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…

Our Peugeot Time-Machine

Last month we traveled 2000 years back in time simply by driving 80 miles north. Sound too good to be true? Well, let me tell you about a little civilization I like to call the Romans.

The Romans were around a long time ago: 2000 years they say, and what’s more, they didn’t just stick to Rome. They made it over here to Britannia and in AD 74 founded a legionary fortress called Deva at the site of the modern city of Chester. Being cultured, historical types we decided to take a day trip up to Chester to see “the finest walled city in England” (pictures).

Chester has come a long way since the Romans left and most of the present walls are medieval or Victorian ones built on top of the original fortress. The walls and gates surrounding the old city were a popular place for Victorian gentry to go “promenading,” and in the spirit of the promenade we made sure to look as refined as possible as we walked the scenic 2 mile circuit ourselves. It was a great way to see the city and neat to think of how long the walls had protected the city.

Besides the walls, Chester is just generally known as a very quaint and charming English town, with lots of old Tudor framed houses and a special section of 2-story shops called “the Roes”. They are quite unique and looked like a typical row of 700-year-old shops at street level but had steps up between every other shop, leading to a covered walkway along the tops of the shops running along more shops on the second level. I could see its charm and surly they were ground-breaking in the 1700s, but they reminded me a lot of a 2-story American mall. I’m sure the villagers of Chester would have me tarred and feathered for saying that.

It was a great day out, and happily our car/time machine performed well on this, its longest journey to date!

…stay tuned for a major travelogue post this weekend, including American visitors (yeah!!), tiny principalities, tapas, and dangerous mountain pass drives!

What I'm Loving

This doesn't fall under the usual 'travelogue' type posts we normally do, but there's so much good stuff that I've been enjoying lately that's worth sharing! Here's what I'm loving at the moment:

Books
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - I'm a few years behind on the bandwagon of this book, but I LOVED it! The main character, a 9-year old boy named Oskar Schell, is precocious and precious and heartbreaking. It is so symbolic, playful and creative. If I ever write a book, I would want it to be similar to this

Plot Against America - I didn't love this book quite as much, but it's still really good (alternative history of America during WWII), and the main character is also a 9 year old boy, which seems like an unusual coincidence! Has anyone else read these books?

700 Penguins - My first coffee table book, this collection of 700 Penguin paperback covers combines my interest in design and my obsession with books.

Movies
The Thin Man - My family has been after me for years to see this movie, and now I know why! It's incredibly enjoyable, and the marriage portrayed between William Powell and Myrna Loy was groundbreaking. There's a whole 'Thin Man' series, I can't wait to see the others.

Arsenic and Old Lace - Hilariously entertaining Frank Capra classic, starring the inimitable Cary Grant, it's another Horstmanian favorite.

Michael Clayton - I've heard mixed reviews of this movie, but we really, really liked it - I think the intelligent dialogue was my favorite part.

TV
Flight of the Conchords - Now that Arrested Development is off the air, this is hands-down my favourite comedy. Brett and Jemaine are hilarious - if you havent seen it, you need to!

Brothers and Sisters - I absolutely love this show. It reminds my family a lot of ourselves, and it is so refreshing to finally see an amazing family drama again. For me, it's in the same vein as Party of Five and Life Goes On.

Music
Alexi Murdoch - I know nothing about this guy, but Andrew (my sister's boyfriend) gave us some of his music and I listen to it over and over - low-key/folky/soulful.

Those are the heavy-hitters at the moment. I would love to hear YOUR recommendations!

Belgium by Land: Part Duo

Brussels is a huge and sprawling city, and a bit intimidating to get around. Saturday morning we decided instead to visit somewhere more charming and manageable, and made the very popular day trip to the lace-making town of Brugge. We got coffee in a brutalist concrete train station, managed to get train tickets by pointing and showing numbers of fingers and toes, and were off through some beautiful countryside to Brugge (1 hour west near the coast).

Brugge is a picture perfect almost Disneyland-clean city with an interesting history. In the Middle Ages the city was a huge producer of lace and shared control of the “global” cloth trade with its great rival Ghent. The small river leading to Brugge slowly dried up, however, isolating the city and killing off its trade dominance. This pretty much froze the city in time, making it one of the most beautifully preserved medieval cities in Europe. It was ‘discovered’ again 200 years ago when wealthy Belgians started building beautiful homes matching the ancient architecture and it’s been a premiere tourist destination for recent centuries. Apparently it does get really busy and touristy in summer, but on a (freezing!) February Saturday we had plenty of room to wander. This was good, because stopping too long would let the hypothermia set in.

