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Chuckro's been after me to go on a solo trip for the better part of a year now - I do occasionally need time away from my boys, and I like to tourist much harder than they do. He's perfectly happy to send me to go quench some wanderlust if it means I come home with stories and food, and more importantly, DON'T make him go on three back to back walking tours in one day.
Why Barcelona? Well, I had about a week and a half to plan, and was planning to stay for, like, 5 days. And United flight credits that needed to be used up. So I went down the list of where United had direct flights from Newark that I a) hadn't been to (sorry, Paris), b) was comfy going to solo (sorry, Cancun at the moment), and c) didn't suck in November (sorry, Dublin). Lisbon has more day trips and I thought I'd want at least a week, while Barcelona seemed more containable. Barcelona!
Barcelona is a fantastically cool city – there’s a reason it’s completely exploded as a tourist destination. Really impressive architecture in multiple styles, incredible food, miles and miles of beaches, and apparently very cool nightlife that I totally skipped because really not my thing.
Major activities in Barcelona:
- Hop-on hop-off bus. I’ve found these kind of hit or miss. They’re pretty useful for getting an orientation on the first day, and can be really great if there are a lot of stops you’d like to get off for fifteen minutes at a time. This one was useful for seeing a couple things I would have otherwise missed, but the narration-to-smooth-jazz ratio was off. I get that they want to leave room for traffic conditions, but I think they could have included more facts and stories.
- Casa Battlo. So this family went to the famous architect Gaudi and basically just said “build us a house” with no restrictions. The result is very weird but really gorgeous. The entire building feels like you’re in a surrealist underwater wonderland, except for the parts that are apparently a dragon. The audio tour has a bunch of interesting points, but worshipfulness is rather over the top. It’s especially awkward at the climax of the tour, which is under the eaves of the roof and has a whole mystical “now give me your silence, hear the beating of my heart” narration from the house itself. Except at the same time, there’s a line to get your picture taken for 9 Euros a pop sticking your head out the window, with a line of tourists and the slightly harried-but-bored attendee chanting “and smile...next...and smile...next”. The two do not coexist well.
- Park Guell. Gaudi and his friend tried to build a planned community surrounded by a park for rich people, only it was too far from the city and so only one person ever actually bought a house (it was Gaudi’s lawyer, and he probably felt obligated). They gave up and just gave the park to the city without building the rest of the houses. The park is really gorgeous (although I’m not sure the sculpture area is worth the additional step up fee). The family that bought the house got the last laugh – they still own it, the only private house in this unbelievably beautiful park that has an amazing view of the city, which expanded to the point that it now actually surrounds the park.
- La Sagrada Familia. Gaudi’s masterwork, a cathedral that in theory should finally be complete in the next 4-6 years after more than a century of effort. (Holy crap, and it’s crowded now.) So, I have to admit, I’d seen pictures and I was not impressed. The east facade of Christ’s birth is kind of gloopy; the west facade of his death is cubist. The pillars in the center are these weird split things. The towers have writing on them I thought looked stupid. Well, I still don’t like the writing on the towers, but I take the rest of it back. Photos just do not do this place justice. There’s no way to convey the level of detail, or the quality of the light. The place glows. Its interior is white, but the way the pillars pick up and spread the light from the stained glass is remarkable. I thought I hated the cubist Passion, and then I saw it in person. It’s so incredibly evocative and expressive, more so than any graphic realism. I love this building. It’s amazing. I took a billion pictures I haven’t looked at yet, and I’m sure none of them will remotely convey how inspiring the place is.
- Barri Gotic. The Gothic quarter is a twisty little maze of car-free streets full of fun little tourist shops that occasionally open into sudden plazas full of cafes and tapas restaurants. Took a walking tour, which was full of fascinating information and helped not at all with orientation. It’s not dissimilar to the old sections of Prague or Paris, but it’s got its own character.
