Barcelona Pt. 1

I loved Barcelona, gang. So much. More than I expected to - I hadn't actually known what to expect, beyond my friend Jenny, who's been there for a decade, and some good food. Did some requisite research before the trip, of course, but it wasn't as easy to conceive this one as some of the other travels. Well. The city knocked me out. After the jump: Barcelona sans Gaudi....

Barcelona from Montjuïc. Swell beyond reckoning.

I'm calling this Barcelona sans Gaudi because I want to cover him in a separate post and video. His architecture took me completely by surprised and rocked me back onto my heels in a massive way, so... more on that later this week. In the meantime... OTHER THINGS IN BARCELONA! (With a little Gaudi, at least in the video, because frankly he's inescapable.)

Barcelona felt to me like a sunnier, more temperate, and in many ways friendlier Paris. It has a lot in common with that other great world city: gothic neighborhoods with crooked, cobbled streets and laundry strung across narrow alleyways giving way to broad paved avenues on the Haussmann model. A human-scaled city with imperial-scaled slashes cut through it.

Peering around the corners

And then the big stuff...

While I spent a good deal of time working on dissertation translations and a few funding applications, I managed to sneak out and run around the city a few times. Gaudi was my huge takeaway, but there was a lot to love across the whole place. La Rambla, the pedestrian thoroughfare leading down to the port, is as touristy as you'd expect but also delightful and shaded and full of energy - you don't want to stop along the street to get paella but it's absolutely worth meandering to people-watch, architecture-gaze, and to visit La Boqueria, the city's main food market (go early when it's still serving the local trade). This part of town is also great for window-shopping... some majorly stylish shops, for menswear as much as anything else, including one of the most beautiful shoe stores I've ever been inside of (Carmina). It's also worth wandering the Gothic Quarter and Born neighborhoods, armed with no guidebook or information (though it's obviously more enlightening to wander with somebody who knows what's what).

Fishtowne at Boqueria

Sometimes you want a whiskey drink at a candy shop turned cocktail bar

I spent one morning at a cooking class near La Boqueria, a thoroughly delightful encounter with an Australian couple on their holiday and a tenth-generation Catalan chef; wandered some Gaudi buildings and spaces; and caught up with my friend Jenny, who is just as delightful as when we last saw each other, years and years ago. It continues to do my heart an unbelievable amount of good to reconnect with folk who've known me for a piece!

The beach. Too cold for a swim but man oh man is it great to have the water there.

Canon atop Montjuïc!

Canopies, light spilling in, the old cathedral of the city

I ate ridiculously well for outrageously low prices, skittered around town until I started to get an intuitive feel for the city, and generally found the whole enterprise to be welcoming in the extreme. It's awful nice if you can go there with a bit of Catalan (more so than Spanish, even), but it's very much the kind of international city where everybody will make do with English - and where you'll find it magical how much Spanish you can sort of understand. That may be due to having a bit of French and Italian (which Catalan and Spanish obviously keep in touch with, rootswise) but it's also just a nice reminder that you can dive in without being Fully Prepared and still manage to hack it in an unfamiliar context. Filed away for the future...

A Modernisme hospital near my AirBnB. All these sites are steeply priced - a combo, I think, of post-austerity VAT rates and an economy that knows it needs to get what it can from foreign tourists with a steep local unemployment rate. Worth every penny on the Gaudi sites, but it did keep me out of a few other corners that grabbed my attention like this one did...

Next up: GAUDI. The stunning brain-changer of the trip. A preview:

Casa Batlló at night - dig those undulating lines, the Venetian carnival mask balconies, the color (less visible here than in daylight)... The wild mind of Gaudi at work, pals n kittens.