8:00 PM.  So you’re going to have to learn to wait if you like to eat earlier.

For the most part, we stocked up on fruit, nuts, cheese, and bread at the Boqueria and at various bakeries, and snacked all day long while exploring.  Then we usually had a nice dinner in a restaurant.  This saved quite a lot of money, since dining in Barcelona is not a cheap proposition.  It also meant more time for seeing things, and less time spent waiting for meals to arrive.

We had some great meals, and we had some crappy ones.

Prepare to alternately aquire and lose your appetite several times while perusing the bills of fare on the next few pages...

Snack del’Arc
Barcelona is absolutely festooned with tiny cafes, and they universally consist of a bar in front, and a half dozen tables in the back.  The bar will seat between six and a dozen people, and serves beverages and tapas.  There are at least one of these cafes on every single block in the city.  You can always get a tea for 1 Euro, and almost all of them seem to charge the same 1.15 Euro for an espresso. The atmosphere and quality of the food varies widely among these places, but if you need a quick dose of caffeine, a snack, a beer, or just to rest for a bit, you’re never more than a two minute walk from a cafe.  Proper restaurants are available too, but they are actually seldom much bigger than the cafes.
The first of dozens of these little cafes that we encountered was Snack del’Arc. It was here that were learned that knowing how to say “to go” in Spanish is a useful thing to do before arriving in Spain.  I could do without the Boy George music they were playing.
On the other end of the spectrum is Bar Cerveseria Pepe, which is identical in every way, except for that it is a dump.  Cafe Victoria is another one, a perfectly adequate cafe in the typical Barcelona style: a bar for beverages and tapas in front, a half dozen tables in back.  This one is on one of the city’s biggest streets: Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes.

Gelato
The local ice cream is displayed in glass-fronted freezer cases, and is usually elaborately decorated.  The rum-raisin gelatto had raisins sprinkled on top, and a little bottle of Bacardi stuck in it!  The strawberry gelatto had strawberries on top, the pecan had pecans, the snozzberry had snozzberries... you get the idea.  Awesome ice creamish stuff, but a bit softer than ice cream, but not as soft as custard.  Always tasted fresh and natural.
At Gelats Dino on the Rambla, the cone has white chocolate embedded inside, like a wafer-thin sandwich of cone-chocolate-cone.  We had strawberry gelatto, with fresh strawberries.  Great for a mobile dessert on the Rambla, for 2 Euro.  Gofres Gelato has similarly tasty treats, but without the choco-cone.

Cafeteria Snack Bar Cervecareia Universitat
This is a crappy little cafe in the plaza across the street from the giant University building on the street Gran Via de les Catalanes.  The paella seemed to have been thawed from a pre-frozen portion in a microwave oven.  It was very salty and sort of vile.  Paella (pronounced pie-AY-ah) is basically spicy rice mixed up in an iron skillet with whatever sort of meat or vegetables you want.  Not unlike jambalaya.  Barcelona is famous for it, but don’t get it at this joint.  Someone dropped a glass on the floor when we were there, and no one cleaned the broken glass up.  The owner traipsed through it about five times, kicking glass chunks all over the place, completely indifferent to it.