- Food tours. I originally signed up for two food tours with two different companies. A few days before I left, they both cancelled because I was the only one who had signed up. (Apparently this is the lowest week of the year, right before Christmas starts.) I frantically found two more with a third company. Well, 45 minutes before the first tour on my first night, they text me. The guide's sick. They managed to get me on an alternate tour, but that one started half an hour before mine, which by this point is 3 minutes ago. I manage to get the first stop spelled out to me; it's 7 minutes away. I run out the door, still on the phone with customer service, smack into a giant street protest (still haven't figured out what they were protesting exactly; they protest a lot there, I had to detour around another one two days later). But I did finally manage to get there. Instead of the Barri Gotic tapas tour, it's a wine tasting tour in Born, so I ended up rather drunker than I'd intended in my jetlagged state, but not to a point of actually being a problem. And the food was amazing. I was supposed to be on a Gracia neighborhood tour on the last day and ended up with a Born/Barcelonetta tour instead, but at least it was still different food and also delicious. Serious food culture there - and the Catalonia food culture and Spanish food culture are not exactly the same.
- Paella class. This was awesome and super hands-on - we went to the market, got our fish, and then had to clean it all ourselves. I learned how to disassemble a squid, which I've never done before. Final result was DELICIOUS.
- Poble Espaynole. So a century ago, they had an Exposition in Barcelona. And one of the showpieces they did was to rebuild the facades of like, 50 buildings from across Spain, smack up against each other. This is a total tourist trap, but one from over a hundred years ago, and it's kitschy but in an awesome way. They also filled the ground floor of a bunch of them with artisans actively weaving baskets and making guitars and blowing glass and stuff. You can buy the handicrafts there. I got some very pretty pottery; I did not get the 300 Euro shawl I drooled over.
- Museu Nacionale d’Art de Catalunya. A well-stocked art museum of reasonable size. Spent an hour and a half, ideally would have spent maybe 3 but didn't have that much time.
- Barceloneta. The fisher village neighborhood that then turns into the beach. I've never been somewhere you could be deep in a narrow-street medieval quarter and then walk 15 minutes to go build sandcastles and swim before. The Mediterranean is cold this time of year, but like the kind of cold at the Jersey Shore in June - it's not comfy but if you're determined, totally swimmable even without a wetsuit. Cold but not bone-aching.
- Flamenco show. Flamenco is from Andalusia, but the most famous dancer is from Barcelona and they were the hub in the 1930s, so they've pretty much adopted it.
- Very long walks. I did multiple walking tours, but also chose to walk to a lot of those tours, sometimes upwards of an hour of making my way through neighborhoods. (I am very pleased with my choice of footwear, given that my feet were sore but I was still walking just fine at the end.) It was just...really nice to not worry whether other people were bored or tired, and to explore new neighborhoods on my own?
Side trips:
I also did two day trips.
Trip 1: Costa Brava/Girona. Took a small group tour in a van along the coast, stopping in a bunch of little fishing/tourist towns whose atmosphere ranged from Hamptons to Wildwood to Santorini by way of Carmel. (It was impressive how different the towns felt.) Then swung inland for a tour of the medieval walled village of Pals followed by the medieval walled city-turned-state-capital Girona. Apparently the Braavos scenes of Game of Thrones were shot there - I saw the alley where Arya gets stabbed, etc. They're super into flies, because their patron saint had a thing. Terrible drought conditions - the river was down to almost nothing.
Trip 2: Baga (Spain)/Ax-au-Thermes (France)/ Andorra. Larger group trip through the insanely gorgeous Catalonia countryside and up into the Pyrenees. The actual stops were middling, to be honest. The Spanish town was cute but non-descript. The thermal springs in France were kind of neat - there are multiple taps and a fountain for sticking your feet in that was honestly a little gross. Andorra is weirdly charmless - like a giant outdoor luxury shopping mall, combined with a ski resort in the off season (no trees, the eradicable gray grime of constant salting).
