Advertisement
Published: April 14th 2008
Las Ramblas
The main artery of Barcelona. Always something happening on Las Ramblas!Hola!
Well folks, summer is here!!! Finally. For us it has been a looooonnggg, cold and grey winter and with a combination of heading further south, hitting April and starting daylight savings Summer has arrived. It was so lovely to be able to stroll around at 7 in the evening without a big jacket on and it still be light. Not to mention how wonderful it is to be warmed by sunshine.
We flew out of Milan on Easter Sunday and into Barcelona. Upon arriving we realised, we’re becoming true blue carefree Aussie backpackers, we knew no Spanish except gracias which is actually pronounced “grassy-ass” over here by the locals. Took us a while to stop giggling when we said that. We expected Spanish to be similar to Italian but alas it isn’t as similar as we hoped because it is, of course, actually a completely different language. What makes it more confusing is Barcelona is not Spain according to the locals. It is Catalunya, a region in Spain that is fiercely proud of its heritage. Here locals speak Catalonian (said to be a combination of French, Portuguese, Spanish and something else). The language was almost lost as during the
Trish with the Spanish version of "Bubbles"
of Little Britain fame.
She kept flashing her boobs at everyone and shouting things in Spanish. It was very funny. She was one of the most entertaining "entertainers" on Las Ramblas. Franco years it was forbidden to speak or write the language. Still some older people who are fluent in Catalonian orally cannot read or write their own language. Nowadays though there is a kind of reverse discrimination going on where the children at school take all their lessons in Catalonian and only take Spanish language classes a couple of hours a week.
The other thing we noticed on arriving is how friendly the people were. Trish had an old guy (i.e. in his 70s) try to get her bag down from the luggage rack for her, after politely declining he helped anyway and then she was helped off the bus by another local. We were also helped by a lovely lady at the Laundromat who spoke no English and laughed almost until she cried when asked if she spoke any. We were next in line for a machine and someone tried to push in, we didn’t notice but the lady jumped up and told the pusher-inerer to back off.
So anyway after 2 nights in Barcelona we decided we really loved it and as we didn’t have any idea where else we’d like to go next in
Picasso's pulling the piss out of Miro (his artist mate)
Picasso and Miro were good mates but Picasso never thought much of Miro's art. So once to try prove to him that anyone can "do" Miro, he grabbed a piece of paper and drew some stick figures. This is Picasso's scribble. Spain we decided to stay out the week. We also had a friend that Daniel used to work with at UFC coming to Barcelona and thought it would be great to catch up with someone from home. We’re so glad we stayed the whole week as we really felt as though we were able to soak up the atmosphere of the place. Our first hostel was nice enough but not that friendly, as we extended our stay we had to find another hostel and the second one was fantastic. It was filled with Brits, Canadians and Aussies and we were sharing a dorm with a couple of Canadians studying in London.
The biggest attraction (and highlight), in our opinion, of Barcelona is Las Ramblas. This street runs right through the middle of the Barri Gotic (Gothic Quarter) from Placa de Catalunya to the Columbus Monument. Once upon a time it was a river but in the 1800s the city walls were taken down and the “river” was turned into a pedestrian promenade. This street runs for just over a kilometre and is full of action at any time of the day or night. At night a wander will have
Remains of Temple Roma d'August
(Roman Temple) that once stood here on Mont Taber, the highest point of ancient Barcino. These columns are in the courtyard of an apartment building. Unlike other cities we've visited Barcelona just builds around, on top or with ancient ruins. you being offered all sorts of goods and services (none of which is either illegal or legal, the Spanish seem to be quite relaxed on prostitution and drug laws but there are laws). We got approached by more than a few “mates” with six packs of beer. The exchange went something like this - mate: “Cold beer?”, us: “No gracias”, mate: “Smoke, hash, cocaine”, us: “No gracias”. Then mate moves on to the next tourist.
During the day Las Ramblas is a completely different place it is lined with little newsagencies selling trinkets for tourists, florists with beautiful arrangements, stalls selling birds, rabbits and mice and most importantly street performers. Mainly human statues. On the weekends you get double the number of statues but quite a few mediocre acts. During the week there are always regulars and some are absolutely fantastic. Amongst the statues you have Michael Jackson impersonators, acrobatic groups, guys kicking soccer balls and the cream of the crop, a “Bubbles” (think Little Britain) inspired character of crowd pulling hilarity.
