Barcelona

Barcelona. Very much anticipated by me and hyped up by everyone else who has been there before. We arrived by high speed train in the evening. We checked into our hostel, called Albareda, where we had a bunk in a six-person room. The hostel is tucked away in the southwest corner of Old City Barcelona, more or less the downtown area. The marina and water are only two blocks away, and the famed Montjuic Hill looms overhead. All the rooms and bathrooms are located on the second floor, and the reception area, common room, and kitchenette/dining room, all of which could resemble an IKEA showroom, are on the first floor. We met two of our roommates almost immediately, sisters from Chile. They looked to be about our age, maybe a year or two younger. I’d let you know what their names were, but they were long, Chilean, and somewhat complicated. But they spoke relatively good English, and we found out that one of them had actually gone to school at IU for a short while. Being hungry, we asked the girl working the reception desk where we could find an authentic, cheap, yet good dinner, and we were directed a few blocks away to a hole-in-the-wall bar, called La Barriga. You know when someone orders a lot of food, and someone else at the table jokes that “you just ordered the whole menu?” Well, we ordered every tapa on the menu for dinner this particular night, so literally, the whole tapas menu. We even ordered one dish twice. The best part; every tapa was less than 2 euro, with the exception of their signature dish which came out at a sky-high 2.50, so dinner turned out to be around 12 euro per person with a few beers included. As the FC Barcelona futbol team had a match that night, the bar eventually filled up with fans, and we watched the start of the game of Europe’s premier sport.

We met another one of our roommates the following morning over breakfast. Chris from Austin, Texas, is the most non-Texan-like Texan I have ever met. A mechanical engineer (I remember sort of being one for a bit), he decided that after two years working a job he didn’t enjoy, he would up and travel for a few months. He seemed like good company, so we would try to see if he wanted to grab drinks at some point during our stay in Barcelona.

The day kicked off with a stroll up La Rambla, a large pedestrian street through downtown. Think of a typical large street in a city, but the lanes of traffic are for people and the sidewalk is for cars, and you have La Rambla. Newsstands, vendors of paintings, trinkets, flowers, and all things touristy lined the street. Off La Rambla is the Boqueria Market, a lively market that sells fresh produce, fruit, fish and meat. It was almost like an Asian market, except it was clean, organized, the goods looked much more presentable, and it wasn’t overly crowded. So all in all, nothing like an Asian market. We each grabbed some freshly squeezed fruit juice, strawberry banana orange for me, and mango for Nick, and moved on. The next sighting was Placa Reial, the supposed lively and busy plaza. It’s supposed to be a happening nightlife area, but since it was the middle of the day, it was rather dead. We sort of wandered through the streets downtown, walking through parts of the Barri Gotic, then catching a glimpse of the water, strolling through Parc de la Cuitadella, and walking up to the Els Encants flea market. This was a true flea market. Piles of clothes were strewn over tables, or even the ground, with people rummaging through it. Other stalls sold old and used powertools and various electronics. Not spending much time in that market, we walked towards the Segrada Familia, the signature cathedral designed by Gaudi. The cathedral was quite a sight, the towers rising well over the rest of the city. The cathedral is under construction, and will be until 2020. Opting out of the expensive admission fee, we took our pictures and moved on.

We spent the next part of our day figuring out how to get to Geneva, as the supposed overnight train we were supposed to take wasn’t running the night we needed. At the train station’s information desk, a guy was able to give us an alternative route, consisting of 3 different trains, which seemed to be our only option (Barcelona to Narbonne, Narbonne to Toulouse, and Toulouse overnight to Geneva). As we booked our reservations, we found out they were not able to book our Toulouse to Geneva train, and we would just have to hope for the best when we got to Toulouse (which would be almost 11:30PM, when the ticketing office would be closed). Should be an adventure.

After figuring out of train situation, at least sort of, we headed back downtown for a more thorough exploration. The downtown atmosphere, to me, is what separates Barcelona from Madrid, aside from the obvious geographic difference of Barcelona being on the water. The streets of the downtown area are predominantly pedestrian; narrow with an old town feel. Small boutiques, cafes, restaurants and tapas bars line the neighborhood of alleyways, for lack of a better description. It’s almost maze-like, except it’s small enough that you would eventually walk into a major street, so you can’t get too lost. We started at the Santa Maria del Mar church in the Ribera section, and just meandered our way through the streets, doing some window shopping, eventually making it back to the Barri Gotic and seeing Catedral, a gothic cathedral also under construction, which denied us the beauty of the building.