Random notes:
- Catalonia/Catalunya tried to secede in 2017 and their leaders were jailed as a result. The independence flags and remembrance ribbons are EVERYWHERE. I want very badly for this to be resolved or stay in stasis peacefully; the city and its inhabitants are lovely and warm and civilized. I'm increasingly aware that lovely warm civilized cities can fall into violence way too easily. Barcelona has a recurring history over 2000 years of developing and then getting sacked, over and over and over again. On the other hand, there's something incredibly hopeful about the fact that places can fall apart over and over and it's not the end of the story.
- On a less philosophical note: the city has tons of pigeons, as can be expected, but is also overrun with parrots. The parrots aren't native to Barcelona; they're escaped pets from South America.
- The city has tons of palm trees; the palm trees aren't native to Barcelona; they were brought over from Mexico and Egypt.
- The city is fringed with miles of beaches. The beaches aren't original to Barcelona; as part of the lead up to the 1992 Olympics, they cleared the factories and shantytowns that used to line the waterfront and built the beaches with sand from the Sahara.
- La Rambla is covered in sangria restaurants. Sangria isn't original to Barcelona, it's from southern Spain. The locals kind of roll their eyes; they all drink vermouth. The sangria on La Rambla is incredibly low quality and will give you a terrible hangover. Unfortunately, the sangria at the flamenco show I went to was also low quality and did, in fact, give me a hangover, despite having drunk less than I had on other nights.
New anxieties of traveling in the COVID age - I managed to keep a low level panic attack going for the last two days of the trip because of a very minor sore throat. (I've tested negative three times now, pretty sure at no point have I had COVID.) I always used to get sick while traveling. But these days, it suddenly turns into a whole thing. Are you behaving morally if you keep going out, if you feel a little off but you're testing negative and wearing a mask? Are you going to get trapped by yourself in a foreign country? It's all a lot more stressful than it used to be. (It did not help that I worked myself into a tizzy the day I was leaving because I felt pretty dreadful. And then realized, after drinking an entire Nalgene of water and a couple hours later, that I was, in fact, just hung over.) Ah well.
Anyway - I ate so many things. They were all delicious. And saw many things, many of which were beautiful and cool. And walked an enormous amount, to the point that I don't appear to have put on any weight despite having eaten All The Things.
Why Barcelona? Well, I had about a week and a half to plan, and was planning to stay for, like, 5 days. And United flight credits that needed to be used up. So I went down the list of where United had direct flights from Newark that I a) hadn't been to (sorry, Paris), b) was comfy going to solo (sorry, Cancun at the moment), and c) didn't suck in November (sorry, Dublin). Lisbon has more day trips and I thought I'd want at least a week, while Barcelona seemed more containable. Barcelona!
Barcelona is a fantastically cool city – there’s a reason it’s completely exploded as a tourist destination. Really impressive architecture in multiple styles, incredible food, miles and miles of beaches, and apparently very cool nightlife that I totally skipped because really not my thing.
Major activities in Barcelona:
- Hop-on hop-off bus. I’ve found these kind of hit or miss. They’re pretty useful for getting an orientation on the first day, and can be really great if there are a lot of stops you’d like to get off for fifteen minutes at a time. This one was useful for seeing a couple things I would have otherwise missed, but the narration-to-smooth-jazz ratio was off. I get that they want to leave room for traffic conditions, but I think they could have included more facts and stories.
- Casa Battlo. So this family went to the famous architect Gaudi and basically just said “build us a house” with no restrictions. The result is very weird but really gorgeous. The entire building feels like you’re in a surrealist underwater wonderland, except for the parts that are apparently a dragon. The audio tour has a bunch of interesting points, but worshipfulness is rather over the top. It’s especially awkward at the climax of the tour, which is under the eaves of the roof and has a whole mystical “now give me your silence, hear the beating of my heart” narration from the house itself. Except at the same time, there’s a line to get your picture taken for 9 Euros a pop sticking your head out the window, with a line of tourists and the slightly harried-but-bored attendee chanting “and smile...next...and smile...next”. The two do not coexist well.
