Barcelona

Apr 5-9

Having had enough of cold and rain in Ireland for the moment, and knowing we wanted to at least get a glimpse of "The Continent", I got on Ryanair's website and looked for where we could go for cheap. Although Corghaigh remains a backwater, with flights limited to Dublin and London, Ryanair has recently expanded offerings from Shannon. We could go to Barcelona (Girona, actually) for E29. Hurrah, although that doesn't count the 1 hour bus ride to Barcelona for another E11.

So without a thought to planning, off we go. Well, actually a day or so before we left I finally found a hostal (that's the correct spelling) that had room (the week before Easter is the start of vaction in Spain).

Hostal Eden is right off Carrer de Gracia and Ramblas Cataluyna, pretty much the center of Barcelona (which BTW is pronounced Barthelona).

There are Gaudi designed buildings all around, and Ramblas Cataluyna has a large central plaza used for markets and just going for walks.


Speaking of walkies, we noticed that in Barcelona everybody cleans up after their dogs, unlike Ireland or Istanbul. The city is very clean, and despite all the warnings about pickpockets we never felt threatened or in danger in any way.

Preparations for Palm Sunday were well underway. There were vendors selling palm fronds and frond creations in the central plaza all week.

On Sunday there was a large crowd gathered before the Christ symbol singing and pounding the palm creations on the pavement. They take Catholiscm seriously here.

Not knowing much about Barcelona, and lacking return calls from our friends who had lived here, we got 2 day tickets for a tourist bus. This allowed us to ride around with the other tourists in a topless double decker, see the sights, getting on and off when we wanted. It's a good introduction to a big city I guess, at least to the tourist parts.

The most spectacular building in Barcelona, possibly the most amazing in the world is Sagrada Familia. This temple, designed by Gaudi, was started in the late 1800's and is still under active construction. It's not expected to be completed before 2020. Part of the reason for the long construction time is the founders decreed it would be built only with donated funds. The other part is that some of the structures envisioned by Gaudi simply couldn't be built before the middle of the 20th century. There are elements that have been deleted from the plan as too difficult (at least for now). He designed many of the structures using a inverted load model, hanging weights from strings to see in a very visual way where the lines of force are. From there it's a simple matter to invert the model and put compression columns where the tension strings were, yielding a minimum material design.

The result is an open, organic structure with graceful flowing lines. Much of the design work he did was at odds with current practice and many believed it would not stand. However, modern computer analysis has confirmed the validity of his work.

We also spent most of an afternoon at Tibidabo amusement park on top of ??, which it shared with a church. I didn't think much of the amusement park, but the ride up on a 100 year old tram and a "funicular" was fun. Oddly, the tram wasn't running any more when we came back down so we had to hoof it the rest of the way down.


The popular food in Barcelona is tapas, basically starters or finger food. Pork, salmon, stinky cheese, aubergine and roasted pepper on crispy bread, or chicken croquets and fries. But squid, cuttle fish and octopus seemed to be the most popular, and certainly the cheapest.


People here live to a different rhythm than the rest of Europe. Many shops close from 2-4PM, which is when lunch is served. Many restuarants don't start serving dinner until 8:30 or so, and serve dinner into the wee hours. There is talk of changing this to conform to the rest of the EU, but I think it ought to go the other way. A midday nap seems a most civilized way to get through the day.


There were other parts of the city, including the Olympic park and waterfront that I would like to have seen, but it was time to move on.