Friday, June 12: The Barri Gotic

"Barri Gotic" is Catalan for "Gothic Neighborhood", which is the name of the oldest part of Barcelona.  It's fascinating!  We spent most of our time on pedestrian streets, some wide and some quite narrow.  Most of them were bordered by tall buildings with businesses on the first floor and apartments or condos above, and the usual wrought-iron balconies.  Most of the buildings, especially on the narrow streets, were quite old.  The businesses, however, were quite modern.  There were some fascinating and different shops, like one that made very old-fashioned sorts of baby clothes, and lots of more usual clothes and shoe shops and places that sold modern things like computers and cell phones.  It was a lovely day and lots of people were out strolling and shopping.  It was a fun place to be.

Here are two pictures of the sort of streets we walked along, one narrow and older-feeling and one wider.  You can see that many of the balconies had lovely plants on them.

 We also saw a few balconies making very practical use of the outdoor air:

Sometimes the streets opened up into plazas.  Here is a lovely old mosaic fountain in one of them:

 That same square opened up into a display of Roman tombs:  

There were signs explaining that when these tombs were discovered they designed the plaza around them.  We had a wonderful lunch of tapas in a outdoor restaurant in that same square.  Spanish tapas are small savory dishes.  Each would be just a little snack on its own, or you can order a bunch to make up a whole meal. Delicious!

This picture shows a very typical Barcelona building, with stores on the first floor and people living in the floors above.

It was very common to see flags hung from the balconies.  We guessed that they are expressions of Catalan patriotism and the wish for an independence referendum.

Some more pretty things we saw during our wandering:

And a small friend we met who demanded a bit of attention from us, since we're all three committed cat lovers:

Barcelona is full of pretty churches.  We explored three more of them today.  First, La Iglesia de Santa Anna.  Second, Santa Maria de Pi.  Like Santa Maria del Mar yesterday, these churches were too close to other buildings for me to take a good picture of either one from outside and this time the lighting inside wasn't good enough to get any good pictures inside with my little camera.  You'll have to take my word that they were beautiful.  The name of the second church puzzled me.  As a math geek I was wondering if there really is a patron saint of 3.14159.  I asked about the meaning when I bought my ticket to go in and it's actually pronounced Santa Maria de Pee.  I was so glad I didn't have any small children with me to fall over giggling!  It actually means Saint Maria of the Pines.

Finally, we visited the cathedral: La Catedral de la Santa Cruz y Santa Eulalia  (the cathedral of the Holy Cross and Saint Eulalia).  Saint Eulalia is one of the patron saints of Barcelona and was apparently martyred during a period of Christian persecution in 303 AD at the age of 13.

The other churches we saw in Barcelona would be considered large by North American standards, but the cathedral was *huge*.  And it was in a large square, so I could take pictures:

Very impressive, both inside and out.  Here is one of the many side altars:

Our ticket included a ride in a "lift" up to the roof.  I wasn't sure I wanted to do that, but after some sisterly persuasion I made it.  I am not too good with heights.  It was pretty scary at first, but the views were breathtaking.  They had sort of a metal scaffolding over some of the roof, with railings at the edge that were quite a bit behind the actual edge of the roof, which helped a lot.  I was very glad I stretched my comfort zone and went up.  Here are two views over the rooftops of Barcelona.  In the first one, you can see the Mediterranean in the distance:

Looking up at the high steeple and the bell tower:

There were pretty little windows way up there too  I wondered how often anyone besides tourists actually looks out of them.

After we returned to the ground, we walked through the "chapter house", where they had a shaded courtyard with a pretty fountain...

 ...and also of all things, a flock of geese.