- Park Guell. Gaudi and his friend tried to build a planned community surrounded by a park for rich people, only it was too far from the city and so only one person ever actually bought a house (it was Gaudi’s lawyer, and he probably felt obligated). They gave up and just gave the park to the city without building the rest of the houses. The park is really gorgeous (although I’m not sure the sculpture area is worth the additional step up fee). The family that bought the house got the last laugh – they still own it, the only private house in this unbelievably beautiful park that has an amazing view of the city, which expanded to the point that it now actually surrounds the park.
- La Sagrada Familia. Gaudi’s masterwork, a cathedral that in theory should finally be complete in the next 4-6 years after more than a century of effort. (Holy crap, and it’s crowded now.) So, I have to admit, I’d seen pictures and I was not impressed. The east facade of Christ’s birth is kind of gloopy; the west facade of his death is cubist. The pillars in the center are these weird split things. The towers have writing on them I thought looked stupid. Well, I still don’t like the writing on the towers, but I take the rest of it back. Photos just do not do this place justice. There’s no way to convey the level of detail, or the quality of the light. The place glows. Its interior is white, but the way the pillars pick up and spread the light from the stained glass is remarkable. I thought I hated the cubist Passion, and then I saw it in person. It’s so incredibly evocative and expressive, more so than any graphic realism. I love this building. It’s amazing. I took a billion pictures I haven’t looked at yet, and I’m sure none of them will remotely convey how inspiring the place is.
- Barri Gotic. The Gothic quarter is a twisty little maze of car-free streets full of fun little tourist shops that occasionally open into sudden plazas full of cafes and tapas restaurants. Took a walking tour, which was full of fascinating information and helped not at all with orientation. It’s not dissimilar to the old sections of Prague or Paris, but it’s got its own character.
- Food tours. I originally signed up for two food tours with two different companies. A few days before I left, they both cancelled because I was the only one who had signed up. (Apparently this is the lowest week of the year, right before Christmas starts.) I frantically found two more with a third company. Well, 45 minutes before the first tour on my first night, they text me. The guide's sick. They managed to get me on an alternate tour, but that one started half an hour before mine, which by this point is 3 minutes ago. I manage to get the first stop spelled out to me; it's 7 minutes away. I run out the door, still on the phone with customer service, smack into a giant street protest (still haven't figured out what they were protesting exactly; they protest a lot there, I had to detour around another one two days later). But I did finally manage to get there. Instead of the Barri Gotic tapas tour, it's a wine tasting tour in Born, so I ended up rather drunker than I'd intended in my jetlagged state, but not to a point of actually being a problem. And the food was amazing. I was supposed to be on a Gracia neighborhood tour on the last day and ended up with a Born/Barcelonetta tour instead, but at least it was still different food and also delicious. Serious food culture there - and the Catalonia food culture and Spanish food culture are not exactly the same.
- Paella class. This was awesome and super hands-on - we went to the market, got our fish, and then had to clean it all ourselves. I learned how to disassemble a squid, which I've never done before. Final result was DELICIOUS.
- Poble Espaynole. So a century ago, they had an Exposition in Barcelona. And one of the showpieces they did was to rebuild the facades of like, 50 buildings from across Spain, smack up against each other. This is a total tourist trap, but one from over a hundred years ago, and it's kitschy but in an awesome way. They also filled the ground floor of a bunch of them with artisans actively weaving baskets and making guitars and blowing glass and stuff. You can buy the handicrafts there. I got some very pretty pottery; I did not get the 300 Euro shawl I drooled over.
- Museu Nacionale d’Art de Catalunya. A well-stocked art museum of reasonable size. Spent an hour and a half, ideally would have spent maybe 3 but didn't have that much time.
- Barceloneta. The fisher village neighborhood that then turns into the beach. I've never been somewhere you could be deep in a narrow-street medieval quarter and then walk 15 minutes to go build sandcastles and swim before. The Mediterranean is cold this time of year, but like the kind of cold at the Jersey Shore in June - it's not comfy but if you're determined, totally swimmable even without a wetsuit. Cold but not bone-aching.
