You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July 2008.
Soooo…continuing from the last post…
Sunday our tour guide hostess had clients, so we were left to our own devices, a thought that after the previous night’s metro-stop-missing debacle, left us a little unsure…
Never ones to be dissuaded by our own ignorance, however, we confidently set out for the Parc Güell, another of Gaudí’s architectural masterpieces. The park is situated almost directly northwest of the medieval quarter, which, conveniently, was mere steps from our hostess’s apartment. And by “mere steps”, I am of course referring to the 5,384 steps leading straight up the hill from the street level, the ascension of which is necessary to reach the park. The magnitude of this daunting challenge gave us pause, as we are not at our pinnacle of fitness (come on…high school track was a long time ago, and beer is just so, so good. Well, not here in Spain, but in general, yes.), but in the name of culture, we pressed on. We were relieved, however, when we rounded the corner and noted that the 5,384 steps were actually part of a moving escalator, which through the miracle of powered-stair technology, brought us to the top of the hill with minimal effort, agreeing perfectly with our corn-fed Midwest expectations. After winding through a hilly, pine tree-lined path, we discovered the main sculptural area of the park, which was impressive in its color, construction and vista. The main feature is a large, raised, gravel-covered park / sitting area, held aloft by a series of pseudo-Doric columns and tiled in the typically Gaudí-an broken tile style. Surrounding this raised park was a continuous undulating bench resembling some kind of freak serpent. Below the gravel area was a forest of altered Doric columns, between which concave domes with bright blue and green mosaics rose and fell, giving the impression of looking up at the rolling surface of a body of water from below. Surrounding this central park were a few small gingerbread-inspired houses, originally summer homes for the Barcelonan elite who commissioned the park as a getaway from the downtown summer heat. Overall, the place looked like Phidias and the Witch from Hansel & Gretel went on a bender with Timothy Leary and decided to build their “Happy Place”. We totally dug it.
From here we headed back to the Metro (making careful note of at which stop we were supposed to get off) and made our way across town to the Montjuïc hill, site of the remains of the 1929 World’s Fair. Our goals were to see the Mies van der Rohe-designed German pavilion—one of the harbingers of the modern International Style and a Mecca of sorts for design junkies like myself—and to check out this little nearby place called “Poble Espanyol”, a collection of quintessential Spanish architecture. The German pavilion was more-or-less (or less-is-more) a religious experience, as it embodies pretty much all the tenets of modern design and paved the way for design to become an integrated part of business and social development, instead of an ancillary afterthought of adornment. The space is very sparse and clean, constructed of marble, glass and steel, its flat planes intersecting at the sharp right angles to be expected of German precision. It is the physical embodiment of the “less-is-more” ethos and a revolt against the overwrought adornment of the Art Nouveau, seeking, in a way, to clarify the machine-inspired lines of Art Deco and the Streamlined movements. I could continue to bore you with lurid details of my experience, but suffice it to say it’s a good thing I brought along an extra pair of clean shorts…
Poble Espanyol was an interesting little diversion, the source of the title of these posts, and one which we immediately regretted spending €16 to get into. It’s not that it was all that bad for any particular reason. In fact, after we got over the idiocy of our decision, we kinda enjoyed ourselves, and we had a decent lunch and some ice cream, which can soothe the pains of any tour book-inspired folly. Here’s the back story: Basically, Poble Espanyol is a one-stop quintessential shop for all the architectural variation of the entire Iberian peninsula, created to give visitors to the 1929 exhibition a sense of what the rest of Spain was like, assuming that they had neither the time nor fiscal ability to actually visit each of these diverse places. It’s a little like Disney Land, except that everything’s in Spanish (which, come to think of it, is exactly like Disney Land…). You walk through a turreted portal in a large stone wall (reminicent of the Medieval city wall of Toledo), into a quintessential Plaza Mayor (like in Madrid), which is surrounded by buildings featuring stores and restaurants on the ground floor with apartments and offices above (just like Madrid), then stroll down narrow whitewashed streets (Sevilla), pass Mudejar cathedrals and bell towers (Cordoba, Granada), through open-air markets (Valencia, Barcelona) and past little white thatched-roofed pueblos—all within a 20-minute walk from end-to-end. In actuality, it was well done, and being designed and built by Spainards in Spain, it retained a fairly high degree of authenticity. The stupid part of the whole thing—as Al so graciously pointed out to me amidst her fits of laughter at the lunch table—was that we just spent €16 to walk through fake versions of the real cities we’ve spent the last 10 weeks wandering through. I attribute our decision to the fact that we were starving and light-headed prior to entering, facts which clouded our judgement. Upon leaving the place, we made a pact not to tell our tour guide hostess of our waste of time.
