Saturday, July 13, 2013

Sarly goes to Barcelona

Okay - I'm not going to tell you when and where I'm writing this post, but let's just say things got a little out of order and the hubbub of Barcelona (pronounced Barthelona) is already far behind us. We decided to add this city onto our itinerary while luxuriating in France, and despite the fact that Barcelona has an incredible amount to offer, we barely nicked the surface as we passed through. During our last supper in France we discovered that our initial lodging arrangements had fallen through, leaving us stranded during the peak of traveler season. After a few phone calls, we found a hostel owner who assured us he would "have a solution for you" when we arrived. Avery had already planned on dropping another backpacker-friend off at the Barcelona airport, and thus five people three backpacks and a suitcase buckled into the tiny two-door and headed for the border.

Leaving the French countryside was bittersweet, and we entered Barcelona a bit skeptical of its city-ness. Up to this point, every step of our trip had mounted upon the shoulders of the last and I wasn't sure the pyramid could go any higher. But the great thing about low expectations is that they are easy to surpass, and the Barcelona experience was so different from the others that it started its own pyramid, anyway. We set our feet on the ground on the port side of La Rambla - a famous street filled with tourist gimmicks and pricey restaurants. Christopher Columbus stood atop of a fifty-foot pole pointing us towards the ocean; we ignored him and walked inland through the gothic district towards the Pensió 2000 (from which we would discover our lodging solution). La Rambla offered everything from flowers to ice cream to clothes in compact stalls, but we found it rather pricey and quite...squeaky. Every few feet, some kid was chomping on a voice-altering squeaky toy or a local was hawking them through demonstration.

The building containing the Pensió 2000 was unmarked and not much to look at, but after climbing three flights of beautiful old stone stairs and encountering a door with the doorknob set in the middle, I decided I liked its character. But when we tramped in and dropped our heavy packs, the owner informed us there were no more rooms available. Carly threw me a glance and I hastily reminded the man of our names and the mysterious solution he had promised us. His face lit up and all of a sudden we went from staying in a crowded hostel to being given keys to his personal house, where his wife was waiting to show us into their private guest wing. Two blocks later and a flurry of Spanish later, we were unpacking onto a queen bed, oohing over the robes and spacious bathroom and shower, investigating the tea and coffee varieties, and opening the full-length doors to the tiny balcony overlooking the street. A very good solution, indeed!

Barcelona is one of those places which I have marked to come back to - mainly because it took a few days to hit our groove and then we were already leaving.  We went thrifting through a chain of Humana stores, and the deals are so great I think it may be worth a plane ticket for a new wardrobe. In the smattering of reading I'd done about Barcelona, I learned about the world famous architect Antoni Gaudí, so we bit the bullet and purchased tickets for the open-air tourist buses with their narrated bits of information. We visited the Sagrada Familia, a church of no style I've ever seen before: something like romanesque-meets-gothic-meets-candy land-meets-Disney. Parapets and arches looked as if they were dripping liquid stone, and at the top of one peak sculpted birds played in a sculpted tree as if from the Twelve Days of Christmas. The usual saints and bible characters decorated the doorways, with palm trees for doorposts and giant clusters of fruit decorating the tops of spires. During our stroll through Park Güell (designed by Gaudí), I admired the way he used powerful artistic themes in his structures, making them very modern but not caustic or discordant. Sharp angles were always tempered by rounded forms, and bold outcroppings were always balanced by the rest of the structure so that when you took it all in, you felt inspired and calmed instead of thrown off balance and hung in suspense. One of Gaudí's apartment buildings undulated like waves along the street; another supported giant white eye-masks on its balconies as if each apartment was waiting for the neighboring buildings to get up and dance. Riding on the top of the open-air bus gave us an appreciation of Barcelona's architecture: nearly every apartment building has some rooftop garden and plants in each railing, and all of them have texture and dimension of various kinds, mixing up the cityscape and introducing some excitement for each street.

It took us some time to find good food, but by using the power of Yelp (restaurant app) we found a promising place for our last night. I asked the waitress if she thought it would be a twenty, thirty, or forty minute wait, and she just shrugged. Europeans consider it rude to rush a check and a single table may turnover only once during the course of an evening. But soon we were sipping wine and dining on seafood paella, a dish where whole prawns swim between gaping mussels in an ocean of rice with chunks of squid and octopus in a savory orange sauce. If for that dish alone, I'll be back. By eleven o'clock we were paid up and back on the metro - but the evening was just getting started. Behind a church, through a courtyard, and down a narrow hall we stepped out of Europe and onto the Swing Maniacs dance floor, the upbeat jazz throwing us back onto our American roots. I danced with some incredible leads that night, kicked a few shins (I can't yet do the tandem Charleston), and found out my brother's movie (www.SwingX.net) is known across the globe. Language barriers don't matter when your arms and legs do the communicating, and that night of dancing in Barcelona is an experience I'll never forget.

We departed for Italy the next day, this time by boat through the Mediterranean. We enjoyed a whole new cultural experience as the ferry was filled with Moroccans and other Arabic-speakers, and we wove through the (dry) pool room filled with plastic tables of smoky card games to set up a picnic up on the top deck. Later, we snuggled down in our cozy cabin for some great bonding time, and I went to sleep incredibly grateful that God had put Carly and I together on this trip, for her friendship, and for the great lessons I was learning. We are different in many ways - but at this point in the trip, we'd figured out how to make our quirks compliment each other in stellar fashion and now I'm afraid normal life will be strange without her.

Next up? Italian beaches and major relaxation.

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