- Flamenco show. Flamenco is from Andalusia, but the most famous dancer is from Barcelona and they were the hub in the 1930s, so they've pretty much adopted it.
- Very long walks. I did multiple walking tours, but also chose to walk to a lot of those tours, sometimes upwards of an hour of making my way through neighborhoods. (I am very pleased with my choice of footwear, given that my feet were sore but I was still walking just fine at the end.) It was just...really nice to not worry whether other people were bored or tired, and to explore new neighborhoods on my own?
Side trips:
I also did two day trips.
Trip 1: Costa Brava/Girona. Took a small group tour in a van along the coast, stopping in a bunch of little fishing/tourist towns whose atmosphere ranged from Hamptons to Wildwood to Santorini by way of Carmel. (It was impressive how different the towns felt.) Then swung inland for a tour of the medieval walled village of Pals followed by the medieval walled city-turned-state-capital Girona. Apparently the Braavos scenes of Game of Thrones were shot there - I saw the alley where Arya gets stabbed, etc. They're super into flies, because their patron saint had a thing. Terrible drought conditions - the river was down to almost nothing.
Trip 2: Baga (Spain)/Ax-au-Thermes (France)/ Andorra. Larger group trip through the insanely gorgeous Catalonia countryside and up into the Pyrenees. The actual stops were middling, to be honest. The Spanish town was cute but non-descript. The thermal springs in France were kind of neat - there are multiple taps and a fountain for sticking your feet in that was honestly a little gross. Andorra is weirdly charmless - like a giant outdoor luxury shopping mall, combined with a ski resort in the off season (no trees, the eradicable gray grime of constant salting).
Random notes:
- Catalonia/Catalunya tried to secede in 2017 and their leaders were jailed as a result. The independence flags and remembrance ribbons are EVERYWHERE. I want very badly for this to be resolved or stay in stasis peacefully; the city and its inhabitants are lovely and warm and civilized. I'm increasingly aware that lovely warm civilized cities can fall into violence way too easily. Barcelona has a recurring history over 2000 years of developing and then getting sacked, over and over and over again. On the other hand, there's something incredibly hopeful about the fact that places can fall apart over and over and it's not the end of the story.
- On a less philosophical note: the city has tons of pigeons, as can be expected, but is also overrun with parrots. The parrots aren't native to Barcelona; they're escaped pets from South America.
- The city has tons of palm trees; the palm trees aren't native to Barcelona; they were brought over from Mexico and Egypt.
- The city is fringed with miles of beaches. The beaches aren't original to Barcelona; as part of the lead up to the 1992 Olympics, they cleared the factories and shantytowns that used to line the waterfront and built the beaches with sand from the Sahara.
- La Rambla is covered in sangria restaurants. Sangria isn't original to Barcelona, it's from southern Spain. The locals kind of roll their eyes; they all drink vermouth. The sangria on La Rambla is incredibly low quality and will give you a terrible hangover. Unfortunately, the sangria at the flamenco show I went to was also low quality and did, in fact, give me a hangover, despite having drunk less than I had on other nights.
New anxieties of traveling in the COVID age - I managed to keep a low level panic attack going for the last two days of the trip because of a very minor sore throat. (I've tested negative three times now, pretty sure at no point have I had COVID.) I always used to get sick while traveling. But these days, it suddenly turns into a whole thing. Are you behaving morally if you keep going out, if you feel a little off but you're testing negative and wearing a mask? Are you going to get trapped by yourself in a foreign country? It's all a lot more stressful than it used to be. (It did not help that I worked myself into a tizzy the day I was leaving because I felt pretty dreadful. And then realized, after drinking an entire Nalgene of water and a couple hours later, that I was, in fact, just hung over.) Ah well.
Anyway - I ate so many things. They were all delicious. And saw many things, many of which were beautiful and cool. And walked an enormous amount, to the point that I don't appear to have put on any weight despite having eaten All The Things.