"Oh wow! Fake Spain!"
After a stroll past the nearby art museum (which was closed), we headed back to the Old Quarter, intending on visiting the Roman Museum. Barcelona was a major outpost in the Roman era, and as such, there is a great amount of their architecture and infrastructure still remaining. In fact, the Medieval cathedral is built on the foundations of the old Roman walls and, nearby, there are Roman columns standing the middle of an apartment block’s courtyard (they had previously been built into the buildings, but were “exhumed” during some recent reconstruction), among numerous other examples. Though both the tour book and our tour guide assured me that the museum would be open all day on Sunday, it in fact was not, having closed at 3pm. We got there at 4pm. Mierda.
This was a minor inconvenience, as the Picasso museum was just around the corner and was in fact open, contrary to the listing in the guide book. Go figure. We did take a wrong turn somewhere, however, and ended up in an open plaza near city hall. As we paused here to consult our map, we were approached by a hip-looking young woman who politely asked us in subtly-eastern-European-accented English if we spoke English. Not immediately taking her for a bum, we said “yes”, at which point she began her ploy, asking for money. Wising up, we said we didn’t have any, at which point she stormed off, curing us and calling out over her shoulder, “You guys are wires! Wires! You have monies!”
We were flattered. Even despite our escalator-taking habits to Parc Güell, we still appeared lean and fit enough that this young lady felt compelled to compliment our slim physiques. The day was lookin’ up.
We got back on track and found the Picasso Museum, which was a great retrospective tour, showcasing a great wealth of his early work and evolution to abstraction; the parts of the story that rarely get told in most museum settings. The collection was especially robust due to Picasso’s own donations as well as those of his widow, making it one of the premier groupings of his work in the world. The biggest lesson here: the man could draw. Like REALLY draw. And he could mimic just about any style he wanted. And once he was bored with mimicry, he would just invent a new style. Not a bad way to make a living.
After our nearly three-hour tour of Picasso’s mad genius, we turned for home, ultimately enjoying dinner and drinks with our hostess before crashing into bed.
The next morning found us fighting through protesters at the Ave high-speed train station in order to board our car for the journey back to Madrid. Apparently they were irritated that they weren’t getting enough of the subsidies from the government on the profits from the train…? I’m not really sure. Having just gotten a hold of basic 5th-grader Spanish, I was a little under prepared to read train-related political jargon scrawled on bedsheets being waved about by overly-energetic, whistle-blowing Spanish college students. Especially at 8 in the morning. I still was at a loss when we returned to Madrid to find another group with nearly identical bedsheet slogans awaiting us at the disembarkation platform. If nothing else, though, I was commended their level of coordination. I mean, to get us coming and going? That’s a lot for college kids.
So that rounds out our 2.5 days in Barcelona. We’re nearing the end of adventure, with only a week of class left and two more cities to hit before we leave. Next up: Córdoba & Granada with more (somewhat) Big, Tall American friends (these ones are different though…and one’s a doctor and really knows what antioxidants do)!