Cafe Opera
This famous place is on the Rambla, across the street from the opera house.  The exterior has a vaguely modernist (aka Art Nouveau) look.  Inside is a well-preserved original turn of the (previous) century decor, but it isn’t a particularly special or spectacular example of that idiom.  Like all restaurants or cafes in Barcelona, there are only a dozen tables or so.  Pleasant place for breakfast, but a bit pricey. 
It was here that we first encountered the Zummo.
Zummo is not the sixth Marx brother (the other five were Zeppo, Gummo, Harpo, Chico, and, er, the other one), but an automatic juice machine.  The Zummo rules.  This thing is the ultimate Rube Goldberg device come to life.  You fill a wire basket at the top with oranges, and they drop through a hole, roll down a ramp, and land inside a plastic box.  A big blade comes down and cleanly slices the orange into two halves, and somehow the orange halves always fall face-down on the dual mechano-squeezers, where the juice is extracted.  The juice trickles into a pitcher, and the orange halves fall into a trash bin. 
Somehow none of the following was ever observed: oranges getting clogged falling through the hole, oranges not rolling down the ramp, the blade being too dull for a good cut, the orange halves falling upside-down, the halves missing the trash, the pitcher overflowing, or any other mishaps. 
Zummo rules.
Fresh juice always... at 4.50 Euros (over five dollars) per glass.
You can buy a whole bag of oranges for that at the market across the street - but they’re not Zummofied. 
You have to pay for proper Zummofication.
Food at Cafe Opera consists of omelettes, salads, and churros con xocolat (fried pastries served with a tea cup of something thicker than hot chocolate, but thinner than hot fudge, for dunking).
This is as good a place as any to mention that whenever you get a basket of bread on your table in Barcelona, it is prepared thusly: a sliced baguette, with salted butter pre-applied, and then a layer of tomato spread on top.  They use the jelly-like inner mushy stuff of the tomato, not the more solid outer parts, and spread a thin layer of it on top of the salted butter layer.  ALL of the restaurants in Barcelona serve this kind of bread.  It is good!

Souper Soup
In the Gothic Quarter, between the Plaça St. Jaume and the Picasso museum.  They specialize in (you guessed it) but a stand set up right on the sidewalk, half inside and half outside of the open front of the building, is the spot to grab a quick smoothie made of fresh fruit on the spot.  A banana - kiwi - melon smoothie will set you back 4 Euro.

Mickey’s Tapas
On the Rambla, Mickey’s offers serviceable tapas and other Catalonian dishes, but it is pretty overpriced, particularly given the quality of the food.  It is clean, the service is neither good nor bad, the atmosphere is nondescript, and in general, it doesn’t suck.  But there is also absolutely no reason to recommend it.  For the level of quality they offer, it is too expensive.  But that’s what you get on the Rambla.  This place exists to suck cash from the tourists.  Mission accomplished, Mickey.  We won’t be seeing you again, though.

There are no Thai restaurants in Barcelona.

Xin’ese is Catalonian for ‘Chinese’.

Restaurant Chino International
The worst Xin’ese food in the entire world can be found in Barcelona, particularly at Restaurant Chino International in the Gothic Quarter.  We thought it would be funny to try the local Xin’ese joint on Christmas.  The joke or the cliche (at least in North America) is that nothing else is open on Christmas, so you always eat Chinese food.  Well, we actually had a lot of options that night, there were plenty of places open, but we went for the Asian dining anyway.
So.
This place serves the worst food ever. 
Ever.
I mean it.
Rebecca and I have experienced a few really awful restaurants in the time we have known each other.  There’s the Chef’s Inn in Wisconsin (we call it the Chef’s Out - because he clearly was out when we ‘ate’ there!), the Rose Garden (the Wrong Garden) in Ontario, and the Apple Barrel (the Ass Barrel) in Tennessee.  All notoriously bad. 
Restaurant Chino International gets the brown ribbon for ‘worst in show’, our all time least favorite, most disgusting and notoriously unsatisfying dining experience.
We can’t even come up with a nickname for it - nothing expresses it’s vileness quite adequately enough.
Her “vegetable fried rice” consisted of salted rice with - no kidding - a few bits of shredded lettuce mixed in.  Salt, rice, lettuce.  That’s the recipe. Directions: use a lot of salt, and almost no lettuce (soggy), serve on greasy platter after a long wait.
I had the pineapple duck, which was some gamey nasty duck(?) morsels, mixed with mushy old pineapple chunks with some sort of ‘sauce’.  The liquid topping that the ‘food’ was mixed with tasted and looked like the milky-sugary sludge you get on the bottom of a cereal bowl that had once been full of one of those all-sugar cereals that they feed to the kids in America.  Tasted like it too.  Milky sugar sludge over pineapple and some sort of organic compound resembling - vaguely - duck.
A British couple sat down behind us a we were finishing, and I was really close to warning them away as they perused the menu.  I feel bad for not having done so.

