Easter ‘08: 6 Days, 3 Countries (Part 1)

Whoo-hoo visitors! After a 6-month visitor hiatus we were excited to welcome our Pitt friends Dez and Eric to Birmingham for the first time just recently. Not wanting our guests to come to the greatest city in Europe first and thus make the rest of their trip a sad anticlimax, we decided to do Birmingham last after an Easter holiday trip to more mundane destinations, like Barcelona and the south of France. The UK gets Good Friday and Easter Monday off, so with an extra 2 days your average euro-worker can put together a pretty sweet holiday: we flew down to Spain on Thursday to meet our brave countrymen.
We met Eric and Dez on a busy side street in Barcelona outside our apartment for the next 2 nights. After some happy hellos and stories about Spanish language difficulties (they tried to find out what they were ordering for breakfast only to have the waitress start clucking and flapping her arms like a chicken laying an egg!), we set off to catch the late afternoon sun in the Park Guell: a surreal (Antoni) Gaudi-designed park on a hill overlooking the city.

From our experiences there, Barcelona seems to be about two things: food and architecture. I’m sure they’re great at lots of other things too, but we didn’t get much past those two. The city’s most famous son is the early 20th century architect Gaudi, who helped to invent the Art Nouveau style and designed many totally unique buildings around the city. You really got a sense for his style at Park Guell, which he designed for a wealthy count who wanted to sell houses in the park to Barcelona’s rich and famous. The project was a commercial flop, but the park looks amazing and it a great place to be at sunset.

Architecture is way easier to show than describe, so now might be a good time to check out our Barcelona pictures so you see what I mean!

Our first night in the city we discovered that our nice 3rd floor apartment was on the most happening street corner in Barcelona, and people don’t seem to need sleep in Spain. Poor Eric fared the worst, and it took a lot of coffee in this nice local café to get us going the next morning. Once we got going, though, we didn’t stop. We started with a metro trip to Barcelona’s most famous attraction, Gaudi’s partially completed (under construction for almost 100 yrs!) Sagrada Familia cathedral. This fairy-tale building is seen as his masterwork and Gaudi died while working on it (hit by a Barcelona tram car – killed by the city he loved). After touring this amazing cathedral, we went up to a hospital designed by another architect with the goal of giving patients an environment that makes them happy and thus aids recovery. It was a really nice hospital, with a big open “campus” with lots of orange tree. I think if you have to get seriously injured on vacation, Barcelona is the city to do it in.

We spent the afternoon wandering in the dense maze of streets and alleys in the old town, and found a great tapas place from our guidebook with huge casks of house wine by the door as you entered. Lauren was a pro on the Spanish front, though even she had a bit of trouble reading menus since many things were in Catalan, the regional language of Catalonia.

The same scene played out whenever we entered any restaurant: someone would smile and approach then say something completely incomprehensible but probably very friendly to us, and wherever Lauren was in the group we would push her to the front while making awkward stuttering noises to the host. Lauren would start chatting away, asking about the kids, the weather, who they were supporting in the next football match, etc, and the rest of us were left to meekly follow in lemming mode. For all we knew Lauren had this super power of telepathy with an alien race, and it came in very, very handy. It was like magic: they would say something, and then she would understand it and say something back, which they understood. I think Lauren rather liked it.

After some more aimless wandering we had a comical experience trying to find a cable car up onto the mountain west of the city, called Montjuic. We got off at the foot of the mountain and saw a cable-car symbol on our maps right at the corner we were standing on. Looking up, there was no way a cable-car could leave from there. There was one further up, but the buildings blocked its terminus from view. We walked around the block, around another block, checked our 3 different maps, scratched our heads, and after 40 minutes were getting desperate. Finally, feeling pretty dejected and incompetent, we headed back down into the metro to give up, only to see the SAME symbol in the metro as on our maps! Well, like archeologists piecing together a hieroglyphic puzzle, we followed the arrows towards this mysterious symbol, which turned out to be an UNDERGROUND incline up the mountain. Haha, we just laughed and laughed…and cried a little.

The mountain top was beautiful and mostly covered in parks and Olympic Stadiums. This is where the 1992 Olympics were held, and for 1 month the mountain was renamed Olympus, and the mayor had to wear a toga like Zeus (this is a lie). We walked along catching some great views of the city, then passed the impressive Olympic complex, and on to the National Art Gallery and its steps and fountains. At dusk there was a huge fountain show (like, really, really huge) with lights and music, which was created for the 1920’s world fair. It was a great end to our sightseeing day and we headed home exhausted. We rallied for a great meal at a tapas bar then crashed and slept very well our second night.

After just 2 short days in Barcelona it was time to move along: our stylish French rental car and the open road were calling. Saturday morning, we headed to the Eurolines (“the Greyhound of Europe”) bus terminal to catch our chariot across the boarder. Though much more scenic, the ride reminded me of my Greyhound trips across PA with unhappy drivers and lots of seemly unnecessary stops, but after 3 hours we crossed the boarder into France and got off in the warm coastal town of Perpignan. The French countryside beckoned…