More photos are up,
-bdmc
Ok, enough horsing around with this “job search” thing. It’s become clear from our protracted expiscation and a distinct lack of options from you, dear readers, that, really, we’re just not meant to be employed. Rather than fill out yet ANOTHER resume submission page on a bassackwards corporate application site, I’ve decided instead to write the conclusions to our Iberian saga.
I know you’ve all been waiting at least a month (judging from the timestamp on the draft of this post), and I’m sure you’ve all just been dying to know how it wraps up. It’s ok to admit that your lives have been cold and empty without our somewhat irregular and unsolicited recaps of random strolls through foreign cities, and you’ve cried yourselves to sleep every night longing for our poetic genius to dance across your screens. It won’t affect your position in our eyes. And if you’re chiding us for our delay, don’t forget, even some of history’s greatest pieces of literature were written over protracted periods: Great Expectations was crafted in installments over several years appearing as segments in a weekly London serial, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was only finished decades after Twain started it, and there’s no way that Tolstoy finished War and Peace in anything under what? like 20 years? So consider yourselves lucky for reading potentially great literature. And I stress potentially.
Anyway, here goes the Barcelona recap (keep in mind this was started back in June, when we were actually returning from Barca):
As mentioned in a previous post (before all the poop talk and threats of arson), we just returned from an exceptional trip to Barcelona this past weekend. As far as all the places we’ve visited, this one comes damn near to topping the list (and does in some cases, depending on your criteria). It has the modern energy of Madrid, the laid back seaside culture of Valencia, the ancient texture of Toledo and Segovia, the artisanal creative buzz of Sevilla, and best of all, their soccer team is the arch nemesis of Real Madrid, which just makes me giggle with glee.
Our journey started off a tad ominously. As we were sitting on the train (the awesome hi-speed train, mind you) moments prior to our departure time, a sudden raucous ruckus developed behind us, near the door between our car and the one to our rear. It seemed to grow nearer, then fade away, only to return again and continue to amplify. Quickly realizing that it was the foreboding sound of children’s laughter, we began to panic, praying to Real Madrid that they would intervene and put the little bastards on another car. Our cries, however, were in vain. Within moments, our car was overrun by a wild herd of screeching tweener girls and a second onslaught of ADD-afflicted 10-year-old boys, both groups all jacked up on Mountain Dew and accompanied by one or two…”adults”, which, just like at summer camp, seemed to be just five minutes older than the oldest charge for whom they were responsible. It was like a swarm of locusts devouring our peaceful pre-departure silence. And for the next two hours it continued unabated, with girls sitting in seats right next to each other screaming at the top of their lungs to each other and the boys racing up and down the aisle with a soccer ball while the “adults” stared blankly at each other and occasionally made a barely-audible “shh” sound to the one kid on the train that was asleep thru the whole disaster. Nice work, doofus. It actually got so bad that I, for a second time, violated my “try not to be obnoxious in another country” policy and yelled at them to “shut the expletive up!” while glaring at the chaperon nearest me. That bought us exactly 2 minutes of peace. Hi-speed train my ass. Couldn’t get there fast enough at that point. Fortunately, however, there was an intermediate stop before Barcelona and all the little cretins got off there, giving us about an hour to put ourselves back together.
We snagged a cab to our family friend’s apartment, a great joint on a winding backstreet situated north of the middle of the Old City. Promptly passing out, we slept like the dead, waking at about noon the next day.
Said family friend just so happens to be a world-renowned Barcelona city tour guide and expert on all things Barcelonan (? Barcelonian? Barcelon?). She’s the gal they call when Chelsea Clinton and Mel Gibson come to town. She speaks seven languages (including Russian). She owns her own tour company and is asked for by name. In short: she’s good.