(another view of the Gothic side of the Sagrada Familia that
has nothing to do with the restaurant you're reading about.)

Memrut Entrepans
Mermut’s is on a street in the Gothic Quarter who's name was inpossible to determine.  The street also had a bunch of other decent looking cafes and bars on it.  It was just off Ample st.  Here is yet another little cafe as described above, but this one is a notch better than the pack.  We had better than average tapas for dinner, and the friendly owner came over to say hello.  He was convinced that we were Dutch, and after we convinced him that we weren't, just for fun, we told him we were Canadian.  He got really excited and told us about his many friends all over Canada.  We noticed that the Germans at the table next to us stopped looking snidely at us after that, and we realized that it might be better to be Canadian rather than American whenever possible for the remainder of the trip. 
We also discovered the secret of the house wine here. 
Pay attention: 
Looking at the wine list of any cafe in Spain, you’ll see most wines listed by the glass, and of course the house wine - vino de casa - is right there, on the same list.  But, the vino de casa, even though it is listed with all of the other wines that are served by the glass, is served by the bottle.  But the menu almost never says as much.  The vino de casa is also usually so inexpensive that the price for the bottle is lower than all of the other wines are for a glass, so seeing it on the menu, why would you think that you’re ordering anything other than a glass?  In most places, you’re getting a glass of your favorite wine for 6, 7, 8, 9, or more Euros.  But, if you order the vino de casa, they bring you the whole damned bottle, and it is rarely more than 7 Euros - usually less.  Now, of course you’re not getting the finest wine that Europe has to offer.  But it is almost always drinkable, certainly no Boones Farm or Thunderbird, and it is usually just as good as the trendy inexpensive wines you can get in North America these days (like Yellow Tail).  Decent, enjoyable.  A real bargain if you’re on a budget. 
Rebecca became fluent in asking for ‘vino de casa’ pretty quickly.

Baked goods on the go
I already mentioned Panadarea le Estrella, where we got some delicious hot fresh baguettes for only .45 Euro each (fifty-some cents).  On another occasion, I was waiting for Rebecca in the grocery store, and I spied something interesting at the fresh baked goods counter.  These are called - I think - fornil, and are like croissants but larger, a little more dense, and triangular.  They are baked with cheese stuffed inside, and sometimes other things, like tiny ham chunks.  They are served warm, even right out of the counter at the store. I got two of them for .60 Euro each, and required no more breakfast, save a banana from the Boqueria.  While on the Figueres side-trip, we ate similarly at a bakery across the street from the Dali museum: Rebecca got a delicious cheese on baguette sandwich, and I got another fornil, and a sort of warm apple fritter thing.  They were all great, and with some fruit and bottled water, lunch for both of us was like seven Euros.

L’Dentelliere
A cozy, tiny restaurant (aren’t they all!) on Ample St in the Gothic Quarter that serves Italian food.  Both of the pasta dishes we tried were just a little too salty, and the portions weren’t huge, but these criticisms probably seem harsher than needed.  The food was pretty good.  The atmosphere was pleasant, the ‘vino de casa’ makes it all bearable, and I’d go back.
By the way - having made this trip to Europe just days after Chicago passed it’s smoking ban, I was extra aware of the fact that in Spain you can more or less smoke in any damned place you want to.  The restaurants in Spain have never even heard of a non-smoking section.  If you’re like me and loathe cigarette smoke, you’re out of luck in Spain.  You just have to deal with it... like I did when the two middle aged dames next to me in L’Dentelliere lit up some stinky-ass cloves in the middle of my entree. 
Walking by the Marlboro store later on made me want to vomit.

