Marty Stepp

On Saturday 9/19, my birthday, Jessica and I both arrived in Barcelona.  We checked into our hotel, which looks like something sent back in time from the year 3000.  Everything is futuristic and seems to put form above function.  The shower door is too small to be effective; the seating is round and hard, like something out of the Jetsons; the TV is flat and mounted in the wall; there are fake plants directly sprouting out of bizarre angular tables on one wall; everything is made of metal and glass; and the bathroom door is a sliding glass door that has been blurred, so while you can’t REALLY see details of the person inside, you can still kind of tell what’s up in there.  It’s not a bad hotel, but the design is pretty funky.  It’s not in the heart of town, but it’s right next to a major subway line so we can get to everything in short order.

The hotel has a pool, but the whole thing is green and nasty and not usable, unfortunately.  When we complained about the pool being shit, the guy at the counter lied and said it was supposed to be that color, that it’s part of the design of the pool.  Yeah, right.  We should probably complain again and ask for a discount.  The weather isn’t really great for swimming anyway.  It’s partly cloudy and in the 70s, with occasional rain; not quite warm and sunny enough.

For my birthday dinner, Jess and I went to La Rambla, Barcelona’s main bustling thoroughfare.  It’s a huge long street with a central brick walkway, full of shops and restaurants and bars and tons of people.  There were jugglers there, musicians, puppeteers; we got offered a chance to purchase some “hashish o cocaina” (we politely declined).

There are a lot of people in this area, mostly Spaniards but also various tourists.  We got to do a lot of people-watching.  Jess and I decided that Spanish women are pretty, but not drop-dead gorgeous.  Mostly they have great olive skin and good fashionable clothes, but beyond that they are not perfect either.  We said there are a lot of 6es and 7s, but that’s it; not a lot of terrible 3-4s, and not a lot of 8-10s.  Compare that to the USA, where I think there is more of a broad range.

La Rambla connects to a set of roads and alleys named Barri Gotic that I guess was the center of the old city of Barcelona.  There are tons of small restaurants and bars tucked into all these alleys.  It’s a cool scene, not at all sketchy like you’d think an alley would be in the USA.  Lots of people are roaming around having a good time and making noise.

We stopped at a restaurant there named El Salon that came highly recommended by Jessica’s Rough Guide book about Barcelona.  They served us a GREAT dinner that made me very happy on my birthday.  We had some Spanish wine called cava, which is a kind of sparkling carbonated wine from this area.  It was good stuff.  We had yummy salads with serrano ham in them, this delicious duck pate on dry bread, a rare tuna steak, and more.  It was a delightful meal and a great way to celebrate my birthday.  During dinner we waxed philosophical about life, love, politics, and solved most of the world’s problems.  A very productive evening.

On Sunday 9/20 Jessica and I went to Sagrada Familia (“Holy Family”), a huge unfinished Catholic church that has been under construction since 1882.  Apparently it’s the top tourist attraction in Barcelona.  It is not close to being done, and they expect it to take until 2026 or later to complete it.  Part of the reason it’s taken so long is that they stopped working on it during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s; also the economy in Barcelona is pretty terrible, so they haven’t been able to throw as much personpower at it as they might like.  It isn’t yet used for actual church services but is solely a tourist attraction for now.

La Sagrada Familia is considered the masterpiece design of famous Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi (1852 – 1926).  He is huge in Barcelona and designed many famous buildings and monuments and things in this area.  And yes, Gaudi is the guy who gave birth to the English word “gaudy” to describe something that is tacky or unconventional.  That’s the way Gaudi designs things, apparently: the tops of the church spires have these weird round brightly colored fruit ball things on them, and the towers have these weird swooping shapes to them.  It’s a very strange looking, yet very impressive, design.

Even though the place isn’t complete, that doesn’t stop them from fencing it off and charging people 11 Euros to take a tour of it.  Then they charge you an additional 2.5 Euros to go up their elevator to actually be up in its towers and see the view.  Barely any of it is accessible to the public, and it’s full of boards and planks and construction equipment.  There’s a small part of the ground floor area that is accessible, and the lift takes you up a few hundred feet, so you get a neat view of the beautiful city of Barcelona.  But there is very little space up there, and you almost immediately need to start going back down the stairs and exit for lack of space and lack of anything else to see or do up there.

On one side it has a huge carved nativity scene, and its outside also has a huge crucified Jesus.  They have a little mini-museum in its basement that shows lots of little models of what the church *will* look like 20 years from now.  It also has plaques of the various sculptors that Gaudi hired to help design all the statues and sculptures and such around the building.  The museum isn’t all that impressive unless you are a huge Gaudi fan or architecture fan, in my opinion.  Maybe in 2026 it will kick ass.

Jess and I had some late-lunch tapas at a place just outside Sagrada Familia.  We got this tortilla espanola dish which is like a pie made of eggs and potatoes and onions and stuff.  No cheese; perfect.  They also have lots of smallish light sandwiches such as tuna or calamari or thin sliced serrano ham.  That plus a salad makes for a fairly light yummy meal.

After visiting the unfinished church we went back to the La Rambla thoroughfare.  Unfortunately it then started raining cats and dogs.  Everybody fled the center of the street and huddled under restaurant awnings and the few covered sections on the side of the road.

Jess and I camped out there for about half an hour waiting for it to die down.  It didn’t.  Luckily Jess had an umbrella and raincoat that we donned to stay kind of sort of dry.  Out of nowhere TONS of guys showed up trying to sell umbrellas to everybody.  It was crazy; literally every 20-30 seconds a new guy would walk past shouting, “paragua?  paragua?!” (umbrella)

We eventually made our way down the wet street to a restaurant called El Choquito that served us some decent food.  We tried to do things the Spanish way by having a light dinner.  We got salad and mussels and some mini chorizo sausages and some yummy sangria to drink.  If you haven’t had sangria, it’s basically wine mixed with fruit juice, often served in a tall glass with ice, fruit slices in it, and a straw.  It is quite nice.

As we were eating we noticed that on the nearby TV, it was playing the final of the Eurobasketball championships between Spain and Serbia.  Spain kicked Serbia’s ass and won by over 20 points.  It was kind of interesting to watch since Spain’s team has a lot of current and former NBA players including Pau/Marc Gasol, Rudy Fernandez, Jorge Garbajosa, Juan Carlos Navarro, Ricky Rubio, and one or two others.  The players and the fans seemed extremely excited to win.  It’s refreshing to see people get genuinely excited about things.  Why don’t Americans do that?

We lingered at the restaurant for some time, and then we decided to make our way back home to the hotel.  We ended our night probably much earlier than the locals (not long after midnight — they stay up for hours past that), but we want to try to get out earlier tomorrow to see more sights.  We suffered a bit today for starting our travels so late after sleeping in too much.

More photos can be found in my Barcelona photo album.