Round-About Barcelona

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I decided to entitle this blog entry Round-about Barcelona because that’s what we spent a lot of our time in Barcelona doing—going around roundabouts. While Barcelona is a beautiful and exciting city, one of its downsides is that its streets are very poorly marked. I couldn’t even begin to count the number of times that we missed our turn (we had a rental car) and had to circle around in the roundabouts to get back to where we were supposed to be. In addition, there are a couple of really big roundabouts—not as big as the huge one around the Arc de Triomph in Paris, but still, 5 or 6 lanes around—some of which have traffic lights, and I got caught in them a couple of times unable to get to the outside lane to exit the roundabout and ended up circling a couple of times. But, thankfully, we also had time to do other things besides driving around in circles.

It was really good to be back in a Spanish-speaking country. Sort of. The “official” language of Barcelona is Catalán, which sounds like a mix of Spanish, French, and Portuguese, but Catalán is pretty similar to Spanish, and everybody there also speaks Spanish. A lot of the road signs were in Catalán, and some die-hard Barcelona-ites (think of them as the stereotypical Texans who insist that Texas should reclaim independence) refuse to integrate into Spanish culture and insist on only speaking Catalán, but that didn’t pose much of a problem.

The other bit of “cultural disappointment,” if I can call it that, of our trip to Spain was that when Gretchen and I got into our rental car, the first songs we heard on the radio were not Shakira, La Oreja de Van Gogh (although we did hear plenty of their new album—enough that we decided to buy it at Carrefour!), or Luis Fonzi, but Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire and Prince or The Artist Formerly Known as Prince or The Artist Formerly Known as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince or whatever his current name—or logo—is.

We flew into Gerona (or Girona, depending on which language it’s written in), which is about a 90km drive northeast of Barcelona, right up the Mediterranean coast. Instead of taking the recommended interior toll roads to our hotel in Barcelona, we decided to take another smaller highway that went right along the coast—similar to the 101 in California. In fact, Barcelona’s terrain really reminded us of coastal California—dry mountains along sandy beaches. And much of the older architecture was similar—and I guess that would make sense because the Spanish originally settled California. At any rate, Gretchen wanted to head straight to the beach. We stopped at the first beach town we saw, parked the car, and then spent about an hour on the beach before heading down to Barcelona. The daytime temperature while we were in Spain was probably in the lower 60s, so the beach was absolutely empty.

After enjoying the beach and taking lots of pictures, we made our next stop—Carrefour. Carrefour is a big grocery store—somewhat similar to a Super Target or Super WalMart. We had them in Argentina. We bought a ton of fruit juice—pear juice, pineapple juice (yum!), and orange juice. That might sound silly, but juice is really expensive in London, so we thought we’d “juice up” (no MLB jokes here, please) while we were in Spain. We also bought a big bag of pistachios (I love pistachios!), which were significantly cheaper than in London. I figured that they were probably grown in Spain (which would account for the low price), but when I got back to the hotel and looked at the label, I saw that they were imported from California. Hmmm….

After shopping at Carrefour, we headed back down the highway toward our hotel. We hit Barcelona right at rush hour, so traffic was a bit congested. A couple hours and a dozen or so roundabouts later, we finally made it to our hotel, which was on the other side of Barcelona. We unloaded our stuff from the car, checked into our room, and then decided to venture out to go find some tapas. Unfortunately, after driving around for 45 minutes or so (and circling several more roundabouts), we could not find a single parking spot in that part of town—nowhere—so we headed back to the hotel, and Gretchen ordered some sort of vegetable lasagna in the room.

I won’t go into any more detail here on what we did while we were in Barcelona—I’ll just summarize everything in the picture captions again. However, I just want to point out one thing that I thought was really strange in Barcelona. Everywhere we went, we seemed to run into Oregon Track paraphernalia (as in University of Oregon Ducks). Not only were several people wearing Oregon Track sweatshirts, but we saw the sweatshirts, t-shirts, and hats for sale in the Nike store and at the mall. Maybe they just really like yellow and green there.

Well, that’s all I’m going to write here about the trip to Barcelona. Tomorrow Gretchen and I fly back to the States. I can’t believe that our time here is already up—but it’s been great, and we are extremely grateful for this opportunity that we’ve had. We feel very fortunate for everything that we’ve been able to see, experience, and learn while we’ve been here. I’ll post one last blog, after we get back to Nashville, relating to the last few days, but I’m kind of behind now because of everything we’ve been trying to do before we leave. And just in case I procrastinate longer than I should, MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

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