Magnum xocolates
In December of 2005, Barcelona was rife with ads on billboards and bus stops for Magnum chocolates.  Scantily-clad bimbos were also walking around in person handing out chocolate by the bowlful at the Plaça de Cataluna.  Rebecca was convinced that the piece of chocolate seen in the Magnum posters was designed to look like a sex toy.  Unfamiliar with the particular make and model of the gadget she referred to, I was unable to comment.
We also saw the sexy chocolate ad on the side of a MOAN bus. 
Draw your own conclusions.

Sapore D’Italia
In Calella, just north of Barcelona.
After taking 40 minutes to even submit our order to the kitchen (we were watching), the adolescent waitress managed to drop our empty vino de casa bottle right next to the table.
Unlike the owner of the cafe near the university, she cleaned it up. 
The food was fine.

Tortelleria Flash Flash
This place was recommended by my pal Dean, who’s taste in these matters is usually impeccable.  Flash Flash was designed in 1970 with a very mod look, perhaps also inspired by Warhol and Pop art.  Visually, it is quite a lot of fun to check out.  Every inch of the walls, ceiling, and furniture are a space-age white, except for some stark black, life sized silhouettes on the walls of women with cameras.  The room is lit by real lights placed in the area of the pictures where the camera’s flashes are located.
Unfortunately the waiter was an ass and the food was shit. 
And it was very expensive.
All they serve here is omelets.  They are small, runny, expensive omelets, and a la carte omelets as well (no hash browns here, not even a garnish).  We were charged 1.60 Euro (over 2 dollars) each for small, hard, fist-sized white bread rolls that we didn’t order, rolls that every other restaurant in Europe (or North America) would have placed on the table gratis. 
We didn’t ask for them, either. 
And the waiter was an ass.
So was his helper.

Cansole
In Barceloneta.  Supposedly the best paella in Barcelona.  Was closing when we arrived at 10:30, and was not open yet when we came back another night at 8:00.  How do they make a buck with these hours?

Buen Bocado
On C. Contessa de Sobradiel, this Mediterranean fast food stand in the Gothic Quarter sells the best food in town.
For three Euros you can get an amazing hummous on pita sandwich.
Absolutely outstanding.
I did not ever imagine that a hummous and pita sandwich could possibly anywhere near this tasty.
For late night eats, it beats the hell out of the old and crusty pizza slices for seven Euros on the Rambla.
Buen Bocado!

Hotel Restaurant Peru
In Barceloneta.  Dropped almost 40 Euros for a satisfying meal of tapas, paella, and salad.  This is the only mid-priced place we found on the seafront strip of Barceloneta.  All of the rest were either complete dives or very expensive.  The vegetable paella was good, and the seafood paella came with whole prawns on top, as well as small clams, mussels, and scallops mixed in.  Quite good.


Nightlife
or: Spain is known as the late-night capital of Europe, but we sure didn't see it...

There are three great Tiki bars in Barcelona, and of course I visited them all.
These were be written about in issue five of Tiki Magazine, due out in late summer of 2006, and in the second edition of Tiki Road Trip, which came out in June of 2007.