At many points in our walk, especially near the churches we saw many whimsical little carvings, which Barbara says are technically called gargoyles:

 

The last one is hard to make out because it was peeking down from a high roof, but it reminded me of Jiminy Cricket!  They were fun, but I also liked them because it meant to me that the individual stone carvers were allowed some freedom to express themselves.  It felt like getting a glimpse of the workers who created all of these incredible buildings.  It's hard to imagine the effort and number of people it took to build things like these without all of our modern technology.  No cranes, power tools, or trucks to carry all of those heavy blocks of stones!

Our original plan was to continue to the museum near the cathedral, which included more Roman artifacts from that area of the city, but our explorations had taken long enough that we were had just half an hour before closing time, so we left the museum for another day.   Exploring always takes more time than you budget for, but part of the fun is giving yourselves time to stop and look at things that might not have been on the original agenda.

We were tired after all of this walking and decided to eat at the Italian restaurant that was right next door to our building.  The food was great (like all the food we had in Barcelona!) and it was fun communicating with the waiter.  He spoke to us in a mixture of Spanish and Italian.  I answered him in Spanish but Barbara and Mike had learned a little Italian for a trip to Italy several years ago and they were able to use that as well.  And since Italian and Spanish share a lot, we got along just fine and didn't need to fall back on English much at all.

Muy Tarde (Very Late)

I had such good intentions.  I was going to post stories and pictures every night.  But we were very busy and we didn't have Internet all of the time.  After staying up late to blog after a few busy days of sightseeing I decided I had my priorities wrong and needed to get more sleep and leave blogging until later.  I'm not complaining; we were busy having lots of fun and seeing wonderful things.  I'm just apologizing to people who heard me promise I'd blog as I went along: ¡lo siento mucho! (I'm very sorry!)

I'm home now and over the jet lag and I'm going to gradually finish up this blog.  Not just for others to see, but as a good way to review my pictures and memories and to give me an online album to look at in the future.

Thursday, June 11: Dos Iglesias y Ningún Parque (Two Churches and no Parks)

This morning we saw one of the big sights of Barcelona: La Sagrada Familia (Holy Family).  It is an *ENORMOUS* church that defies description and it was impossible to do it justice with my little point-and-shoot camera.  This is the best I could do:

Try to imagine a combination of the most huge, beautiful cathedral you've ever seen and then throw in some Disneyland and a bit of Doctor Seuss and you'll have the basic idea.  It was designed by Antoni Gaudí, a Catalan architect who was famous for imaginative designs.  He was a leader of the Catalan Modernisme movement.  Among other things, they tried to include curves rather than straight lines in their art and you can certainly see that in this church.

They started construction in the late 1900s and it will not be finished for a few more decades.  It is gorgeous and original and uplifting and reverent all at the same time.  Here's a web site if you'd like to see more pictures and information.

This place is a huge tourist attraction and you have to get tickets online and it's packed with people.  We did an audio tour.  It was crowded and crazy busy, but still beautiful.  My first glimpse of the place from the subway exit was a huge tower with letters spelling "Sanctus Sanctus Sanctus...." spiraling around it.  When we were waiting to go in we were looking at all the statues carved into the walls and there was one with his arm lifted and one finger out like he wanted a bird to come land on it.  And sure enough, a pigeon came and sat with him for a few minutes.  We think it must have been meant to be Saint Francis.

Inside was incredible too.  My favorite feature was the stained glass windows.  Not the traditional stained glass, but panes with different colors like an enormous color wheel.  Everything in the building had a purpose and a meaning.  The pillars holding up the high ceilings were also very beautiful.  They branched out like tree branches, to give the feeling that the ceiling was the sky.

The massive noisy crowds made it hard to take in the building as a place of worship, although the audio tour stressed the spiritual purpose and meaning of everything.  There was a little side chapel where they invited people to sit down and pray.  There was a guard at the entrance, asking each person "are you going to pray?" and pantomiming prayer with his hands for those who didn't speak one of the languages he knew.   (New word: prayer is "oración" in Spanish).  He also turned away a young woman wearing shorts.  I was amused by the idea of "prayer police", but the surveillance seemed to work.  I went in and it was very quite and I was able to spend a few moments praying for my own family and friends in this amazing place.