As it turns out, Saturday was her day off and she generously volunteered to take us around and both show us things that aren’t on the map and get us into the big touristy places by bypassing the lines using her Super Tour Leader Badge of Power. Not ones to turn down such an opportunity, we began our trek in the Old City, strolling down the sprawling street market of Las Ramblas, basically a tree-lined avenue and former creekbed with a large median studded with stalls and street vendors hawking their wares (mostly pets) and freakishly dedicated street performers scaring the crap out of little tourist kids. We’re talking people dressed up in such a way that they make Kiss and the guys from Gwar look like a bunch of amateurs. And unlike Kiss and Gwar, they all stand still for hours, adding to the suspense. From there, we turned into the ancient open-air market, one so large and robust, it makes the acclaimed one in Valencia look like a cheerleading club’s grocery-store bake sale. The aisles seemed miles long, with every possible variety of food for sale. The egg vendor didn’t just have chicken eggs; there were ostrich, goose, robin, quail, etc. Basically any egg from anything that lays eggs—maybe even platypus—I’m not sure. The fishmonger had an equal variety of bizarre seafood and the spice vendor’s stall was a floor-to-ceiling visual and olfactory kaleidescope. The place also included the reportedly best bar in the city, which was so packed we couldn’t even get close to it. We did, however, get to the butcher stall, where the 11-year-old daughter of our tour guide (and a lovely gal herself), requested—nay, demanded—an 18″ sausage to gnaw on. American kids demand ice cream or lollypops; Spanish kids want meatsicles. It says a lot, doesn’t it? After fighting through the crowds for a little while longer, we decided we’d had enough and snuck on out the back.
Our adventure had made us hungry, so our guide took us to an ancient butcher shop / bar (an odd combination, we know), situated in the street / 1/2 basement level of a Renaissance-era building. The ceiling was lined with row after row of hanging jamon (the cured pork leg) and you could barely see the guy behind the counter through all the sausage that was hanging in front of him. The butcher shop part of the store was maybe 1/3 of the total space, with the remainder dedicated to a small bar, featuring 3 tables, 2 barstools and a floor-to-6′-ceiling, corner-rounding wine cabinet with every conceivable varietal. We enjoyed some small tapas and a couple of drinks until 3pm, when the owner hollered at us to leave, as he was closing the store for the daily 3-hour dominoes tournament he and his aging friends took part in, customers be damned. He then brought us another round of drinks and some more to eat. We were somewhat confused. A little while later, he blinked the lights and said that the next time he was serious, so we packed up and ducked out under the half-closed roller door out front, passing the incoming geriatrics ready to school each other with little white tiles. It was a unique experience not to be found in any tour book. The only unfortunate aspect is that they owners, nearing retirement, couldn’t find anyone to take over the business, so once they quit, the whole thing dies. Kinda made us want to reconsider our career plans. Hell, I could totally run a meat-and-liquor shop that closes for three hours a day!
As the day was waning (as such will happen when you get up at noon), we figured we should use the Super Tour Leader Badge of Power to get us into something other than a backstreet bar (cool as it was). Thus, we made a beeline to the Sagrada Familia, the still-evolving dripping cathedral that is the lingering masterpiece of Antoni Gaudí, and cut past all the loser tourists standing in the ever-increasing rain. Inside, we were given an in-depth tour of the museum in the church basement which discusses the construction process, Gaudí’s life and death—he was hit by a streetcar and left to die in the street because everyone thought he was a bum due to his eccentric and shabby clothing, the result of his living in his studio for years on end, focused on his work—and the model shop where they cast scale models of the custom pieces which are then read by computer and cut from stone. The most awesome part of the whole museum for me was a wire-and-sandbag model of the church Gaudí had built to test the weight and stress of the building on its various joints, that kicks the crap out of any CAD rendering. Unlike your standard architectural model which is basically a small version of the finished building, this was a thin wire skeleton of the church, built upside-down, with small sandbags attached to the joints and scaled in such a way that Gaudí could extrapolate the strength and massive forces with which he was working. To date, all the calculations he made in this way have proven accurate and solid, an amazing feat, considering the times and materials.