Around the corner from Cansole in Barceloneta is an English pub.  You can go there after you discover that Cansole is closed (which it will be) and speak English with impunity while getting a pint of heavy stout for dinner.  By the way, if you don't at least try to speak the native language, to the best of your ability, whenever possible, in what ever country you are in, then you're a turkey.  The locals really do appriciate the effort, and by the end of the trip you'll have more fluency than you might expect yourself to.  That said, isn't it nice to walk into an English pub and relax for a bit, speaking the good ol' Canadian English we speak at home, eh? On Carrer Ample (Ample St.) in the Gothic Quarter, there is a pirate themed bar who’s sign (and name) is based on the movie Hook.  Directly across the street (that’s about fifteen feet away) is another pirate bar who used Pirates of the Caribbean as a starting point.  Both are rather silly inside.  Both feature enough memorabilia from the films in question to make me wonder if the bars were opened solely to promote the films.  Either way, I wonder why the cash grubbing marketing geniuses in Hollywood don’t routinely open bars themed around their upcoming movies in order to promote them?  I also wonder if these two bars fire cannons at each other across the narrow little street on which they compete for the pirate grog tourist dollar. It's so nice to walk in to a place like this and be able to speak Pirate like we do at home! Arrrrrr! In addition to the pirate bars, there are ample restaurants on Ample street, and plenty of scooters too - ample quantities, it might be said.  Scooter parking everywhere, car parking no where. Ample mullets too.  The mullet never went out of style in Europe.  These people are not wearing the mullet from irony, or to be hipsters.  They just never got the message. The Marsella bar is right down the street from the Hostal Opera, which was home on this trip.  Unfortunately, visitors to Marsella will find themselves just getting into the beginnings of a shady neighborhood from the relatively safe confines of the tourist-approved zones of the Rambla.  That’s never stopped me before, and certainly didn’t on this trip.  Marsella claims to be the oldest bar in Barcelona, and based on the inch-high stacks of dust on the chandelier, I believe it.  The substance on the 200-year-old bottles decorating the upper shelves goes beyond dust, beyond patina, and fully crosses over into the category of unidentified sapient life form (deceased).  A former creeping fungus, now an endlessly puzzling black crust. The centuries old woodwork has been barley maintained, the marble bar is cracked.  There is a feeling of age here and a slightly sinister edge that recalls Poe or Lovecraft. This place is known for it’s absinthe.  They keep many snifters of it lined up behind the bar, poured and ready to serve.  The bartender serves it with a tiny fork, a bottle of water with a tiny hole punched in the cap, and a sugar cube.  The idea is to put the cube on the fork, and drizzle water over it so that the sugar veeeerrry slowly seeps down into the drink, making the licorice-meets-battery-acid-flavored beverage a bit more palatable.  Doing it properly results in the sugar-water mixing gently with the absinthe, forming a cloudy mixture.  Doing it too quickly makes the sugar water sink to the bottom and fail to mix properly. Turns out the beverage we were served is the sans-wormwood variety of absinthe, or in other words, the same ersatz stuff you can get in North America.  No luck getting the real deal, even at Marsella, a bar that is supposedly known for the stuff.  We did see some real absinthe at duty free - for $50 a bottle. The manager of Marsella is a cranky old American who is friends with some pals of mine who own a bar here in Chicago.  Go for the history and the experience, but don’t expect a warm reception.

There is a street called Tallers that runs from the Rambla to the college area.  It is a great shortcut between the two neighborhoods, in fact.  Tallers is also filled with a bunch of record stores (the highest concentration of them that I observed in the entire city), and also seems to be the hangout for the few heavy metal or industrial rocker kids that we spotted in Spain.  The very first address on Tallers (yes, that would be “Tallers 1”) is Boadas.

Boadas.
Mmmm... Boadas....

Boadas was opened in 1933 by Mr. Miguel Boadas Parera (1895 - 1967).  The tiny bar seats about eight people, and there’s standing room for another twenty.  The water closet is literally the size of a closet.  There’s a painted portrait of Parera on the wall, and tons of other framed memorabilia from his life, going all the way back to the turn of the century.  There’s a great backlit mural behind the bar, showing people in the 1940s enjoying themselves at Boadas.  I wonder what was there before that?  There's also is a great painting of Parera shaking a cocktail.

Our first attempt to enter the bar was aborted due to the presence of about forty people in the room (see above, re: room for twenty), and a later mission yielded a cramped seat at the bar after a bit of a wait. 

Totally worth it.

