Spain had never been at the top of my list of places to travel but when a friend of mine asked me if I wanted to tag along on her trip to Barcelona to visit some friends there, I decided what the hell, why not? Of course, I’m now very glad that I did! Also, long post is long. Sorry.
Normally when I travel I make highly itemized itineraries to maximize my time and minimize my walking. (This is my German efficiency coming out.) Staying with people who actually live in Barcelona meant that we were able to take a much more local approach to things, so we literally planned nothing before we got there beyond the cursory look we gave my guidebook while at the airport. We did a lot of things I probably would never have done if I had gone to Spain on my own, all of which were highly enjoyable. The days tended to flow one into another and we never really had any idea what day it was nor could we ever remember what we had done on any given day, so rather than attempt to go day by day I’m just going to work thematically instead.
Old Stuff
I live in Toronto and Toronto is a very young city in the grand scheme of the planet. One of the many appeals of Europe (and, really, anywhere not in the Americas?) is how old stuff is. Not just that it exists, but that it’s usable and functional and that it’s not weird to have people casually living in Gothic-era apartment buildings. What the what! We spent more time than was probably necessary (or amusing) pointing at stuff and saying “OLD!” I’ve been to Europe twice before but let me tell you, the novelty of OLD does not wear off.
The Gothic Quarter was quite wonderful for hitting all of our OLD needs: old buildings, winding streets, and lots of shade. We wandered around in here a lot, both on purpose while visiting things and as a means of getting from one place to another.
Romans
The greatest tragedy of the last two millennia is the fall of the Roman Empire. Seriously. We could have been on the moon in 1350 if they had kept it together. Monasteries would have been filled with people creating Bible apps for the iPad. I’m telling you, the greatest tragedy. Romans, beside being awesome, are pretty much the penultimate purveyors of Old Stuff in Europe, and Spain is a great place to find Roman ruins. (Just ask Russell Crowe.) Our day trip to Tarragona was mostly for the purpose of seeing their relatively intact Roman amphitheatre by the sea, but I was delighted to discover lots of other Roman architecture in various bits and pieces all over the town. Remains of old walls and buildings and even a circus. They also claim to have a tower that Pontius Pilate lived in for some time but subsequent research seems to indicate that zillions of places in Europe claim this kind of story, so we’ll chalk that up to local legend.
We also went to the Museu d’Historia de la Ciutat, which is the museum of the history of Barcelona up until the middle ages-ish. The fascinating part of this museum is that underneath the museum they have 4000sq metres of ruins of the old Roman town of Barcino (evidently the most extensive found underground in Europe). If you love Roman history, you absolutely need to go to this museum. (Or, you know, Rome.)
The Mediterranean
I think I am now officially collecting bodies of water that I have swam in. I’ve swam in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and now I’ve swam twice in the Mediterranean. Our first full day in Barcelona we ended up at the city beach, which was pretty packed despite it being fairly late in the day. The next day we took a day trip to Tarragona, a town about two hours away, and ended up at a beach there at the end of the day. The beach in Barcelona required actual swimming, but the beach in Tarragona had a very long stretch of shallow-ish water so we were able to spend most of our time just crashing into the fabulously large waves.
Food and Drink
I’m not much of a foodie so when I travel I never really worry about dining well. The “Where to Eat” section of any guidebook is always completely useless to me (as is the “Where to Shop” portion), but on this trip? The food was GREAT. I chalk this up to staying with people who both know how to cook and know how to eat, and who made sure that we were experiencing all sorts of various Spanish (and often Catalan-specific) dishes. I don’t think I ate a single thing I did not like at any of the restaurants we went to.
Beer in Spain is cheap like you would not believe. It’s not weird to be able to get a beer in a restaurant for 1 or 2 euro ($1.50-$3.00CDN), which is pretty much unheard of in Toronto. So, we drank lots of beer. My new favourite beverage on earth is called Clara (xampu outside of Barcelona), which is essentially beer with lemon pop in it, a.k.a. delicious. I googled it yesterday and evidently it’s much more common elsewhere than I think; Wikipedia is telling me it’s called Shandy. Clearly the world’s best beverage has not made it deep enough into Canadian restaurants yet because I’ve never heard of this in any form. (But I don’t get out much.)
Also, the prevalence of cafés in squares just kills me. Why are there no squares of this sort in North America? Why do we fail in our urban planning? Ugh.
Nightlife
I am not much of a nightlife person but the oppressive heat in Barcelona at this time of year kind of forced us to sleep for much of the day and spend most of our waking hours in the afternoon and evening. Our first night there (literally the day we landed) was the last day of the annual festival in Gracia, which is basically a huge street party spanning many streets. Each street decorates according to a theme and then there is judging and prizes. Naturally, my favourite street was the dinosaur themed street. Each street had a stage and a band performing, which was neat. The dinosaur street had a band called the Soul Tans who claimed to perform American soul music but somehow thought “I’m Walking On Sunshine” fell into this category. It goes without saying that they were terrible.
We checked out a couple of bars and street patios on various nights, etc. The culmination of our international experience was probably when a random Argentinian started hitting on the Swedish friend of our host at the encouragement of his random German friend. Also, the Argentinian had Lego man hair, which was awesome.
Public Fountains
Public fountains are another thing that North America does not do well (in addition to the lack of public clocks, but I digress). Barcelona is covered in public fountains and with good reason: you get dehydrated after being outside for approximately five seconds. I love the public fountain.
FC Barcelona
One in three children in Barcelona wears the FC Barcelona jersey at any given time. I’m not even kidding. Most of them seem to be Lionel Messi fans, but occasionally you get a David Villa supporter. Every single tourist shop (of which there are thousands on Las Ramblas alone) sells presumably knock-off Barça jerseys and in their windows like to put out the full kits meant for little kids. This really is more than a team. They played AC Milan in a friendly while we were there, but there was no one around to understand my “AC Milan? Nah, you’re a bit weak in your midfield” joke (5:40) from Spice World. ALAS.
Amsterdam
I took a day trip to Amsterdam when I was in Paris nine years ago and afterwards I decided that although it was a nice place it probably wasn’t somewhere I’d ever need to go again. Colour me moderately amused at the fact that Amsterdam is now the first European city that I’ve visited twice. (I’m not counting Paris because while our flight to Barcelona connected in Paris, we were never really in the city. Saw the Eiffel Tower from the plane, though!) We had about a five hour layover in Amsterdam on the way home so we decided to take the train into the city to walk around for a couple of hours. After the 35°C+ weather in Barcelona all week, I was quite literally shocked getting off the plane in Amsterdam and into rainy 14°C weather — my teeth started chattering uncontrollably, which was a little ridiculous. I couldn’t deal with the drop in temperature, apparently. We bought some umbrellas at the train station and headed out despite the weather. Again, I don’t feel much of a need to go back to Amsterdam ever again, which probably means I’ll somehow accidentally get there a third time.
You can check out the rest of my pictures here, if you’re interested.