< Previous Page | Next Page >

A statue outside of the
Fundació Joan Miró.
I can see his pee pee!

I think I know: yes, no, please, thank you, excuse me, you're welcome, what is, I don't understand, do you speak English, and the numbers one through ten (which are pretty much the same as in Spanish). That's more than I say to most people in Toronto. I suppose that illustrates that I should be a bit less reserved when I get home. I'll pretend I'm a Texan and bellow joyfully at anybody who comes face to face with me.

Anyway, apparently everybody speaks Spanish (Castilian), so I'll be fine. I made it in Germany and I didn't speak a word of German when I started.

The Alps are beautiful from the air. Holy cow.

Barcelona is so fucking
festive. There's a four-
piece band on the train
from the airport.

there's a four-piece band on the train. Dude, I have my own soundtrack for arriving in Barcelona!

Apartment is beautiful.

Location is beautiful.

Barcelona is beautiful.

Speechless.

Me and Krista being gooflets
at the New Year's dinner.
WOOOOOO PARDEEE

From Barcelona! OLE!

I stuffed myself with entirely too much absolutely delicious food tonight. I think I gained ten pounds, most of it in animal fats. Barcelona is a madhouse. A maaaadhooooouuuuse!

I see that you are all still asleep. No wonder, given that you were up all hours of the night shouting ¡Feliz Anno! and smashing bottles in the street.

No big surprise here, but Barcelona is very different from Berlin. It's grittier, teeming with people and complexity. Berlin is very ordered, much like Toronto. In fact, Berlin bears a general resemblance to Toronto in terms of its feel, which could explain why I like it.

Barcelona is closer to a state of nature. More organic. (That's more than just a nice way of saying that drunks urinate in the alleys and they need to clean their subway.) The people here have a fabulousness that Berliners lack. The architecture itself is quite different. Berlin has a tidy presentation and clean architecture... except for the parts that the Allies blew up during the bombings. Barcelona does not: you really feel like some of the buildings just grew out of the earth. I'm not sure yet which city I prefer (I'll probably like them both for different reasons), but I have to say already that I'm finding Barcelona a bit magical, as long as I'm not too preoccupied with making sure my purse isn't stolen.

Today I'm going to take the cable car up to Montjuïc, maybe check out the Miró museum, and see the city from the hill that overlooks it. Then: siesta, cafe con leche y crepe! ¡Arriba!

Oooo! A cable car!

That was the lamest cable car ride ever.

Barcelona has compensated by providing me the experience of a tenor bellowing opera at full volume as he cycles down the mountain.

Oh god, Neil Diamond is on the speakers in the Internet café. Mal.

Siesta accomplished. It's been a good day so far. I slept in, went for breakfast, then headed up the mountain on the lamest cable car ride ever. The car runs from Paral.lel station up the mountain (a hill, really) to the first station. Had I known then what I know now, I would have walked from my apartment and up the hill myself: the cable car ride lasted all of two minutes at a super-slow pace, and there are stairs up the mountain. There are also esclators. Outdoor escalators. Uh.

Both museums I wanted to see were closed. One opens from 10:30-2:30 tomorrow; the other from 10:30-2:30 Monday. I know what I'll be doing before my siestas on those days!

Last night was crazy. I met Krista and Chris at their hotel at 5pm. We stopped for some fanfreakingtastic crepes, then walked around Barri Gótic and did some shopping before going for one of the most amazing dinners I've ever had. It was, I dunno, about 75 courses. By the end I was about a wafer-thin mint from collapsing in upon myself and forming a black hole.

Around 11:45pm they issued us bags of grapes (you're supposed to eat one grape for every chime of the clock when it strikes twelve, which was made very difficult by the fact that Europeans don't eat genetically modified seedless grapes, so I had to stop and pull the seeds out of my mouth) and a bag of party favours. These party favours included little tooting horns, masks, party hats and (inexplicably) black cardboard moustaches that you clip inside your nostrils. The restaurant went fucking bananas for the next 30 minutes, with every idiot (me included) wearing the silly accessories and blowing their noisemakers. The owner chimed in the new year by standing on the spiral staircase and smashing two cooking pot lids together as we all hooted and cheered beneath him.

It was the best New Year's I've had in a long, long time.

Welpers, I should go kill some lunch.

These two guys loaded up
their restaurant orders and
walked by me whistling the
Indiana Jones theme.
I'm not kidding.