After we'd had our fill of Sagrada Familia, we decided to visit another Gaudí location called Park Guell.  We'd read online that you should make reservations to visit that as well, but we thought they couldn't possible fill up an outdoor park on a weekday still ahead of the main tourist season.  So we didn't bother, especially since we had no idea when we'd be done with Sagrada Famila and wanting to see the park.  We were wrong!  After a Metro ride and a long walk, we were told we´d have to wait until 6. 

So we changed our plans and went downtown to see a very old church called Santa Maria del Mar (Saint Mary of the Sea, web site here).  This was the other end of the spectrum -- just as lovely and spiritual as Sagrada Familia, but in a completely different way.  The present church was built in the 14th century, but Christians had been worshiping at or near the spot long before that.  The buildings close to the church made it impossible for me to snap a picture of the entire front of the church.  Here's what I could manage from the outside:

And from the inside:

After exploring this church the afternoon was mostly gone.  We were in in the oldest part of the city with many more things to see and do there and resolved to return the next day.

We had dinner once again in the area near our apartment.  The owner left a list of recommended restaurants, and each night we've had success just wandering around and finding a place that looked good.  This night several places we tried were full and we ended up in a tiny little restaurant that was wonderful.  They had just a few tables and the host (who must have been the manager or owner) hovered over us making sure everything was perfect.  The food was delicious.

That's the end of the events of the day, but I want to write a little about the experience of trying to speak Spanish in Barcelona.  I grew up in the U.S. in a community with many Spanish speakers and hardly any French speakers, so I studied Spanish in middle school and high school the way most people in Canada study French.  I enjoyed it and took a year of Spanish at university. I took another year of university Spanish at Queen's just for fun and in preparation for this trip I have been in a really nice conversational Spanish class to brush up again.  I am by no means fluent, but I can manage a lot if you give me time and a dictionary.  So I was excited about the prospect of being able to use my Spanish.

Barbara and Mike had also studied Spanish and do quite well, but I seem to be the one that's the most gung ho about speaking the language here.  While I reviewed Spanish, they learned some French, which will come in very handy in the second part of our trip.

Up until today I was feeling frustrated.  I had a few small successes, such as being able to ask at the airport about where to get a taxi and to understand the answer.  But mostly people hear my obviously non-native accent when I ask a question and answer me in English.  Or even worse, they size me up in one look before I can even talk and address me in English!   Added to that is the fact that the first language of many people in Barcelona is Catalán, not Spanish.  Although most Catalán speakers also speak Spanish, it´s a second language for many rather than a first.

At first I was kind of annoyed because I *wanted to practice*!!!  But I realise that they were showing me a courtesy to moving to a language in which I would be more comfortable and I'm sure it made most of the conversations quicker and simpler than they would have been in Spanish.  A little disappointing, but it's not the job of waitresses and ticket-takers and shopkeepers to give me Spanish lessons.

However, tonight in the little restaurant where we ate dinner, our server did not switch to English.  He was friendly and courteous, but it was obvious that he didn't speak English.  So we were on our own and it was fun.  We got the impression that this restaurant catered to locals and didn't get a lot of non-Spanish-speaking tourists visiting them.  At most restaurants they offer us English menus and that has been helpful, but we didn't get one here.  We spent some time puzzling over the Spanish menu without great success.  In language classes you tend to learn basic food words but not a lot of the extra ones that would help with menus here -- particularly seasonings and the many kinds of seafood.  We were debating the word "ajo" and a lady at the next table overheard and told us that she spoke a little English and she thought the English word was "garlic".  I thanked her and told her in Spanish that we spoke some Spanish and were trying to practice but having trouble with the food words.  She immediately went back to Spanish and seemed pleased we were making the effort.  We talked with her and her husband for a minute and they were very nice.  They were done with their meal, though, and left, and I broke down and asked (in Spanish) if they had an English menu.  They did and it was a great help.  We ordered and the food was delicious and the server kept checking on us and we were able to tell him in Spanish that the food was delicious.  We chatted for a few minutes and told him where we were from and that this was our first visit to Spain.  He seemed very pleased with us and to see foreigners making an effort to speak his language.  Finally, an interaction that went beyond the bare essentials!