We rambled A LOT during our week in Barcelona, not just because everything kind of feeds off of it as the main street
Street Performers at the bottom of Las Ramblas
with the Christopher Columbus monument in the background. Christopher Columbus was welcomed home by Ferdinand and Isabel after his first trip to the "New World" (aka the Americas). The monument is topped by Chris himself supposedly pointing to the New World but apparently they put the statue on wrong and he is pointing in the wrong direction! but because we loved wandering up and down it. You never saw the same thing, always something different happening. This is also apparently the place in the whole of Europe that you are most likely to get pick pocketed. While we saw one at work (and saved an old lady) and our friend from the hostel lost her wallet we luckily escaped falling victim (touch wood!).
Other highlights of Barcelona (there are SO many) was a cooking class, seeing some of Picasso’s works and namely being introduced to the fascinating works of Antoni Gaudi. It is hard to look at anything interesting in Barcelona and it not be Gaudi’s work or at the very least Gaudi-esque. Two big sights we visited were the Sagrada Familia and Parc Guell. The Sagrada Familia is a MASSIVE unfinished church that Gaudi designed and began work on knowing that it would not be finished in his lifetime. This church is like nothing we’ve ever seen before. Well, it looks like a church in that it has biblical references and scenes and massive stain glass windows but well it is kind of hard to explain really. We’ve seen many a cathedral along our travels
Welcome to Barcelona
Another street performer. Las Ramblas is lined with human statues. Trish only wanted a photo OF this guy but he insisted she have a photo with him with all the trimmings. We then felt bad that we only gave him 10 cents!! and you read the guidebook or listen to the audio guide tell you that it took over 100 years to finish but that was still hundreds of years ago. This church is still in the making, and it was fascinating to see something of that scale and grandeur during construction. Our photos just do not do it justice but we did try.
As for our cooking class, we went on a walking tour of the city on our first day and they also ran a sangria drinking marathon cleverly disguised as a cooking class. We met another Aussie couple on the walking tour and decided to join them at the cooking class the next night. It wasn’t really a hands on cooking class, she mainly cooked the paella (national Spanish dish a cross between a risotto and fried rice - okay that is a really bad description but the best we could do, it is very tasty and really in a league of its own) while we made sangrias (apparently originated from France but the Spanish loved it so much they adopted it and just never corrected anyone that thought it was Spanish) and ate tapas (another Spanish tradition).
The paella was lovely but the sangrias were even better! We even co-created (with the other Aussie couple) a drink we dubbed “the Ozzi-angria” as we’d started making another jug only to be told that there was no more red wine therefore no more sangrias. Not wanting to distort the rest of the world’s perception of Aussies (and we couldn’t let the alcohol stewed fruit and brandy go to waste) we added more sugar and topped it up with some soft drink, wallah - not quite as good as the sangria, but drinkable and hell, isn’t that what counts!!
On our last day in Barcelona we celebrated Catalonian pride with the locals outside the Cathedral with the Sardana dance. Well we watched, clapped, donated a euro to support the band and took lots of pictures. The Sardana is kind of like a Greek dance, slow music that gets quicker, crossing of feet in a big circle then hold hands and throw them in the air. After the dance had finished we were wandering back to Las Ramblas (of course) and came across some sort of festival. We’re still not sure what it was even after extensive researching on the
Poor little piglets
The downside of the markets. net and asking every Spanish person we know. It involved many, many paper mache type sculpture things that people put on their shoulders and dance down Las Ramblas with to the beat of drums played by little groups of locals (mainly kids in this instance); finally they’re followed by a human pyramid. It goes on for ages and they kind of did a loop from a small square near the Cathedral to the Las Ramblas and back again. We got so excited we’d stand and watch and take pictures for a while and then run alongside the parade to get to another part. We just didn’t want to miss out on anything. Trish got a bit too excited and at one stage was practically in the middle of Las Ramblas (with the parade) taking pictures and clapping with them all before Daniel pulled her back to the side where the audience ought to be. Neither the participants nor the audience seemed to mind, in fact a few of the sculpture people came up to her and did a dance and chanted in Spanish to her, to which she replied with all the Spanish she could muster, a very enthusiastic “Hola!!”.