A human chimney has taken a seat at the next table and is contributing significantly to global warming. I'm going to do some more moseying.

I just saw a café owner literally throw a woman out into the street. She had come in and was asking customers for money. He escorted her to the door but she resisted when she got there, so he threw open the door and pushed her outside. She fell (somewhat melodramatically, I might add) to the ground and sat there for a few minutes, staring back into the café. It was a sad sight.

Here's something about Barcelona: they don't sweep in the corners. I mean that both literally and figuratively.

This may just be the glasses of wine talking, but I'm having a great time. W00t.

For Chris and Krista: Carmelitas, dos thumbs up. They are responsible for the aforementioned glasses of wine.

I slept in this morning. It felt GREAT. I'm finally getting the hang of sleeping in on my holidays.

Now I must kill breakfast. Mercado! Olé!

A jogger having a smoke while he's running?

Damn.

Why are the coffees over here so much better than they are at home?

The power is out in the Miró museum. This really, uh, um, illustrates the differences between his works using bright colours and his works using more subdued colours.

Is there an art heist underway? Stay tuned!

By the way, I think this might be my favourite museum in the whole world.

I love this. I don't
know what it is, but
I want it.

Yes. The best museum I've ever seen.

One more full day in Barcelona. I'm finding myself adjusting to the Latin circadian rhythms, which have me waking up around 10am and going to sleep, well, much later. The Spanish have thoughtfully located Barcelona six time zones ahead of Toronto, which means that in absolute terms I'm only an hour or so off of my regular schedule. Gracias, amigas.

The food here in Barcelona is tasty, but my body--which has grown accustomed to eating chicken breasts and steamed vegetables--is engaging in an open revolt. Last night it staged a sit-in in the administration building, and I had to call campus security. Given what I've been eating, I'm not entirely sure what my digestive tract is having a problem with, but there you go.

Breakfast here seems to be a very no-nonsense affair. People swing by a café for a coffee and a pastry just like in the business district in Toronto. Lunch is a bit more involved; in fact, they shut down large swaths of the city from about 1-4pm (including, inexplicably, some restaurants that really should be selling lunch) so that everybody can have a chill meal with their pals. Restaurants--the good ones, anyway--have lines that stretch down the block if you arrive much later than 2pm. The city starts to re-open around 4pm, when people leave their apartments and converge on the old city to rub shoulders with one another. I mean this in the literal sense of it being wall-to-wall crowds, the crowding made worse by the street vendors displaying scarves and cheap jewelry on blankets that take up a too-generous amount of valuable street space. Even with the crowds, everybody here is friendly and not in too much of a hurry, so it's like being in Manhattan if you got the population stoned first. Nobody seriously contemplates going to dinner until 9pm or so; in fact, most restaurants don't even open again until after 8:30.

A street in La Ribera.
You can almost see the
bodies piled up from the
Black Plague.

"Medieval" is a great way to describe the city. If everybody weren't so well-dressed, you could easily imagine them meandering down the narrow streets schlepping big baskets of mud on their backs ("there's some lovely filth down here"), or driving donkey carts filled with today's pickings to the market. It's charming in that Old Europe way, but also gritty and "real". Very different from most of the northern European cities I've visited.

But the air pollution. Oh my God. In terms of the smoking, the Barcelonins make Berliners look like amateurs. Everybody here smokes. I think they must issue them cigarettes at birth. And stinky shit, too: you can smell the stench of some crusty old guy honking on a stogie long before you see him. I haven't experienced it in a restaurant yet, so the fact that it's outside should give you some idea of how powerful the shit is. And they don't just light up after a good meal in a restaurant. They have a cigarette before the waiter comes, another after the waiter has left, a third after they've ordered, a fourth with their drinks, a fifth for good measure before the food arrives, a sixth after the food has left, and then they finish off the whole pack before they leave the table. These people are committed smokers.

The language thing is interesting. The official language is Catalan, which looks just as much like French (maybe more so) as it does like Spanish to me. Most people here--being Spanish and all--speak Spanish, which is referred to as Castilian. This is what you learned by going to high school Spanish class or watching television in the US. Because this is an autonomous region of Spain, there has been a great push to resurrect their language (it was banned by Franco when he came to power). Many of the restaurant menus and signs are in Catalan with--in most cases--Castilian subtitles. I've not yet heard anybody speak Catalan, but my understanding is that the universities teach in it, which must be tough for the kid who just wants to get away from her parents' house in Madrid and decides to come to Barcelona to take in the beaches while getting an education.