I realised today that my dreams of having long, meaningful conversations with people in Spanish here were probably a bit silly.  Most of the conversations you have with people when you travel are fairly brief and practical.  But we're really had a lot of short, useful exchanges in Spanish -- "how much are the tickets?", "do you have a table for three?", "may I have some more water?", etc, etc.  We've been able to do that successfully even if the answers sometimes come back in English.  And we had this nice conversation at the restaurant.  We would be much more lost without this level of Spanish.  So this trip is more of a linguistic success than I first thought.  And the best exchanges have been when we were in less touristy places where people didn't speak English.  If I want more of that sort of thing in my future travels I need to spend time away from the big cities.  Maybe the Camino someday....  In the meantime, I'll keep studying with patient teachers in Canada whose job it is to stick to Spanish with me even when I'm floundering :-)

Wednesday, June 10: El Día de Orientación

Today was our Orientation Day in Barcelona.  We took a long walk around the neighborhood of our apartment and ended up in Parque Joan Miró, a lovely park dominated by a huge statue by Joan Miró, an artist from Barcelona.

A little strange for my taste, but certainly eye-catching.  It was a lovely park, with families and children and dogs.  There were parrots in some of the trees!

Near the park, we found a large arena.  We later learned that it had been the bull-fighting arena until a few years ago when bull-fighting was banned in Catalonia*.  It's now filled with shops.  We didn't go shopping, but we discovered that there is a big glass elevator leading to the top of the area, where you can walk around and take pictures, like this one, looking down at a beautiful monument.  You can see a little of the elevator on the right-hand side:

*For anyone who doesn't know already, Catalonia is a region that includes parts of France and Spain.  It was once an independent country and the region has its own language.  We hear Catalán spoken here in Barcelona more often than we hear Spanish and most signs are in Catalán (often with Spanish and English underneath).  It's a lot like Quebec or Scotland here; a large percentage of residents of the Spanish part of Catalonia would like to become independent from Spain.  I haven't read up on all of the politics, but Wikipedia says that the Spanish government has not agreed to requests for an official referendum.

After the elevator and a bit of lunch we caught a sight-seeing bus -- one of those buses where they drive you around and point out places of interest and you can get on and off to explore when you want to.  We mostly stayed on the bus and rode around to get our bearings and understand the sections of the city and make lists of things we'd like to see later on.  Barcelona is a beautiful city with lots of variety and history.  Here are some of my favorite pictures from the bus:

more lovely buildings with balconies

my first look at the Mediteranean from ground level

one of many beautiful parks...

...and one of many fountains

the Cathedral's bell tower from the cathedral (12th century)

At the end of all this walking and riding in the sun, we were pretty tired.  We went back to the apartment and got cleaned up and rested a bit and then headed out for dinner.  The restaurant we had planned to go to turned out not to have any tables for us, but we found a lovely Columbian restaurant right around the corner and had a wonderful dinner.

Tuesday, June 9: ¡Estamos en España!

The flight from Toronto to London was great.  I can' say enough nice things about British Air.  The seats were really comfortable and the attendants were super nice and the food was actually pretty good.  I slept for about three hours of the six hour flight, which I didn't expect to be able to do.  Best of all, each of us had a little screen for the "entertainment system" and I left mine set to display a map showing where the plane was currently so I could follow our progress.   I had a window seat and watched out the window to follow our progress along Lake Ontario, framed by lights.  They put out the cabin lights for dinner while we were over the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and I went to sleep.  When I woke up I got a nice view of the Atlantic, soon followed by Northern Ireland, the Irish Sea, and a path across England to Heathrow Airport in London.  What a beautiful world we live in!