Back at the hostel, Chris happened to be in the common room, and we invited him along for dinner. He had met this girl, Kelsie, during his travels in Grenada, and she was also in Barcelona at the same time, so she came along too. Kelsie is 18, from Alberta, Canada, and is traveling for 5 months around Europe on her own. I think many of you would agree that takes quite the sense of adventure and wanderlust. Per our hostel recommendation, we had dinner at a restaurant called El Boton Charro, where they had a menu del dia. I’m going to take a few sentences and describe menu del dia for those of you who don’t know what it is. Menu del dia, or menu of the day, is where you get a list of starters and main courses and you simply choose a dish from each list. It also includes bread, dessert, and a drink (which can be alcohol) for a set price. While we discovered menu del dia in Madrid, we fully exploited the joys of it in Barcelona, as it’s usually cheap, at least for the amount of food you get. In this particular instance, dinner was 9 euros per person, and that included a full bottle of wine for the table.

After dinner, we went to the Dow Jones Bar, which I have been waiting to do for years. The bar works almost like a stock market, with the list of drinks on computer monitors that line above the bar. When you order a drink, the price of it goes up, but the price of all the other drinks in that category go down. Every once in a while, there would be a “stock market crash,” and all the prices would drop down for a short period of time. If I start a bar, it will be modeled similarly, but it’ll be a bit more sophisticated and contemporary. I’ll send out the grand opening invites in a decade, give or take a few years, so stay tuned. After a few drinks, I made the wonderful discovery that irish car bombs were 4 euros (this was a set price, not affected by the rest of the ‘stock’), so you should know the rest of the story.

The second day began without the hangover that ensued in Lisbon, so half the day was thankfully not lost. We took the funicular (read: tram) part way up Montjuic Hill, and walked around the museums in the area. The biggest one, Palau Nacional, is a Catalonian museum that, to our dismay, was also under construction. It seems that every good looking piece of architecture in this city is under construction. So sorry if Barcelona doesn’t seem like a good looking place on facebook. Walking up the winding roads, we saw the Olympic stadiums where the ’92 summer Olympics were held. And perched atop the hill was Montjuic Castle, which provided stunning views of both the city and Mediterranean Sea (at least I think that’s the body of water). I should mention that our days in Spain were sun and 60s. Couldn’t have asked for much better. We had planned on taking a gondola from the hill that crossed over Port Vell and to the beach, but it wasn’t running this day due to high winds, a slight hiccup to a great day. Instead, we walked through the marina, where some incredible yachts could be sighted. The one that caught our immediate attention was slightly further away, but a yacht that is roughly 300 feet long is bound to draw attention in a marina, even from a distance. It was too far away to read the name unfortunately. However, another yacht, the Amadeus, at a measly 220 feet, was used by Bono to cruise the world, so that was cool to know. Following the marina, we walked alongside the beaches of Barcelona, enjoying some surf, sand and sun. For those suffering cold winters back in the States, boy… that sucks. Resisting temptation to pop my head into the waterfront casino of Barcelona, we headed back to the hostel to figure out dinner.

We had a nicer dinner off La Rambla at a place called La Fonda. While it was a bit touristy, we enjoyed paella, a popular dish in Spain that more or less contains rice mixed with seafood, a rather tasty dish. Dessert was Crème de Catalona, an amazing pudding. I figured that while we were in Spain, I would have to save some sangria. So we dropped by La Oveja Negra, a bar that served sangria on tap. You should know that the smallest serving is half a liter, so in wine equivalency, over half a bottle. The bar in general was clearly a party bar, and the floor reminded me, for the Purdue-goers or visitors, of Stacks. Except it didn’t have the immediate dirty feel or the smell. But who knows after midnight?

For the last day in Barcelona, we made a trip up to the north-most part of the city to visit Gaudi’s Park. Like the rest of his work, the buildings and structures in the park were very unique and different than traditional buildings you would expect to see in a park. While browsing trinkets that vendors were selling on basically pieces of cloth on the ground, there was a police sighting, and the vendors quickly folded up their sacks, took off running, and scattered. It was a funny sight, except for people who were in mid-transaction and were disappointed they didn’t acquire their wanted items. I figured that since soccer was so big in Spain (and all of Europe, I suppose), I should try to check out a stadium. Naber wasn’t nearly as keen on that, but kindly obliged to tag along. We headed for the FC Barcelona Stadium, big from the outside and seemed cool enough. Too bad admission into an empty stadium was 17 euros. Ridiculous, by my standards. I’m not paying that much to see a field of evenly cut grass. I was a bit bummed out, but don’t try too hard to feel bad for me. A casual sandwich lunch, and we were on the way to Geneva.