Seemed to go down well.
We really didn’t want to leave Barcelona at all but in order to see some more of the Iberian Peninsula we had to push on. We caught the bus to Valencia and stayed at an awesome hostel. Unfortunately the same description can’t be given to Valencia itself. We arrived in mid-afternoon thinking “wow, they really take the siesta seriously here” only to find out that it was in fact a public holiday in Valencia. Hence, NOTHING was open. We hadn’t had breakfast because we’d had an early bus and hadn’t managed to find anything along the way so we were absolutely starving. We went into the only place that was open and serving food. It was like a country pub (only Spanish style - whatever that is) and no one spoke any English. We of course being the carefree, chilled out travellers we are (read: disorganised, unprepared and sometimes downright stupid) forgot to bring along our phrase book. So we had to order only in Spanish from a menu only in Spanish. And the locals weren’t that friendly either! We didn’t do too badly out of it actually considering we were really just guessing
at what we ordered. We got a spinach and goats cheese salad (salad good, bit over goat’s cheese since it all now smells and tastes like undigested milk dried in a lamb’s stomach for 3 months!!!) and some stuffed capsicums. It wasn’t really enough but it would tide us over till dinner (when we were promised things would be open) and we were too scared to ask for anything else.
We only spent a couple of nights in Valencia and enjoyed a sunny siesta in the massive city park. It was too windy to go to the beach but perfect to sit in the sun. From there we caught a four hour bus to Madrid, were we stopped in the middle of nowhere halfway, got ripped off by an ATM and found out that El Caballo really could be an authentic Spanish hotel/restaurant. We were too annoyed at the ATM fiasco to take photos though so you’ll just have to believe us! For those that haven’t had the pleasure of visiting El Caballo it is a Spanish style resort about half way between Perth and Northam.
We were still missing wonderful Barcelona so didn’t really care much for
Passion Facade of Sagrada Familia
This Facade was constructed after Gaudi's death using his sketches for inspiration. Madrid but ended up having a fairly good time. We ticked a few more works of art and must see sights of our list with a day trip to Toledo where we also discovered that the compass Trish bought Daniel for Christmas is incorrect. Kind of inconvenient as the reason she got it was so we could navigate our way through the medinas in Morocco (next destination), but even funnier that Daniel has been using it for a month and half and hadn’t noticed it was very wrong. We desperately wanted to get out to El Escorial (MASSIVE palace modelled on Chateau of Versailles) and the Valley of the Fallen (underground granite cathedral built by Franco’s prisoners and funnily enough also where he was buried???? Go figure), but unfortunately on the day we wanted to go everything went wrong because the stupid Spanish don’t get started in the morning until 10am and we were in dire need of a laundry run.
So instead we well did our laundry and wandered around Madrid a bit more. Our flight to Morocco left on Sunday evening so we spent the whole day Sunday hitting Madrid’s 2 big museums - the Prado (with
one of the greatest selections of art in Europe) and a massive exhibit of Picasso’s works (can’t remember the name of the museum) which houses his most famous piece - Guernica. Guernica is typical of Picasso and at first looks like crazy modern art but when you know the story behind it, it really is amazing. This painting showcases the horrors of war by telling the story of Guernica. Guernica is a town in northern Spain that Franco let the Nazi’s bomb in April, 1937. The date you’ll notice is before World War II but it was during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso painted this for the World Fair in Paris (where he was living at the time). It caused a great stir in the international community and bought the Spanish Civil War to the attention of the rest of the world - Google it! The Prado Museum was the epitome of Spanish logic (i.e. none but with a cover of perfect organisation) but we managed to see pretty much everything we wanted.
With Spain done and dusted (with loads of "we’ll have to come back to go there", and "see thats") we move on to our next big
adventure. Ahhh the life of a backpacker, another day, another country, another day another continent.....
Advertisement
Tot: 0.093s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 8; qc: 51; dbt: 0.0537s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
Jo & Ben
non-member comment
Keep enjoying
It is so great to hear about your adventures and see all the wonderful photos. We did start to worry about you when we had heard nothing but others reassured us that you had not scrubbed us from your contact list!!!! Take care and keep enjoying it all. We really couldn't have two better people bringing the world right to our doors. Are you sure you don't want to become overseas correspondents!!!!