Barcelona: the Good, the Bad, and the Stupid.
(this wasn't actually posted until January 2004)

A trip report, in convenient bullet-point format.

Leaving London:

The Bad:
• The moment when you hear the bus driver get a radio message that there's an accident ahead and he replies that he's already past the place he could turn off so he's stuck. And you look at the clock and think "we might miss our flight."
• Realising you have 12 hours to kill in an airport, and you can't even get through to the duty free.
• Spending enough time in an airport washroom stall that the people in green vests knock to make sure you're okay.
• The internet kiosk has the most ridiculous "keyboard" in the history of everything, making it hard to get your £1 for 15 minutes worth and making it look like you can't spell.
• Inability to access LSE's webmail from internet kiosk means you can't retrieve calling card details from your inbox and kill time calling North American friends in the middle of the night.

The Stupid:
• Not allowing time for the bus being late and for RyanAir closing their gates early, even though you almost suggest to your travelling companion that you take the Stansted Express train instead of the bus for the time vs. money trade-off.
• Going to the Body Shop with the express purpose of getting conditioner, picking out a shampoo and a conditioner because they had a "buy shampoo, get a free conditioner" deal and then wondering the next day in the shower why the conditioner is foaming. And remembering how you noticed that the Banana shampoo and conditioner looked awfully similar, yet picked the wrong one anyway.
• Ordering the second bottle of wine, even after your flatmate questions the wisdom of this. If you feel so relaxed and amused by your predicament after your half of the first bottle, shouldn't you feel even better after a second?
• Not staking out spots on the benches earlier, so that both of you could sleep on a padded surface, instead of trading off time on the cold hard floor. In this matter too, you think about it, and then ignore your good instincts.

The Good:
• Seeing parts of London that are new to you from the not-so-express National Express.
• Watching an amazing sunset under a lavender flannel sky and filling your camera's memory card with crazy, bus-jiggled shots of it
• Pret vegetarian sushi and "No Nasties" soda for dinner
• The Body Shop clerk is from Atlanta, has lived in England for 15 years, and is moving back to the States in a few months. You and your flatmate bond with him in North American solidarity. He is very sympathetic after he asks how your day is going and you say, "well, we missed our flight..."
• Monsoon having a sale on clothes that look good on you
• O'Neills playing a good cover of Stuck in the Middle With You and another of Like A Prayer, not the Bigod 20 one.
• O'Neills closing at 11:17, the bar guy announcing "If you're not leaving, it's time to be leaving" to everyone and sparing you from potential further bad decisions about wine.
• Not wasting 3 hours going back and forth to London to sleep in your own bed, thus risking the chance of missing the rebooked flight.

Barcelona:
Actually, I'm getting tired of bullets and the second person singular. Plus everything about Barcelona other than my health and, at times, the weather, falls solidly under The Good. I slept for most of the flight, and then for most of the 80 minute bus ride from Girona airport to the drop off point in Barcelona. Every time I'd wake up the view was similar: misty hills, nice trees, highway, sometimes a few houses on the hilltops. The outskirts of Barcelona reminded me of the outskirts of Tijuana on the way to Ensenada, from the sheer number of houses crammed onto the sides of green hills.

We took the metro to the Jaume I stop, and walked to the Hostal Levante "en el centro del Barrio Gotico", with its marble floors and good shower and bathroom attached to a clean room with 3 very comfortable single beds and a balcony overlooking a pensione canadiense (complete with flag hanging from their balcony), all for £80 per night between the three of us. Future ThinkTanker's friend from MIT was incredibly nice about us standing her up -- she enjoyed having Friday night to herself, having transfered to a single for the night and revelled in ten hours sleep. After showers, Future ThinkTanker and I felt human enough to start enjoying the city.

Barcelona is totally lovely and much warmer than London (14C when we first arrived, probably 20C Sunday afternoon). The day was cloudy but bright, nicely matching my hazy but mild hangover. We grabbed sandwiches (Maoz Falafel for me, so delicious with the self-serve add on vegetables) and ate in the Placa Reial. We then rambled along La Rambla, checking out the market (according to MITFriend, they sell bull testicles there) and the birds and plants. The human statues on the Ramblas are of higher quality than those in other cities. The first one we saw was a man on a toilet. MITFriend verified that he wasn't wearing underwear. Past the Placa de Catalunya we followed Passeig de Gracia to the Illa de la Discordia, with its three beautiful but very distinct-from-each-other houses by Domenech i Montaner, Puig i Cadafalch, and Gaudi. Loveliness.