I'm barely able to get by in Castilian. I never took Spanish in school, but through osmosis I've managed to pick up just enough to give me false confidence that I can speak it. I can say things like "mesa para una, por favor", "la cuerta, por favor" and "por favor, donde esta el baño?" Notice the excessive use of "por favor," which is the Canadian in me. Barcelonins aren't so much about the formalities, though they will say "de nada" when you say "gracias". I understand how to clumsily construct a Spanish sentence, but I have memorized about three nouns, all of them related to food or things that are forbidden (there are a lot of them in Barcelona). Most of my conversations, though, go like this:

• some basic Spanish grammatical opening statement, like "I would like..."
• *flips through dictionary*
• *points at menu*
• *waiter asks for clarification*
• *alaina flips through dictionary*
• "Ah! Queso y jamon! Si! Gracias!"

With one exception--the hotel where Krista and Chris stayed--everybody is letting me muddle through Spanish. It's gramatically different from English: more like Latin and French, I guess? (My memories of high school Latin are of Chase Phelps making up a song to the tune of Rock Me Amadeus called "Fuck Me Up The Anus." I didn't learn a lot in Latin class.) They do tend to speak to me like I am a short bus kid, but they're doing it in Spanish so that's good. It seems to be de rigeur to greet people with an "hola" and say goodbye with an "adios" when they enter and exit your shop. Those two words I know, so as long as they don't ask me about the local sports team, I pass just fine for a Spanish chick. I have the scarf and everything.

The French guy at the table next to me is describing to his lunch companion, in narrative slow-motion and with great detail, how he got the shit kicked out of him by another man. His English is a bit difficult to understand, but I get the impression that at least part of it took place on a bed and involved him begging for mercy.

Shopping at the market.

Sagardi is a tapas bar. For those of you who are unhip to this groove, a tapa (literally meaning "snack") is a small treat that is served at a bar. They're a bit like hors d'oevures, single-serving morsels that are salty enough to make you want to drink more beer. The Catalan versions of tapas are things like olives and anchovies, but they also offer tapas on pieces of bread, sorta like bruschetta. (In fact, a slice of bruschetta can be a tapa.) So the conversation at a tapas bar goes like this:

Me: "Una cerveza, por favor."
Bartender: "Una plata?"
Me: (Thinking "No plate. Stick," but not saying it because I don't know the Spanish word for stick, nor would I be able to continue the conversation if he was a Simpsons fan.) "Si."

The bartender gives you a plate and a beer, and you walk down the bar picking various tapas off of plates. Each one is run through with a little toothpick. I got one that was veggies and beans, with what looked like sun-dried tomato on the top. I picked out another that was crostini with shaved hardboiled egg heaped upon it, a prosciutto tapa, and a couple that looked like tofu but given the Latin love affair with meat was probably something like sliced loaf of pureed fish eyeballs. I took this plate and sat down outside to read my book.

Oh. My. God.

Tapas are the fuckin' shiz, yo. I tell you whut. Except for one of them. Now, when I said earlier "what looked like sun-dried tomato," it was because I need to tell you that it was actually an anchovy. Krista had it right when she said that anchovies taste like fish ass. They taste like the scent of the stinkiest fish store in Kensington on a 32 degree day in early August. As my Irish friends say, holy Jaysus fuck. It wasn't quite as disgusting as hakarl, but close.

At the end of the visit, you take your plate to the counter. They count the leftover toothpicks and charge you accordingly for the number of tapas you have consumed. It's a pretty cheap meal, too: each tapas is a couple of euros, and you can get by on just a few.

Other than the fish ass, the tapas were tasty. I'll go back tonight for more if my stomach and intestines haven't escaped from my body and hidden in a corner, crying and begging for mercy.

I hear bagpipes!

How appropriate, given where I am and what Charles I and Cortez did to the Aztecs.

I've been feeling a bit sick to my stomach for the last couple of days. It didn't get bad enough to really cramp my style until yesterday afternoon, which is why you didn't see any updates from me after the tapas incident. I got back to the apartment and got progressively worse, until I essentially started writing out my last will and testament and signing my organ donor card around 4am this morning. My body seems to have come through the worst of it, and now I'm just exhausted. I'm going to head to the airport and hop on a plane to Paris, where I will reach the hotel and proceed to nap for as many hours as it takes for me to not feel assy again.

Thanks a lot, stupid body. Fuck you!

< Previous Page | Next Page >