The old-school bartenders are all dressed in tux jackets, and can make any traditional cocktail you want.  They are all classy but not snooty or condescending.  They all have their own charisma and separate personalities, but are first and foremost service minded.  One guy, for example, has his own way of shaking the cocktail shaker, and another mixes drinks by pouring the drink back and forth between two shakers: one way above his head and the other by his waist.  A third guy has mastered the art of prestidigitation involving liquor bottles.  But none of it feels corny or overly showy; these guys just have style.  It’s the real deal.  It’s all presented almost as an afterthought, very nonchalant.  It is the only place where I hae ever actually liked the 'flair' bartending and not wanted to tell the bartenders to give it a rest and get on with making my damned drink.

Trying to stump them is futile.  They know every classic drink.  They’re like walking bartender’s guides in tux jackets.  The drink of the day is right out of the classic-era cocktail guides that I horde; last time I visited Boadas it was the Nelson (bitters, vermouth, and whiskey, with a cherry - like a Manhattan, but sweeter and with more red vermouth).  We also had excellent versions of the Sidecar, a Kir Royale (start with about 1/6 glass full of Creme de Casis and then fill with cava), and the Cuba Libre (white Cuban rum, lemon peel around the edge of the glass, fill with cola). A lot of people were drinking Mojitos; so many that we asked if it was the house drink.  No: it is just that the Mojito is as trendy in Spain right now as it is in North America.  I don’t drink many Mojitos, but the one at Boadas was damned good, as was their take on the classic American Martini.

By the way, if you ask for a Martini in Spain, you’ll get a glass of Martini brand straight vermouth and a funny look.  They don’t do the Martini as we know it over there - except at Boadas: they’ll know what to do.

We saw a couple of Blue Hawaiis going over the bar, but I didn’t want to even ask about a Mai Tai: I didn’t see any orgeat, and besides, we’d been to all of the Tiki bars already, and this was the time and the place for Sidecars and Martinis, not Mai Tais and Zombies.
And anyway, Blue Hawaii is a shitty drink - you just order it for the novelty value of the color.  Once.
All drinks, no matter what you get, are 5.50 Euros (That's about $7.80 US at the moment).

Totally worth it - a bargan in fact - for the quality of the drinks, and also for the full Boadas experience.

They are not stingy with the pours at Boadas either.

The only thing that sucks about Boadas is that it is 4000 miles from my house.

You can zoom from Boadas to Kahiki by just walking down Tallers, away from the Rambla, and you’ll end up in the college plaza across the street from Kahiki.

Las Cuevas del Sorte
Here’s a little restaurant in the Gothic Quarter (at Gignas 2) decorated in a quintessential Barcelona style.  Dimly lit and a bit decadent feeling.  In their basement one finds a much larger, and much more sparsely decorated cavern of debauchery.  This could be Gaudi’s basement, with blue glass tile all along one wall and curved shapes wherever possible.  All of the hipsters, musicians, and poets seem to come here. A couple of goths too.
They serve Caipirinhas (sugar, lime, and cachaca - 140 proof brandy made of sugar cane), a drink related to the good old Mojito.  Quarter a small lime, muddle the lime pieces and sugar in the bottom of a glass, and add the cachaca and ice.  Shake.  Didn’t catch the brand we were served, but it came in a wicker-covered bottle (kind of like the Ron Zacapa rum).  I am told Pitu is the best brand to get. 
Caipirinha is not to be confused with the Caipirisima (sugar, lime, rum) which ended up tasting like something not too far from my own Pisco Sour recipe, but with rum.  Five Euros each.
The local brew is La Cuevas del Sonte.
The bartenders were a hipster black girl and a white guy with white dreadlocks (but he was well dressed and didn’t come off as a hippie).  They also have a Mai Tai which comes sorta close to the traditional ingredients (this one is dark rum, light rum, Cointreau, Amaretto, lime, grenadine, and orange juice).  Lose the grenadine and OJ, and you have a very expensive proper Mai Tai: the Cointreau and Amaretto are high-dollar replacement for the triple sec and orgeat.  Seven Euros.
Definitely a cool place.

New Year’s Eve
Here’s the one big warning I have for anyone visiting Spain on New Year’s Eve: be prepared, they do things very differently there!