We then took the metro to the Sagrada Familia, Gaudi's unfinished cathedral. Other than this one I have no complaints about the Barcelona metro, but Passeig De Gracia is a crazy, crazy metro station -- to get to the purple line we needed, we had to walk along the green line, up the stairs, down a long hallway, past the yellow line, down an escalator... It reminded me of that interminable joke from elementary school "up the purple stairs, down the purple hallway, up the purple stairs, down the purple hallway." I can't remember the punchline of that joke though. Did it involve a monkey?

Anyway, the Sagrada Familia is awe-inducing despite the scaffolding; it's still under construction and might be done in another 50 years. I was starting to feel like a germinous, coughing, sneezing piece of plague on a stick, yet I enjoyed climbing the "like, 35 stories tall, I think" (TM random American girl on whom we were eavesdropping, it's actually about 21 stories I think) long path up through winding, endless, dark circular staircases, to a bridge with a wonderful view of the city and the rest of the cathedral, and then down again. This wasn't a stairmasteresque athletic feat -- so many people were pausing above to take pictures that you could only climb a few steps at a time.

By 4, I was feeling feverish on top of everything else, so I headed back to the hotel for a nap while Future ThinkTanker and MITFriend went to the Miro museum. They returned at 8, and at 9 we joined two other LSE Americans from Future ThinkTanker's programme to share tapas and sangria in Port Vell, looking across the water at Barcelona's trade centre. The tapas were good, but when we went wandering in La Ribera looking for a place to go dancing, we found an even better tapas bar just as it started to rain, Sagardi, part of some Basque chain. They set out platters of tapas of yumminess on a toothpick on bread, and you settle up by paying 1.10 euros for each of the used toothpicks on your plate.

At midnight my cough was getting awful again, so Future ThinkTanker and MITFriend used my impending demise as an excuse to head back to the hotel and avoid dancing. The other two told us the next day they didn't manage to find a club, but found yet another excellent source of tapas, staying out until 3.

The alarm didn't go off Sunday morning, so we didn't get quite as early a start as planned. By eleven Future ThinkTanker and I were having breakfast in drizzle at Parc Guell, Gaudi's beautiful, crazy park. The Hall of the Hundred Columns (actually, there are 86 according to Berlitz) has excellent accoustics, as proved by the violinist busker. The buskers all over Barcelona were great. I tried to get a few of them on video with my digital camera, but the sound capture was turned off. Duh.

We took a cab back to the Cathedral in the centre of the Barri Gotic, because the rain was getting worse and we were meeting our travel companions to watch the Catalan dancing at noon in front of the Cathedral. Senor Cabdriver was super friendly, as was everyone in Barcelona (not in your face about it, but warm and kindly), and we made halting conversation in what I think was Spanish but might have been Catalan. In my case it was Spanish with French words thrown in inadvertently here and there. He commented on the rotten weather, and on how we were going from "del monte al mar" in our short cab ride. He also pointed out the Illa de la Discordia as we passed and offered to stop so we could take pictures, but we somehow managed to explain we'd already done that.

I think it was the Rough Guide online that listed the Catalan dancing as one of their must sees, and it was interesting. But there were about 10 to 20 dancers (mostly cute old people), another 20 musicians, and 300 people with cameras watching them. After watching the dancing and saying goodbye to Future ThinkTanker's friends from her programme, who were embarking on a modernist walking tour before spending another 2 days in Barcelona eating tapas (envy!), Future ThinkTanker and MITFriend and I headed for the beach.

Just after we reached the sand of Platja Barceloneta the sun finally came out for the first time all weekend. Sun, sand, and the Mediterranean full of cute euro surfer boys. It was great. I considered going swimming, but decided against it because a) it wouldn't help get rid of my cold and b) while my underwear was of the black tank and black brief variety, so it wouldn't have been indecent, travelling back to London in damp clothes seemed like a losing proposition. Instead of suffering sand in the feet of the tights, I convinced the other two to go wading and got my Mediterranean thrills vicariously.

We walked to the Olympic area and the casino, found nowhere reasonably priced to eat lunch, and walked back, enjoying the sun all the way. I coughed and blew my nose a lot and felt feverish. Back at the harbour we had delicious and affordable vegetarian paella and sangria. I followed it up with champagne (well, cava) sorbet, but should have gone for the lemon instead. We returned to the hotel to pick up our bags, at which point there was an hour and a half before the airport shuttle left Barcelona. FutureThinkTanker and I were feeling uber-cautious, so we only spent half an hour in a Navegaweb after wishing MITFriend a safe journey on her train ride home. I really like Outlook and Explorer in Spanish. ¿Don't Enviar and Busqueda and Atras sound better than Send and Search and Back? Our caution was useful, as first we went down the wrong street from the metro and then we were waiting a block away from the pickup point. There were at least three busloads of people waiting, and because it wasn't obvious where the bus would be stopping, it was more of an "exuberant wedge" (from PJ O'Rourke's description of the Italian approach to queueing) than a queue. FutureThinkTanker and I were the last two to board the second coach.

Returning to London:

The Good
• Catching your plane
• Finishing The Lovely Bones on the plane
• Getting off the plane quickly and onto the first monorail to the terminal, thus getting through customs faster than everyone else

The Stupid
• not having checked the Stansted Express repair schedule; discovering once you've finally got your bags and headed to the replacement bus service area that they've changed the night they don't run from Sundays to Saturdays, and if you'd known that you would have taken the train on Friday and not missed your flight

The Bad
• The Stansted Express pausing for a few minutes in the middle of nowhere for a vaguely-explained technical problem
• Arriving at Liverpool street station just minutes after the last Central and Circle line trains
• Getting on the last Hammersmith line train only to hear there are delays further along the line
• Sitting on the tube at Liverpool St Station for about 25 minutes before it heads out, because of delays
• Sitting on the tube at two other stations for about 5 minutes while it waits for delays further along the line to clear up
• Getting out at Edgeware Road and not seeing a bus, and having to wait more than a minute in the cold for a cab

The truly Excellent
• arriving home, even if it is 2 or 3 hours after your plane landed
• sleeping in your own bed, even if it's not as great as the one in the hotel

Miscellany:

Documentation:

• Because Future Thinktanker prefers travelling with an agenda, once we had rebooked our tickets and got some food, she wrote out a schedule for how we would fill our time on the bag from Pret. It was:

  
  6p    *Food, Christina downs sushi -> NO NASTIES
  
                               discussion of false economies
  
        *Shopping -- mag, conditioner, books
  
  7p    *debate merit of $ [actually pounds] on email
  
        *Nike store
  
  8p    *phil. discussion re. nature choice [on whether it was better that we weren't
  
  allowed to go through security now and thus didn't have to decide], ONeill's
  
  9p          |
  
  10p    DRINKING
  
  11p         |
  
  12a
  
       }      Christina sleeps
  
  1a
  
  2a
  
       }      Future ThinkTanker sleeps
  
  3a
  
  4a    * CHECK IN *
  
  5a
  
  6a    * BOARD FLT *
  
  

  
  
• We used the same bag to write funny things down in O'Neill's but almost everything written in pink highlighter is indecipherable. What I can make out is this:
  
  • Lamb & Chicken... Chicken Rules [on Taza, downstairs from our flat, where along with shawarma, of which the chicken is apparently the right choice, they also have vegetarian sandwiches like falafel, hummous or aubergine. Aubergine rules too]
  • mold = is old [on our dislike of the mold growing on our bathroom ceiling]
  • Napoleon complex Canadian flag tie dye guy "Is it really that big or is he from Zimbabwe" [her speculation that the guy with, instead of the traditional patch, a big Canadian flag hanging like a cape from the back of his backpack might be overcompensating for more dubious national origins]
  • Be Strong
  • So drunk. Two bottles of wine.

Lessons Learned:
• Hypothetically, sorrows drown easier on one bottle of wine than two. The second bottle might make it easier to sleep on the floor. This still doesn't make it a good idea.
• Read the label. Twice. One more time.
• Always take the Stansted Express on the way to Stansted. And double-check their repair schedule.
• Hotels with good beds and showers rock.
• Barcelona is lovely. Take more film.
• The Tube is always going to break down when it is most annoying.
• My inner Cassandra should be heeded more often.

- posted by Christina @ 8:56 am