This is the retroactive diary of days 5-9 of my time in Spain, which mostly took place in Barcelona. It was awesome! The trip, that is. You can read the diary and decide the rest for yourself.
You can also check out Part 1 and Part 2 if you missed them the first time.
Day 5:
We move slowly on our last morning in Madrid, as the four days of non-stop activity are finally taking their toll. We're catching a train to Barcelona in a couple of hours, but I could sleep the rest of the day.
We haven't even left yet and I'm already tired, but I remind myself that I'll be meeting up with my sister and her family soon and looking at Gaudi's masterpiece, La Sagrada Familia, and that makes it better.
I run to the supermarket two blocks away to grab a few things for lunch. As I check out, the cashier asks me in Spanish whether I have a grocery store rewards card.
Just as I'm starting to feel like I belong here, it's time to go.
As we arrive in Barcelona, I realize I need to figure out where we're going once we disembark. I map out the subway system and we're ready to go. There's just one thing wrong.
I'm having an unusual amount of difficulty reading the signs. They seem sort-of familiar but still indecipherable. After a few puzzling minutes I realize that the signs aren't in Spanish but it's French-influenced cousin Catalon. This is going to be an adventure.
In Madrid, only three people spoke English in the entire city. We had read in the guidebooks that English was more prevalent in Barcelona. This turned out to be true. In Barcelona, 12 people in the entire city spoke English. Of course, five of them were members of my family, but let's not get overly technical.
We get to the apartment and check in. It occurs to me that amidst the activity of the last week, I didn't double-verify what time my sister is supposed to get here. She had originally told me 10, and then 6, but I didn't reconfirm that before she left for Spain 3 weeks ago.
Regardless, we have at least an hour, so we make the 15-minute walk to the local public market, which is called La Boqueria, but would more accurately be described as Heaven. It holds the largest collection of fruit, meats and seafood the world has ever known. The fruit is colorful and cheap, and you could devour it all on the spot if only people weren't bumping into you all the time. (Weird thing about Europe: no one says "excuse me" when they bump into you or block your way, because it happens so often. I never got used to that. I kept saying the Spanish equivalent of excuse me when I bumped into people, and they looked seemed more offended that I apologized than that I ran into them in the first place.)
But there isn't too much time to get lost in the sea of colorful fruit, so we take a quick walk through and come back.
There's still no sign of my sister, so we pass the time with a 2-Euro bottle of wine from the grocery store, where I'm again asked if I have a customer loyalty card. I'm picking up right where I left off!
On my way back to the apartment I'm also asked for directions. Weirdly, the signs are predominately in Catalon, but everyone seems to speak Spanish.
We pass the time looking out from our balcony with our wine and the evening turns into night. By about 8, we assume that my sister and her family must have been on the 10 o'clock flight after all, so we make the 15-minute trek back to the market.
It was closed. So were most of the shops we passed on the way to it. I guess Barcelona doesn't stay open as late as Madrid. The guidebooks didn't mention that either. If I ever meet Mr. Fodor or Mr. Frommer (assuming they're not actually the same person), we're going to have a serious talk.
We walk La Rambla, Barcelona's long tree-lined pedestrian walkway, and head back, where my sister, brother-in law and their 8 year old daughter have just arrived. A celebratory glass of wine and some conversation later, and we all turn in early.
Day 6
"We have to go," my wife says as the alarm sounds at some ungodly time like 7:30. "The guidebooks say if you don't get to Sagrada Familia early, the line gets crazy."
"I don't know, maybe it would be better to get a good night's sleep and then deal with the line?" I suggest.
"We can sleep when we're dead."
Touche.
So Liz and I walk the 8 blocks to Sagrada Familia while my family sleeps in. The adrenaline takes over the fatigue as we walk. If there's one thing in Spain we wanted to see, this is it.
We turn the corner to find it, and expect to behold majesty. Instead, we see scaffolding. Lots of scaffolding. The cathedral is open, but still unfinished, and the construction on the front overwhelms the church, which also looks surprisingly small.
Even worse, we get there by 9:15, but it's already too late. The line wraps around the entire building, and a guide is telling people not to bother because it's a four-hour wait.
Rick Steves and his cohorts have failed us again.
Between the construction on the city's signature landmark, the early closing times and the ubiquitous Catalon, Barcelona was not off to a good start.
But at least the guide didn't issue her wait-time warning in Catalon, or we would have wasted our whole day.
We take the walk to a couple other Gaudi architectural sites, which both surpass our suddenly lowered expectations. We met my family, go back to La Boqueria, wander the streets and take in the Picasso Museum.
Everyone else went to bed while my sister and I stay up late discussing Life, the Universe and Everything, and what life might look like if all our dreams come true.
It's what we do. And by the end of the day, Barcelona seems like a wonderful place to be.
Days 7-8
Friday and Saturday in Barcelona are a blur. There was so much to see and we did it so quickly, that it all runs together.
We went to the Barcelona Cathedral, which was beautiful and reminded my brother-in-law and I both of Notre Dame. I tried to light a candle for my most fervent prayer request, but the wicks were so short that I extinguished four before I finally got one to light. I like to think that the one new flame I eventually lit burned with the energy of my prayer and the prior four combined. We took the elevator up to the roof and had an amazing view of the city.