Once inside the cathedral, it was a religious experience of an entirely different order. First, to even be inside an under-construction cathedral was just ridiculous, especially when you consider that the last time that happened with any regularity no Europeans even knew America existed. Second, despite the fact that there was no roof, only 2.5 walls and a hint of stained glass, the effect was stunning. You could imagine the finished product, with its array of towering columns in geo-organic forms supporting a ceiling punctuated with little portholes to allow in sunlight, illuminating the space in a subtle glow. And the entire interior adorned with brightly colored mosaic tiles. Basically, you have to go and see it yourself. I can’t do it justice.
Keeping hot on the Gaudí trail, we then hit up the Casa Milá, a turn-of-the-(19th)-century apartment block on the corner of the south end of Las Ramblas and some other side street. This is the one with the undulating façade and seaweed-inspired steel balconies. You’d know it if you saw it. Inside it was an Art Nouveau enthusiast’s wet dream. Everything undulated in colors and textures that mirrored the sea and nature, all swirling around a well-lit central courtyard adorned with tiles that gradiated in color from dark to light blue as you ascended the building. The impression was one of looking either up from the bottom of the sea or down into the deep from above depending on your vantage point. The rooftop terrace continued the undulating seascape experience, with fantastical sandcastle-like chimneys and archways. Up here I discovered the quintessential Gaudí photo op: the Sagrada Familia in the distance viewed through one of said archways with a twisting chimney flute to the side (Idiot tourists, however, refused to cooperate, constantly lingering in the archway or otherwise screwing up my shot. Bastards. This one could have been Pulitzer-prizeworthy. Do they give that for photos? If not, it would have won whatever they do give for it. Anyhow, I’ve got about 5,000 others to cull through and maybe there’s another one worthy in there…we’ll see.). Just below the roof, inside the attic level of Casa Milá, one felt like Jonah, striding among parabolic arches and recesses of dimly-illuminated reddish-pink brick resembling the the cavernous ribs in the belly of the whale. There were also a variety of well-conceived video presentations highlighting Gaudí, his work and the times he was creating, along with small scale models of the entire building. Overall, it was well done, very interesting and beautiful, especially when viewed in context of the other stale architecuture surrounding it.
Finishing up our Gaudí trip, we swam across the street and into a couple of gigantic beers with some olives and croquetes before getting on the metro back to the apartment. Our vigilant tour guide had to leave us at the door of the Casa Mila, as she was exhausted. This didn’t seem like a big deal at the time, until we boarded the metro and realized we had no idea what stop we needed to get off at. Picking one that seemed right, we exited the tunnel and, realizing that nothing looked familiar, went directly to a pay phone (for the first time in 15 years) and called for help. After our gracious host recovered from her explosive laughter at our huge whiff, she set us on the right path and we finally joined her for dinner with some neighbors about an hour and a half late. Oh well. At least the train was nice and clean.
So that concludes day one of the Barcelona Brouhaha. As we had a full two-day weekend there, and our tour mommy had to work on Sunday, we struck out on our own, yielding a string of tales that require another post. I’ve already exceeded the legal character limit on this one.
-bdmc
BDMC and I are currently in Chicago interviewing and looking for apartments. Unfortunately it’s a little hard to choose an apartment when you have no idea where you’ll be working, how much you’ll be making, etc, etc, etc. Anyone out there have a job for a graphic designer and an accountant and a beautiful apartment in a great part of the city that you’ve been saving for that perfect couple to rent?
This really has been a heavenly summer – we’ve been spending time in Northern Michigan on a gorgeous lake in between jaunts to Chicago for interviews. I actually have a little bit of a tan for the first time since…hmmm…when did I graduate from college? But it would be much more enjoyable if we didn’t have that whole job thing nagging us.
Anyway, BDMC promises me that he really does have the final Spanish episodes and will be putting them up soon. We’ll see…..
-cuptastic