We took the town in with a long walk and our usual game of trying to figure out where Nick has led us astray. We visited an interesting religious community from the thirteenth century south of the city called a Begijnhof, which had a rough circle of whitewashed houses around central green. These Beguine communities were common all over Europe, and were built to encourage widows and unmarried women to live in communities and help the poor, etc. The original residents were not nuns, (they did not take a vow and were free to return to secular life) but with the decline of the Beguine communities in the last century many are now occupied by Benedictine nuns.

Proud of our cultural/religious education, we spent the rest of the day looking at grand architecture and eating amazing fries and chocolate-covered Belgian waffles. The fries were a double bonus, since they delayed frostbite and were really tasty.

A nap on the train back into Brussels got us ready for our much-anticipated Belgian Beer crawl around the Grand-Place – “one of the most uniformly beautiful enclosed city squares in Europe” as the tour book says. The square is mostly made up of ornate guildhouses which are now really cool restaurants and pubs. We tried 4 or 5 different places, trying to sample some of the highlighted beers from our guidebook. There were tons of bitter, fruity, creamy, and alcoholy beers, many with millennium-long pedigrees. The glasses were really unique too, with one notable beer, Kwak, served in a totally impractical round-bottomed hourglass so you couldn’t set it down. It came with a wooden stand to hang it from when you wanted to set it down.

Other highlights were Leffe, Chimay, and Lambic which is made with one of the oldest beer manufacturing methods on earth, using wild yeast and aged 2-3 years in a cask. Draft Lambic is extremely rare, and we went to the one place in Brussels that had it, which was an experience in itself. We walked down this long, shady ally very much off the beaten tourist track into a small beer hall with long wooden tables and benches filling the room. You just took a bench seat where you could find it among the patrons and they brought you a big ceramic pitcher of Lambic along with some mason jars. It was great, and it was fun just people watching and drinking our (kind of cider-tasting) draft Lambic.

The next morning we rose and checked out, leaving approximately 6 hours to explore all of Brussels. We started with a walk back through the Grand-Palace in daylight and read a bit about it in our trusty Lonely Planet guide. Town Hall was pretty impressive, but the guildhouses that boarder most of the square encapsulate the Baroque ideals of exuberance and complexity. The square was rebuilt after 1695 French artillery fire leveled Brussels, and city guilds used their money and power to have their headquarters rebuilt and control the style of architecture (early urban planning). The law they created said that “non-conforming facades are to be demolished at the expense of the offender,” so I guess people were pretty careful with development. Industrialization rendered guilds obsolete soon after they dumped all this money into their houses and with all industry/commerce taking place in newer parts of the city the Grand-Palace quickly became something of a museum, preserved it in its height for modern tourists like us to visit and enjoy.

We hurried on through the Cathedral, the main park in Brussels, and finally took a tram car ride to the EU quarter where all of the governmental buildings for the European Union are located. This center of bureaucracy was about as boring as it sounds, and none of the buildings or architecture were particularly stunning. Writing the EU Quarter off as a rookie tourist mistake we crossed the city to the much-more-interesting Victor Horta Museum, which was his former house and workspace. Horta practily invented the Art Nouveau style of architecture which rejected imitative styles of his time (neoclassical) in favor of an innovative style characterized by curving sinuous lines. Horta experimented with steel and glass, and said “never use a straight line when a curve will do”. His house was really interesting and a great last stop on our Brussels blitz.

Nice work to anyone who’s read all the way down to here: pictures for a reward!

Belgium by Land: Eurostar Stars

For Valentines Day this year we thought wrap the experiences (not simultaneously) of Belgian beer and high-speed train travel into one glorious weekend trip. Friday after work we made the 1.5 hour train trip down to London to catch a Eurostar train out of the new St. Pancras International Station. St. Pancras used to be a major hub of British rail travel and was the largest enclosed space in the world when it opened in the 1860’s, but time and neglect really left it in a bad state. When the all-new (Arup) high-speed line from the English coast to Central London was proposed, St. Pancras became the new terminus of Eurostar and 800 million pounds ($1.6 bn) was spent to totally renovate and modernize it.

Friday night it was fun taking to to walk around the new station and check things out before we left: the “world’s longest Champagne bar”, high-end shops, and of course, impressive roof arches. After we had our fill of modernized Victorian engineering we boarded our train. A comfortable 2 hour trip later we were on the streets of Brussels!