We had a tasty dinner of fresh squid and spicy potatoes, we wandered, ate some churros and went to the Museum of Chocolate. We told inside jokes and delighted my eight-year-old niece with stories about the craziness of all her other family members. Like the time her granddad put catfish in our swimming pool.
I stuck my arm in the Mediterranean, and I rammed unsuccessfully into the base of two more orange trees, hoping one would fall. I ate a killer paella, sat on shaded tables in beautiful squares, and got lost more than a couple of times.
Finally, in a last gasp effort, we dashed to Sagrada Familia to take one more shot at getting in. Amazingly, late Saturday afternoon was quiet and we got inside after a 25-minute wait. The interior was striking in its simplicity. From an architect known for his outlandish designs, the inside was surprisingly and beautifully plain.
The building doesn't look that tall from the outside, but on the inside, the undecorated brown columns seem to rise to just short of Heaven. The windows are stained and beautiful, but the rest of the cathedral is overwhelming mostly for its for its sheer simplistic magnitude.
A viewing area was fenced off on the backside of the church, which was blessedly scaffold-free. It was amazing in its detail, as seemingly hundreds of scenes were carved into the surface of the cathedral. The door of the cathedral looked like a yawning mouth swallowing unholy tourists that by the dozens, and spitting them out forever changed by the majesty of the inside.
While my wife took pictures, I slipped away to a little prayer cubby facing a stained-glass window. I prayed silently for the same things that I pray for often, but somehow those familiar requests seemed more powerful here. The words echoed in my head, and then seemed to linger in the air, as though this space contained some kind of supernatural microphone. "Whatever might come between now and the next time I'm here," I asked, "guide me through it and show me where to go."
Sagrada Familia had redeemed itself from the scaffolding. There's a presence in the building that feels like the energy of millions of earnest prayers bundled together, even amidst the noise of the gawking tour groups.
I'm glad we came back.
Day 9
If you a flight leaving from the Barcelona airport anytime this decade, you should probably starting heading that way.
We picked up a taxi two and a half hours before our flight.
After a surprisingly long cab ride we got to the airport. I took a right upon entering, as the cab driver had instructed (thankfully, they don't seem to use "apunte" (or whatever that word was) in Barcelona as their vague multi-purpose preposition, as they do in Madrid). But when we looked at the flight screen, no American Airlines flights were listed and all the departing flights were to somewhere else in Europe.
So he were are, an hour and forty-five minutes from the departure of our international flight, in the wrong place, where no one spoke English and the signs weren't even Spanish. Panic began to set in.
There was a long walkway that claimed to lead to another "concourse" (not "terminal"), but that might still not take us to where we needed to be. No signs mentioned anything about American Airlines, so it seemed risky to try it.
Also, we had strategically spent all of our Euro except a few coins, so if we needed to catch a bus to some other terminal, and the fare was more than a couple Euro, we'd be out of luck.
To make matters worse, there were the only two customer service desks in sight had lines that appeared to be at least half an hour long. We wandered around aimlessly, looking for someone to whom I could ask directions, praying I'd be able to understand them.
After a distressing few minutes, I found an agent took pity on me and told me to take the free shuttle on the front corner when I put on my extra-desperate face and used overly formal Spanish.
The Barcelona Airport was apparently two different airports that not only existed completely independently of each other, and didn't even acknowledge the other's existence, and we had been in the wrong one.
After an excruciatingly long shuttle ride across the "same" airport, we got to our 8-person check-in line with over an hour to spare and took at deep breath. Or at least we did until we noticed that our line hadn't moved in the 10 minutes we'd been standing there.
We finally got to the front of the line 45 minutes before our flight, having not yet cleared security. Apparently the check-in delay was because our flight was oversold and they were trying to find volunteers to take another one. He offered us $1200 and a free hotel to stay another night in Barcelona, but that would have meant coming back to this airport tomorrow so no amount of money on earth wasn't worth it.
Instead, we took the same deal to take a connecting flight through Miami that would get us home four hours later.
We gained seven hours traveling back through time zones, so we had a 31-hour day. The 10-hour flight to Miami seemed to take twice as long as the 7.5 hour flight from New York, but we felt ok when we landed.
A few hours into our layover, our sleep-deprived bodies started to crash. I walked to an airport coffee shop to try to find a way to survive the layover.
The menu was in Spanish, and the barista didn't speak English either. My cell phone worked now, but I was still basically in Spain.
It was a fitting end.
We eventually slept our way through the flight home, where a friend picked us up and took us home.
It's weird to be back. I instinctively spoke broken Spanish to strangers for a day or two upon my return, and I didn't feel totally right from the jetlag for about a week. I still miss the free olives that come with every order. I miss the tapas and the two-dollar wine. I miss the beauty of the Moorish architecture and the palm trees, I miss the dinners where the waiter doesn't pressure you out of your table the moment your plate is empty. I miss the fresh, more flavorful food, I miss my sister and her family and I even miss the orange trees whose fruit lay tantalizingly beyond my grasp.
I miss the feeling of to expanding my horizons to the point of almost fitting in to a different culture.
I'll be back here someday. I don't know when. I never dreamed it would take six years to get to Europe after the last time I'd come. I guess you never really know how life would unfold in the future, so all you can do is enjoy the moment.
But I know, barring some unforeseen misfortune, I'll be back again. Part of me was always here, even before I came.
And the next time, I hope you'll come with me. And if you don't, you should make it a point to get here on your own.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment