Day 12: Montjuic and the Coast

We started out today with a trip to Montjuic, which is a park overlooking the city. From the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, you get the best views of the city spreading out below, and a view out to sea. We then walked around the park until we came to the site of the Olympic Stadium they renovated for the 1992 olympics. Barcelona is proud of their games, as they are one of few cities to ever turn a profit on them. The Olympic Stadium illustrates how they did this. They spent the requisite piles of cash on infrastructure and civic improvements, and you can tell that they took pride in those. This stadium, for the opening and closing ceremonies and track and field events, was an afterthought. Barcelona had several big stadia in use already (chief among them Barcelona football club's legendary Camp Nou), and so they renovated this to hold 55,000 people, and gave it pretty basic amenities. It now gets used once or twice a year for loud rock concerts, and looks like a mediocre college stadium, but that's why Barcelona made a profit on their games and Beijing didn't.

After Montjuic, we had a lunch of bread and St. Marcellin cheese (it's like super brie that you can't bring back home because it's not pasteurized and runny and delicious), and went for a bike ride. Barcelona has bike trails everywhere, but tourists have to rent bikes rather than use the cycle hire network. Some bike shops have quality equipment. Others do not. Ours was unfortunately the latter. One bike had a bent pedal and a gearshift that didn't work, and the other had a seat that was so uncomfortable we had to take turns riding it. Fortunately, the path along the coast is quite lovely, and we enjoyed ourselves greatly when we weren't the one on the bike with the busted seat. After this, we had another huge dinner at the hostel (with a lot of wine), and rang in the new year with 12 grapes, per Spanish tradition.

Day 11: Sagrada Familia

Today, we had tickets to go see the Sagrada Familia. This church is the main life's work of Antoni Gaudi, the most orginal of the Art Nouveau architects who worked in Barcelona (the locals called this style of architecture modernisme). Sagrada Familia was begun in 1882, and Gaudi took it over in 1883. For the next 43 years until his death, he radically redisgned it from a Neo-Gothic cathedral into the form that's still being built today. Gaudi's design is unlike anything that has ever been built or ever will be built again. It's based on a Gothic cathedral with big stone columns and arched vaults, but Gaudi was a keen observer of the natural world, and everything in the church is designed around it. Instead of the Romanesque columns in every other cathedral, Gaudi's evoke trees. The ceiling is meant to evoke a forest. The exterior is covered in naturalistic sculpture. The height of he building is beyond ambitious, with a plan for 12 bell towers, 4 evangelist towers, a Virgin Mary tower, and a Jesus tower that will be 560 feet tall over a central vault some 160 or so feet high. The whole thing is funded by donations (your admission is a donation), but I promise the visit (and a trip up a facade tower) is worth double the cost of admission. This total reliance on donations is why work went slowly until 1992 (when they instituted admission). Since 1992, the pace of construction has increased dramatically, and the former pipe dream of finishing this thing will now be reality by 2026, and the structure has been fully enclosed and usable as a basilica since 2010.

After that, we went back to Mercat Santa Caterina to get some cheese and saffron, and a caganer. After setting up a bike tour for tomorrow, we went to Passeig de Gracia to see a house (Casa Batllo) and apartment block (Casa Mila) designed by Gaudi. Both of these are now museums, both require advance tickets or very long lines (in low season, I should add), and both are almost as much as a full narrated tour and tower visit to Sagrada Familia (Casa Batllo is €21.50, Sagrada Familia is €24). If you aren't oozing cash, do Sagrada Familia, and take a picture.

We returned to the hostel for dinner this evening. For €15 per person, we got four courses (tapas, salads, main, and dessert), each with a wine pairing (rose, white, red, and a Spanish sparkling wine called cava). We're drunk now, and it's bedtime.

Day 9-10: El Born and Dali

Yesterday, we went to go buy gifts for people. We headed towards the El Born neighborhood, where we were distracted by a brightly colored roof. When we went over to see what sort of building had a roof like that, we found the Mercat Santa Catalina, which has been there since 1848, the roof being a modern addition. Unlike Mercado San Miguel, which is mostly for tapas, Mercat Santa Catalina is mostly for non tourists to buy food. It's full of butchers, fishmongers, cheese sellers, and green grocers with the occasional bar or two (this is still Spain after all). We got some sherry vinegar, and wandered about the neighborhood until it was time for lunch. We met up with a consultant from Adam's job who lives here, and he took us out for a lovely menu del Dia. Afterwards, we planned to resume our shopping. Unfortunately, on Mondays in December, many places close up shop at 5PM, including the aforementioned marketplace. After consoling ourselves with a pint from a local brewpub called BlackLab  (which was by far the best beer we had in Spain), we went to Las Ramblas to find some knockoff Barcelona jerseys. We did, and managed to haggle a good price, but alas, they were youth size large, and therefore only fit Alecia. We then went into the adjoining Mercat Boqueria, which is easily twice the size of Mercat Santa Catalina. As the main marketplace of the city, they have some rare things (the Spanish don't care for hot peppers, but if you need habañeros to cook with, they'll be here) and some expensive things (kobe beef, anyone?), but everything else they've got is more expensive than it would be elsewhere.

Showing up in low season may play hell with opening hours for mercats, but it does have its perks. One of these is that you can decide to go to the Museu-Theatre Dali in Figueres the day before you go, not buy tickets in advance, and still get in. Figueres is about 2 hours away by medium distance train (the high speed will get you there in about 40 minutes, but only runs in summer, and will not be a cheap trip). Once there, the ticket line for day of tickets was 50 minutes at 2PM in low season. Double or triple the tourist numbers, and you'll be waiting in line for longer than you'll spend in the museum. The museum's collection of his original oil paintings has a lot of his early work, which was done while he was figuring things out, and his later work, when he was sort of copying his earlier self, but does have a few gems, including his famed portrait of his wife that turns into Abe Lincoln, and Leda Atomica. However, the main draws are the museum itself, which was designed by Dali, and features a route through the galleries that is deliberately confusing (the man was drugs after all), and the jewelry he made. Dali designed a bunch of pieces of jewelry from the late 40s to the mid 60s which are as fantastically bizarre as his paintings themselves. He made flowers, rings that loon like corsets, literal ruby lips with pearly teeth, a heart pendant that beats, and a Byzantine icon with a face viewed through a giant gem. Tampa may have a better collection of oil paintings, but they don't have anything like that, and their museum was designed to make sense on the inside. The only downside is that round trip train fare and an admission will run you €40 (36 if you only use local trains, more if you take an AVE), but if you enjoy Dali, it will be worth the trip.