La Buena Vida

I’ve been waiting years and years to visit Spain. Learning Spanish during my school days, watching every Almodovar film, savoring tapas, and hearing many travelogues dripping with superlatives about the country’s offerings were enough to put it on the top of my wish list. Furthermore, every single person I know who’s visited Barcelona has insisted that I’d absolutely fall in love with the city. Well, sure enough, within moments of arriving, I knew it was my kind of town, and after three and a half glorious days, I very surely fell in love.

There’s a very special kind of energy there – one that joins ultra-dynamism and ultra-chillness. The people are friendly and laid back, yet have the energy to keep it going through all hours of the day. Sure, they take a siesta, but in Barcelona we hardly noticed any kind of pause in the afternoon. Some shops were closed, but there were people pouring out of every nook and cranny. Granted, it’s the beginning of peak tourist season, but the constant swarm of people hardly made the city unbearable – if anything, it only added to the vibrancy of an already lively place. While we found the super-late dining hour to be over-hyped (restaurants were packed, even with locals, by the time we arrived at 10:30-11), the legends are all true – the people rage through all hours of night. Walking around post-dinner at 1am, there were groups of people strolling, partying, or just hanging out, and I’m not just talking twentysomethings.

Then there’s the city’s incredible art and architecture. I think my jaw was agape almost the entire time I was in town. Like many European cities, there is an abundance of history captured in the building’s edifices. In Barcelona, we stumbled upon medieval and Gothic churches, 17th century plazas, and ornate statues from various bygone eras. Plus there was architecture we set out to see: the art-nouveau-on-acid apartment buildings designed by Antoni Gaudi and his contemporaries, not to mention Gaudi’s piece de resistance, the Sagrada Familia cathedral. This work-in-progress is, over 100 years since building started, still under construction, but the cranes and sporadic scaffolding do not at all diminish the effect of this astounding architectural wonder of the world. The pseudo-cubist stone edifice at the entrance featuring knights and religious figures gives way to an interior forest of columns branching into petal-like designs and sometimes a burst of sky (the ceiling is not entirely complete). After circling the whole of the interior, we reached the back exterior of the building, and at that point my mind was officially blown. The famous 80’s anti-drug ad campaign came to mind: this is your brain (picture the pristine, raw egg); this is your brain on Gaudi (cut to sunny-side up). Yowza. The edifice looks like it’s melting, but it’s really all a series of ornate carvings so weird and beautiful and at some times realistic (there were some human figures reminiscent of classical sculpture). The spires swirl upward and are topped off by bulbous, colorfully tiled simulacrums of crosses. And the most insane part is that there’s so much more work to be done to fully realize the original vision. I can’t wait to return to the city, say 5 or 10 years from now, just to see the progress that’s been made. The lone image pictured here obviously expresses more than my words ever could, but of course no pictures can even do it justice.

But that’s not the end of all the surreal goodness with which Gaudi graced BCN. He designed a fantasyland of a park in the hilly outskirts of the city, Parc Guell. From the gingerbread house at the entrance to the eerily cool and calm Hall of Columns to the mosaic-tiled lizard, there are enough quirky landmarks to feed the senses aside from lush greenery and shady walking paths. Even though the park was a total tourist madhouse, exploring it was a heavenly experience.

We tried to visit the Picasso Museum twice, but each time the line was winding all the way to Madrid, so we opted out. Instead, we checked out a gallery featuring Dali’s lesser-known works (lots of drawings, small paintings, sculptures, and even some funky furniture). In addition, we went to the MACBA, BCN’s contemporary art museum. Although we weren’t super impressed with the current exhibits (plus there wasn’t enough context provided for the more obscure ones, including a multimedia installation on the Lithuanian embassy in Rome…a little info would’ve been helpful), we loved the museum’s architecture and a few random installations.

In between all our art-gazing escapades, we just walked and walked and walked. Las Ramblas, a main artery of the city that was built for promenading, is a tourist attraction in and of itself. It’s chockablock with vendors hawking everything from bouquets to tacky souvenirs to live animals; in between the vendors you can find all manner of street performers. I think BCN has a higher per capita of street performers than any other city in the world. They weren’t limited to Las Ramblas – we saw them in almost every plaza throughout daytime hours. The Boqueria, the mother of all outdoor market, is also located right off the densely packed Ramblas. We spent a while just wandering amid the market stalls boasting vibrantly colored produce, seafood, spices, candies, and, of course, the
ultimate in Spanish food products, jamon iberico. We sampled the latter at a restaurant and I’m not a very good Jew for saying this, but I felt intoxicated after eating it, and I don’t even really like ham. It was that incredible. We of course also enjoyed a variety of tapas and sipped some tasty cava, and amid all the delicious eats, we somehow forgot to get some paella, which is scandalous.

A final note on language: I was mentally preparing myself to try out my long dormant Spanish skills. Granted, in Catalunya (the region in Spain where BCN is located) people speak Catalan, which is not the Spanish we learned in school. However, most people in BCN do speak Castellano Spanish as well as some English. The first couple days my foreign language wires got crossed and I spoke in a little patois I like to call fragnol. For example, I ordered “café avec leche” more than once and instinctively answered “oui” instead of “si.” But after a while, the old Spanish came back to me and I was able to put whole sentences together. N felt a bit helpless, as his Spanish is more or less limited to "hola," "gracias," and now, "bocadilla." It was funny to have the tables turned, as I’m used to being the linguistically inferior one in the land of the Gauls.

In short, I am head over heels for BCN and although we already moved to Paris, I now really, really want to move there. Best. City. Ever.