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our apartment for the week
ours was the first balcony on the bottomVisiting Barcelona was like unveiling a well-kept secret. The best restaurants were out of the way and in little niches off main streets. The most fashionable clothing stores were found after weaving through small side streets and then ducking through side-side streets. The muchos cool nightclubs only opened at 1am and were only known by word of mouth. We were lucky that we had met a friendly Spaniard way back in Vietnam who had written down for us a bunch of her personal ‘favourites’ in Barcelona.
We were quite lucky with our accommodation and had booked an apartment a while ago right near Plaça Cataluña which is off La Ramblas, the main axis of the city. The character of Barcelona seemed to be in a state of constant flux, and rambling through the cityscape felt like traveling through a multitude of evolving cities. Leaving an awe-inspiring Gaudi building with its fragmented shiny tiles and vibrant array of colour, one would stumble into a dirty, dis-coloured alleyway full of unkempt weeds and forgotten rubbish. You would walk down La Ramblas with its throngs of tourists and similarly numbered hordes of hawkers; musicians banging away at their instruments and street artists busily
la ramblas
our first day out and about scribbling away at the latest tourist fad; street cafes popping up on virtually every square centimeter of pavement with street performers claiming every other patch left over to impress the audiences with their magic tricks or outlandish statuesque costumes. Then a few hundred metres past the harbour the man-made sandy beach Barcelonetta appears, seemingly an odd placement through the city’s wear and tear and industrial grime.
Contrary to what we have heard, the Spanish cuisine was quite delightful and tasty. We enjoyed a massive selection of tapas on our first night out, and the Spaniards sure know what to do with their meats and cheeses and fish and fruits. Our last Spanish meal was a Mixta Paella which was washed down nicely with our jugs of sweet and fruity Sangria. Both these restaurants we visited (Txapella and Le Quinze Nits, respectively) seem to be predominantly visited by locals and tourists who had done their research, and judging by the numbers of diners we guessed that the owners of the establishments wanted to keep it that way.
From an architectural point of view, it is certainly no secret that tourists come to see the buildings of Gaudi. As an
at the markets
fruits and vegetables, sweets and meats, wines and cheeses galore. architect, friends would return from Barcelona and tell me “JIAN you have to go there, it’s inspiring”; lecturers would teach us in first year architectural history the importance of Gaudi as an innovative architect-sculptor whose buildings I thought I would only ever see in textbooks. I was not disappointed, and the three Gaudi venues we visited (Parc Güell, Casa Mila and Sagrada Familia, the last which is still under construction and not due to finish til 2020) were all very different but equally aesthetically and architecturally poetic.
Barcelona is a city that you unravel with not just your eyes but with your ears. It is a City of Noises, and with the city so vibrant at all hours of the day it is like a constant city soundtrack on repeat. Early in the morning, the garbage is collected all over the streets in clunky clanging garbage trucks, whilst other council workers release high-pressured jetsprays of water splashing and washing away the dirt and grime from the night before. As the morning starts and the workers begin to stir, newspaper stands shout out the day’s headlines, and roller door shutters all over the city rumble and roar as they open
up to the public for the day. La Ramblas is a surreal sound journey in itself, and does not even take a siesta in the early hours of the afternoon like the rest of the city does. Bird-sellers display scores of tweeting birds, café-owners bellow out specials for the day promising free jugs of sangria, street performers mimicking mystical creatures hiss at passing tourists, cars and taxis honk at ignorant pedestrians. Then as the setting sun covers the city in shadow, it delves into a colourful but slightly seedy nightlife street with guitar-players and dancing onlookers joining in an allegory of rhythmic Spanish tunes, locals drinking and clinking glasses in streetside bars, and the not too distant sound of rioting that we discovered on our last night (FCBarcelona beat Man U in some soccer game….)
Barcelona was definitely a highlight of our trip thus far. It is colourful, lively, vibrant, and cosmopolitan yet scruffy, obscure, jagged and noisy. One week was only just enough time to allow us to dig beneath the surface of this city and reveal its inner charm and secrets; despite the city’s boisterous facade it really had a very elusive and mysterious character.
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Emma
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Lollies!! And food!!! haha Some interesting places as well. Oh how I wish I had been there with you all xox