We had planned to go to Kahala, our favorite of Barcelona’s three Tiki bars, for New Year’s.  One of my music industry pals (Andrew Burns - an American living in Barcelona), said he’d be there, and the bar staff were enthusiastic about us showing up when we mentioned the idea during a prior visit. 

We got all gussied up, had a nice dinner, and then got on a bus that would take us from the Plaça de Catalunya (at the top of the Rambla and not far from where we were staying), to basically the front door of the Kahala.  At 10:00 PM, we definitely noticed that the streets were suspiciously empty given the auspicious occasion, and in a city that is considered one of Europe’s most festive.

There was no traffic, no one else on the bus, and very few people on the streets. 
We got to the Kahala and discovered that it was closed!  A sign in the window said they’d be open at 12:30 AM.
Whaaa?
So we walked around the corner to another place in the same neighborhood that had come recommended, and found it locked up too.  And for that matter, all of the restaurants in the area were closed.  So were the shops, the bars, and everything else.  It was now 11:15 on New Year’s Eve, and Barcelona was like a ghost town, even more desolate than it had been on Christmas afternoon!

We found one restaurant open, and they would not let us sit down - they said it was only open for a private party.  We finally found a mini mart open, and the Indian guys inside told us in broken English - but very emphatically - that we’d find nothing open that night.

I found a pay phone and called Andrew.  He explained it: people in Spain celebrate New Year’s at home with close friends or relatives.  They ring in the new year in their homes, and then go out and raise hell after midnight.  They are all very serious about this, apparently.  Even the owners and employees of all of the restaurants and bars would be at home until just after midnight.

It was now close to 11:30, and Rebecca was starting to get really upset.  Ringing in the new year had been important to her.  She was mad at our own complete failure to understand the local custom, and sad at the idea of missing the big moment in general.  We walked half of a mile or so down the Av. Diagonal  - one of Barcelona’s very biggest streets - and eventually found a place that was open.  It was kind of a crummy, generic restaurant, like a Denny’s, but two notches nicer, and with a bar.  It definitely and completely was our only option (save for my half-hearted idea of buying cava (champagne) from the Indian guys and toasting ourselves in a nearby park!). 

We got a table next to an elderly couple at ten minutes to midnight, quickly ordered cava and a big ice cream sundae (see above re: Rebecca, stress, and sweets!), and waited for the countdown.  The waiter brought us each a bag of grapes marked Nuevo Ano (New Year), which we knew that we were supposed to eat at midnight to bring luck in the new year.  That custom had reached our grey matter previous to tonight’s folly.

Predictably, the place went nuts after the countdown, heard via a crackly radio pumped through the restaurant’s overhead sound system.  We ate our grapes, and finished our other snacks.  By 12:15 the place was empty, and we walked back to Kahala.  Andrew showed up, the bartenders we’d made friends with on our previous visit came in to work, and the owner came over to say ‘hola’ and show me around the place (knowing, as he did, about my writings on the subject of his business!). 

We had to fly out of Barcelona the very next morning (my work was done, and Rebecca had to be back at her job in Chicago by January 2nd!), so we’d planned to head home by 1:00 AM.  But since we didn’t even manage to get started having fun until almost 1:00... well... let’s just say we ended up taking a funny picture of some drunk guy passed out on the Rambla. 
At dawn. 
We were very tired on the plane home.


Lodging
or: how to tell a hostel from a hostal from a hotel...

Didn't stay here. 
I am not even sure if it is a hotel or not. 
But it's a damned nice building, no?

In Spain a Hotel is a Hotel.  But a Hostal is more like a Motel, and a Hostel is a Hostel.  So if you want to save some cash by staying in mid-priced accommodations, make sure you get a Hostal, but not a Hostel or a Hotel.  Got it?