For the flight from London to Barcelona it was cloudy most of the time, but at the very end we got to see some nice hills around the city and the Mediterranean Sea to the east.

I was pretty tired when we got to the Barcelona airport, but managed enough Spanish to get through Customs and ask about finding a taxi.  On the way to our apartment my first impression of the city was of lots of interesting apartment buildings with pretty wrought iron balconies.  We stopped in front of one of those buildings and I went in to join Barbara and Mike.  I hadn't seen them since August and it was so good to be together again.

The apartment is cute and comfortable and we have a little ¨terrace¨ too.  Here are some pictures from the terrace:

Barbara and Mike toast the start of our vacation

We walked around the corner to a nice little grocery store and stocked up on a few things.  We expect to eat most of our lunches and dinners out, but breakfast and snacks will be here.

For dinner we walked to a tiny little restaurant down the street and had tapas and paella.  The food was wonderful and the atmosphere was lovely.  The restaurant had a few little tables inside plus several more outside.  Pedestrians walked down the street between us and the restaurant.  The waitress was very nice and put up with our tired attempts at Spanish.

Now we're going to fall into bed and recover from our jet lag and do some more exploring tomorrow.

Monday, June 8: Buses, airports & planes

Today considered by itself is not too exciting: packing, sitting in a bus, standing in line in the airport, sitting around in the airport, updating my blog in the airport -- and before the end of the day, finally getting on a airplane.  But as the long-awaited first day of my epic trip it's wonderful and exciting.  I can't  believe I'm finally on my way.

Pearson has a wonderful waiting area in Terminal 3 that I've never seen before.  It's a restaurant with lots of tables and you're allowed to sit there whether you order something or not.  Each table has an ipad to play with a electric outlets for charging all your stuff.  If only I had anticipated this and packed my cell phone charger in my carry-on bag instead of my suitcase....  But I did put my laptop cord in my carry-on, so here I am online.

I don't fly very often and so I'm not jaded enough to hate airports.  There is a certain fun to being stuck in a place where I don't have any work to do.  I brought knitting and books and my ipod and laptop and I'm a happy camper.  I think I'll go buy a cup of tea when I'm done posting this :-)

Even though this isn't a very interesting day I think every blog post ought to have a picture.  So here is the Pearson International Airport Monorail:

The monorail transports people between the different terminals of the airport and also the airport hotel and maybe some other things.  I think it's pretty cool.  And it reminds me of our friend Peter, who is an engineer and a world expert in monorails.  I'm going to need to change terminals at Heathrow tomorrow and I've looked at the Heathrow web site and all they have is plain old buses, poor things.

My first plane leaves about 9:40 tonight and then I've got a two-hour layover in London and two hours on another plane and then I finally get my first glimpse of Barcelona and meet up with my wonderful sister and brother-in-law and the fun really starts.  (Spanish word for the day: cuñado means brother-in-law.)

pre-trip post

This is an initial post for my new blog, partly just to make sure I know what I'm doing!  I am about to take my very first trip to Europe, along with my sister Barbara and her husband Mike.  I will be taking my laptop with me to post a trip diary and pictures for anyone who happens to be interested.

To practice posting photos, here is a picture of me taken in London in 2011:

That was the best trip I've ever taken (with the Canadian Rockies a close second).  I expect this new trip to be equally exciting.  We leave on June 8 and return on June 26.  The first part of our trip will be spent in Barcelona, Spain, exploring the city and eating lots of seafood & tapas and hopefully getting to practice our Spanish.  After that we will be staying in a friend's house in the town of Valras-Plage, France (on the Mediterranean coast between Montpellier and Perpignan), enjoying the beach and exploring the whole region.  Stay tuned!