Barcelona II: Looooong Day

As always, photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/manda_face/

03 marzo 2009

*******Saturday*********
We woke up at 08:30 to get breakfast. The hostel had a pretty nice spread compared to some of the other ones we'd stayed at, and I was able to eat some cereal so I was happy. After eating, we went to walk down La Rambla. Even early in the morning, the street was getting full with vendors selling all kinds of (adorable) pets, thousands of flowers, souvenirs and street performers everywhere. You know those guys who stand on a platform on a sidewalk, have painted themselves gold and stand really still for hours? Think of that, but down entire sections of the street. Also, think of them way more elaborate. Like one guy in a giant bird costume, a couple guys in headless-man costumes and another guy, painted gold of course, sitting on a gold painted bike next to a skeleton lady on another gold painted bike.

We killed a few hours there until the tour our hostel offered in connection with the Travel Bar a few blocks down for free. The tour was supposed to start at 11:30. We waited there with two other girls until close to noon when the girl giving the tour came over to us and said she had to cancel it because not enough people had showed up. Still, she was really nice about it and marked on our map the places she would've taken us. Then she gave us a discount for the pub crawl that night, which worked out pretty well.

It was kind of difficult to tell where we should be going when we actually started walking around the Gothic Quarter though, so we didn't see everything she marked. Still, we're pretty sure we walked down the streets where the Jewish area used to be and saw a few really nice cathedrals and piazzas. After we figured we explored a good amount of it, we headed towards the metro to head up towards some of Gaudi's buildings.

I'd never heard of Gaudi until I did a bit of research about the city before the trip. He's basically a really cool architect that made buildings that look like they're dripping and curving with lots of fluid lines. If I were rich, I would've gone inside all of them too, because they were really fascinating from the outside.

I don't know if Gaudi was like Picasso, where he had some kind of vision problem and just saw things as curvy. Maybe he wasn't a genius architect at all and that really was the way he saw the world, but if that's true then he still saw everything in a really cool way. Plus you have to have some skill to figure out how to make a building look like it's melting but still stay standing through centuries.

We stopped at Sagrada Familia, Casa Milla and Casa Botllo. Sagrada Familia is still unfinished and has been under construction since Gaudi started it some centuries ago. The other casas were similar, but the exteriors were very bendy and looked kind of like they'd been molded from Play-Doh.

We also tried to hit up Park Guell where a whole bunch more of Gaudi's buildings were supposed to be. When we got to the metro stop for it, we saw a sign pointing us towards what we thought was the direction of Park Guell. We saw a giant hill at the top of which was something that looked like it had a lot of trees and plants so we figured it had to be right.

Well, after about a 20 minute trek uphill we ended up at a park called something like the Garden of Tourists. Aka, not Park Guell. We stayed there and looked around for a few minutes. It was pretty, yeah, but it was a small average park. We started to leave and looked to the left. Down another hill, then up another really huge hill, off in the distance we saw Park Guell. We saw the staircases that lined the road to get to it and the ant-sized people headed towards it. It would've been really cool to see, but there was no way Hailey was climbing that hill. I felt bad for making her climb the first one to the wrong park anyway, so we headed back to the metro.

We metroed back towards the hostel and Hailey went back for a nap. I wasn't particularly tired yet, so I figured I'd explore some of the windy streets in the gothic quarter that we'd passed through and had some really awesome looking shops.

I found a Quiksilver, a Vans store that was blasting "One Armed Scissor" by At the Drive-In, and a Claire's that I came this close to buying a new bag from. Other than that, all the stores were names I had never heard of or seen before. One was called "New Yorker" or "New York Style" or something like that and was basically like another H&M.

Before we had arrived in Barcelona, one of the info packets I had been reading said there was a really cool hipster market called El Mercadillo somewhere in the gothic quarter but that it was really hard to find. I don't know if that was a lie or if I just ended up on some really obscure streets, but I walked right past it so of course I went in.

It was set up like a really crowded and smaller version of the Tri-County Flea Market. All the stalls were selling punkish and hipster items. Giant "Palenstino" neckerchiefs were everywhere, for sale and on kids and merchants necks. Gauged earrings, punky bracelets, checkerboards and some really cool clothing brand was everywhere. Barcelona has no shortage of hipsters just walking through the streets, but this market was packed with them and it was definitely where they bought all their stuff.

I didn't buy anything during my stroll, but I think this was the first time I've really enjoyed window shopping. So many of the stores have such cool things that were just really awesome to look at. I need to get back to this city so I can see more of Gaudi's architecture, more of the town in general, and more of the shops in the gothic area.

When I got back to the hostel, Hailey was literally just waking up from her nap. It was around 17:30, still a couple hours too early for dinner. We both sat on our beds filling in postcards we'd bought from a stand the day before. I guess after window shopping I was more tired than I thought, because all of a sudden I woke up on my bed a little after 18:30 not remembering that I'd fallen asleep.

We went out in search of stamps (which we never found) and some food for dinner. We needed to meet at the Travel Bar at 21:30 for the bar crawl and there was a 30 minute Flamenco show we wanted to see at 20:30 beforehand. We walked down to La Rambla again, in the direction of the flamenco show and the Travel Bar.

Hailey considered KFC for dinner while my mouth watered at some of the surprisingly many vegetarian and vegan restaurants in the area (yet another reason I need to go back). In the end, we found a place with three tapas and a drink for 7.90 euro. We got six between us that ended up being all vegetarian, which worked out well for me. I think my favorite way to eat a meal is tapas since you get to try so many different things, and the tapas we had in Barcelona was insanely delicious. And, again, more fantastic sangria, this time made with cava, or champagne.

We found a gelato place near the restaurant and on the way to the flamenco show. I wasn't sure what to expect of gelato in Spain, but it was surprisingly good and pretty close to the quality of the converted ex-bank now-gelateria in Viterbo.

The flamenco show was amazing. The musicians played for about 15 minutes and the dancer came out for the second half of the show. I wish our seats positioned us more so we could've seen the guitar player's hands, because he was incredible at Spanish guitar. I was enthralled and spent most of the time, even after the dancer came on stage, watching him. The girl who was singing had a really shrill voice, which wasn't really pleasing. But the guy who was the other singer had a great stage presence and a really quirky way of moving his shoulders while he clapped his hands. The dancer was also amazing. I tried to imagine how long she must've been dancing to be able to move her feet that quickly.

After the show we went to the pub crawl and had a last delicious sangria as our free drink at the Travel Bar. It was a lot of fun, especially after we met three girls from Vassar who were studying in Paris and on their spring break. We met them at the third bar before the club and hung out with them for the rest of the night. One of them was even from Port Washington, knows Jesse and is family friends with Steven Donnelly. Talk about random, but I love six degrees of separation like that.

We enjoyed our drinks, chatted with the girls we met and danced a bit at the club at the end of the night. I think a guy tried to teach me some salsa dancing at one point but I definitely was not able to follow his feet.

We left late and took the long walk back from Barceloneta to our hostel. We did pass the Columbus statue at the bottom of La Rambla though, so I was glad we had the chance to see that before we left. By the time we got back to the area with the hostel, we were too tired to stop for donor kebabs or felafel or at the caffe our almost-tour guide had told us had amazing, think hot chocolate that they sold with bread to dunk. It's making my mouth water now and is yet another reason I need to get back to Barcelona.

We were back in the hostel around 04:00, enough for about six hours of sleep if we missed breakfast and woke up in time for check-out.