We ended up on the top floor of the Hostal Opera on Sant Pau, just around the corner from the Opera House, on a Gothic Quarter street just a half-block from the Rambla.  This was a good location, because the Liceu Metra stop was a quick walk away, and all of the other action on the Rambla was also close.  However, being directly on the Rambla is asking for trouble - it is way too crowded and noisy all night.  So, near the Rambla, but not on the Rambla was a good spot to stay.  At first.

The room was smallish, but nothing to complain about.  Like everything in Spain, they don’t like carpeting much, but they love their ceramic tile.  The floors and even part of the walls were tile, giving the place a bit of a sterile and not-so-homey vibe.  But it was a clean place, and reasonably priced.  The bathroom was also clean and modern.  The two beds we had requested were small but comfortable.  The only real problem, in fact, was the heat - or complete lack of it.  The first few nights we were absolutely freezing.  There was a radiator in the room, and it was barely warm to the touch.  We asked for more blankets, but you all know that a few more blankets doesn’t cut it when the room is only 55 degrees.  Five nights in this room, and the temperature situation did not appreciably improve.

The room faced a residential courtyard, so the view wasn't so hot - unless your idea of ‘scenic’ is people’s laundry hanging from porches.  I am not too worried about this - I can go out and see the sites when I want my good views.  The hotel is for snoozin’ and showerin’, and I don’t usually plan on spending much time gazing out the window.  Someone had a pet rooster too.  It was crowing all afternoon on the day we arrived, which was amusing until I remembered that roosters like to get busy at about 4 AM.  Good thing I remembered the ear plugs. 

There’s a mysterious pulley hanging from the ceiling, above the stairwell, above the fourth floor.

The side trip to Cadaques and Figueres included two much nicer hotels, described in my article about the Dali adventure (watch for a link here when it is published).

(Didn't stay here either.  It is also not a hotel. 
It is Gaudi's Casa Battlo, on the Block of Dischord)

After the side trip to Figuereas/Cadaques, we ended up back in Barcelona, and back at the Opera.  We didn't get the same room.  The new room was on the first floor (that’s what we’d call the second floor in North America - the one above the ground floor).  This room was almost no larger than the unacceptably small and unacceptably single bed.  There was maybe 12 inches of space around each of side of the bed in which to maneuver.  I talked to the manager, and was told that all but three of the rooms in the entire hotel are small like the new room, and that I had simply gotten lucky by getting one of the few substantially larger rooms earlier in the week.

As should be clear to anyone who has read this travelogue (or any of my other ones), I prefer to keep my lodgings as economical as possible so as to spend my cash on experiences of value.  I spend so little time in the room anyway - why travel just to sit in a hotel room? - that unless the room is prodigiously stinky, I am not going to whine.  Much.

But this room was so small, the bed barely fit into it.  There was no where to put our luggage!  The bed was not suitable for two people.  I am six-foot-four; and this bed was not suitable for even one person, and impossible for two, especially given my size.

I had spent five nights in a room of a certain quality, I was quiet and courteous, and I paid on time.  For this, I was rewarded upon my return (only two nights later), with a vastly inferior room, for the same price as the far better room.  That was not acceptable.  Leaving the hotel was not an option, although the idea occurred to me.  Arriving back in Barcelona after the Dali tour on December 30, I discovered that every room in town was already posting signs indicating that they were full for the New Year’s holiday weekend.  So Rebecca and I spent our final two nights in town sleeping limbs akimbo, hanging off the tiny bed.  There was no danger of falling completely out of the bed and to the floor, since there wasn’t enough room between bed and wall to fit the width of a body - even one as slender as International Rebecca’s.

Cozy, yeah, that’s it.


More fun facts about Spain:

Dollar stores are called: “.6 Euro y mas”.
60 Euro cents is approximately a dollar. 
“y mas” means “and more”.

There is a lot of graffiti everywhere.
A lot of it is anti-neo-Nazi.

To understand people in Catalonia, understand that they only begrudgingly consinder themselves a part of Spain, and that they even have their own language.  Many signs are bilingual in Spanish and Catalunyan.

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