Nothing But Gaudi

From Barcelona

Hola, amigos. We´re at the easyInternetCafe (brought to you by the same folks that run easyJet. I´m still looking for the buffalo wings) sending out a few missives before we head off, as Joseph Conrad would say, "into the heart of darkness." Next stop: Pamplona. We don´t know what to expect once we get there, except for bulls and booze. Supposedly it´s a one-week long party with tons of people. There´s a campground, Camping Ezcaba, located about 7 kilometers on the outskirts of town that we may be in. However, if this event turns out to be like a Woodstock, we may just pitch our tent with all the other sweaty hippies and see what happens. Bedspace it hard to get around these parts at this time of the year, so most people just sleep in the park or in trees or under cars. Everything is fair game.

Oh, silly me. I haven´t even mentioned anything about Barcelona yet. And I´m about out of time here. I must admit that Barcelona is quite a city. I really loved it. It´s an artsy place where the Modernisma style (similar to Art Nouveau) meets today´s art. Antoni Gaudi´s influence reaches far here. We checked out all his stuff: Parc Guell, his aparmtent complex, and the grand-daddy of them all, the Sagrada Familia, which is the cathedral he started over a hundred years ago that is still being worked on. The cathedral looks like the typical gothic cathedral combined with an outdoorsy style, where the columns of the church look like trees and the ceiling is like a forest canopy. And his corn cob spires poking out of the cathedral are filled with tiles and animals and so many details. It´s one of those things you just have to experience once in this lifetime, because descriptions or pictures don´t do it justice.

Another must in Barcelona is to walk down La Rambla, which is their main drag here in town. It´s like the Magnificent Mile with a Tim Burton twist to it as street performers start doing really bizarre things. They take the silver people statue poser concept and take it to the next level. Just rambling down La Rambla, I saw an elephant that tells your fortune, a creepy gold dead guy on a bike, a stunning gold angel, an avant-garde piece of artwork where the guy had his legs sticking out in the air, Edward Scissorhands, Jack Skellington, a dead soccer player, cowboy, indian, acrobats, dancers, a guy dressed as a cat and living in a trashcan...whatever you can think of, they were doing it. Also on La Rambla, they had a lot of booths set up to sell pets to tourists...mainly song birds I noticed. But I did see some chickens there as well, and I wasn´t sure if they were supposed to be as pets or for consuming.

There´s also a lot of markets around these parts selling fresh produce, fish, meat, bread, and any other thing you need. Some of the sights you see are rather disturbing...blobs of squid just sitting there, dead goat heads staring at you, crabs still wiggling their appendages. We bought some produce and some chicken from here, but then decided to do the rest of our shopping at the cheapo grocery stores that we trusted. We screwed up yesterday, though. We decided to have fish for dinner. We THOUGHT we had bought fish filets (it´s a little hard to read Catalan), but when we cooked it, it turned out to be squid. It tasted like eating a bicycle tire. Not our best meal here in Spain.

We also managed to make it over to the marina in town, go up the statue of Christopher Columbus, and check out some other sights. It´s a great city, Barcelona.