Barcelona Ups and Downs

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Hello from Barcelona.

This is our fourth day in Barcelona and already the city has given us reasons to love it and reasons to hate it.

We arrived on Friday after riding a train from Zaragoza, three hours in seats facing a couple of girls who decided it was a good idea to listen to their headphones at full blast for all the world to hear and then converse in voices loud enough to be heard over the blaring music. I could hear their music over my own train provided headphones and train channel music, not to mention being able to hear them screaming at each other over the dinn. But despite this, the train ride was nice and we arrived in Barcelona intact and ready to go.

At the train station we sat down with some McDonalds (yes Mc Donalds - hey it´s easy and we were starving in a train station) and began trying to phone different hotels and hostals listed in the Lonely Planet. we were not in luck. It seemed that everything in the city was booked up for the weekend. I went over to the youth hostel kiosk for some information on the youth hostels in the area. We ended up booking one in a shared room (this is all they had) for what ended up being about 38 Euros for the both of us per night. We booked for two nights.

The Hostel was actually really nice, aside from giving me flashbacks of Reiber Hall. It was located outside of the City Center, which, we learned in the end was actually a bonus. It was an 18th Century building, I was told, and had very detailed ceilings in the lobby with moorish looking decor. The grounds were huge and very nicely landscaped to have a wooded feel. In our room there were four other people who all seemed to be from Germany. We were able to talk to two of them for a while, sharing battle stories and talking about life in general. They were named Steffi and Hagen and they were really cool. Also, in the course of a one and a half hour conversation, they brought up Knight Ridder, confirming that Germans do indeed love David Hasslehoff. When I asked them about this, all they could do was crack up. Amazing, I always just thought it was a rumor.

Anyhow the first day we got to the hostel we went out to explore the nearby Guell Park which houses a ton of great Gaudi Architecture, in fact, the park was designed by Gaudi as wehat was supposed to be a large estate housing project for wealthy people back in the early 20th, but was abandoned and so now is a big park with a very famous Gaudi terrace and veiwpoint. It was great, the architecture in person is so much more crazy and amazing than in photos. Every detail of it is designed in such a totally inspired way (for instance, the undersides and supports). It was great to see.

That night in the shared dorm room was ok. We got to share some bunk beds. Miraculously, everyone was pretty much ready to go to bed at the same time, so that worked out really well. Masa said maybe they put us in the old people room. This is because at about 11 when we were brushing our teeth and getting ready for bed, there were tons of 18-20 year olds getting ready to go out. I´ve never really felt old before, but this kind of did. When we arrived at the Hostel, there were tons of groups of people, all seeming to be around 19, talking and hanging out on the grounds and niether masa nor I felt like we had much at all to say to them. But luckily once the "kids" all left to their clubs the "old people" all came out of the wood work. It was kind of a weird and intersting dynamic in the place.

Anyway so we slept ok in our bunkbeds and then at exactly 8am, the speakers in the hallways started blaring in four different languages (castellano, catalano, english, and french) something like "good morning, breakfast will be served from 8am until 9am. After 10am you will not be allowed into the bedrooms. Some guests may stay in their rooms, please be sure to contact the reception desk ..." and so on. The message played a couple times in all languages and then they began blaring music over the loud speakers to wake everyone up. It was so weird! But it was ok with us since it was 8 after all and they were feeding us. We ate some bread and cereal for breakfast and set off to see Barcelona.

First thing we did here was get on a walking tour of Picasso´s life in Barcelona (he lived here from the age of 14 until about 24, they told us). The guide was cool and well informed, he also informed us that we should be careful because gangs of theives would approach and rob tour groups. he gave us this bit of info in a very nonchalant and matter of fact way that was kind of creepy. At the end of the tour we got tickets to the Picasso museum, which we visited and it was great. Luckily we kept all our stuff the whole time and were not approached by bands of thieves.

Next we needed lunch because we were starving. We ended up at this really horrible place with crappy food and bad atmosphere. It was really disappointing but what could we do, so we ate and got out of there. Next on the agenda was to visit the Museum of the City which had a great exhibit of the Roman city that stood where Barcelona is now and which is excavated under the existing city. You can go down and it explains all the different things in the Roman city. That was cool. But all the time we spent in the main or old part of Barcelona we spent fighting crowds and maneuvering through people. It was exhausting. After the museum of the city we decided to have some sangria before we found dinner. That went off well, if a little pricey, it was good and we were happy to sit for a while and enjoy the wine. Next stop was dinner at a vegetarian restaurant we´d found earlier. This was like a cafeteria style thing where you get your plates off a rack and pay at the end. I got a big plate of much needed vegetables and some veggie lasagna. Masa had a plate of eggplant and tomato parmasan and some other veggies. We sat and ate all of it, thinking that it was kind of on the cold side and would be much better hot. Then when I got up to go to the bathroom I managed to actually see the huge bank of microwaves on the wall at which everyone was heating their foods. aha. oh well too late.

After the fairly unsatisfactory dinner of cold vegetables we felt like some dessert, but for some reason as we walked around we could not find any place that looked like it sold pastries or anything. All damn day long that´s all we saw but of course once we were looking, nada. Oh well. We stumbled across a major square that was full of restaurants and bars, at this point a little tired of the crowds and a little tired of not being able to find something. And even though we didn´t feel like it we ended up sitting at one of the outdoor bars with a couple huge jugs of beer in front of us. we were both in such foul moods about Barcelona and just tired of being tourists and tired of the attitudes that we encountered everywhere towards us and towards tourists. It was really overwhelming. Barcelona felt, at that moment, like some giant, bloated, crowded shopping mall. The only things to do were to visit museums, shop and eat. We were tired of museums by this point and we didn´t want to shop or eat. This equals dilemma. So there we were already feeling down and - I know it sounds crazy coming from two people taking a trip around the world but we were bored - and that´s when the burning cigarette butt hit masa´s shirt and fell down to the ground. I´d heard the guys behind us chatting in spanish about tourists and how there are more and more every day blah blah. And, logistically, the thing couldn´t really have come from anywhere else. I looked over to them but they looked away and masa said they wouldn´t meet his eye either. We sat there for a moment longer until a guy came up with roses to sell. He tried to get masa to buy some for me, masa said no. They guy insisted. Just one rose, he said. Masa said no, he didn´t want to. Guy insisted further, getting testy now, and masa, in no mood for this said, no. go away. finally they guy gave us a dirty look and left. We left immediately after, most of our beer still sitting on the table. So needless to say our blah mood had taken a turn for the worse as we got onto the subway. Let´s just say here that a minor altercation occured on the subway and that neither masa nor the other guy were entirely innocent in the matter. But that was kind of the last straw for me. I was ready to leave Barcelona. If they so desperately hated and resented the tourists, I was glad to extricate myself from the issue. In addition I could see so clearly how the cycle went on. We were pissed off by a series of incidents and being tired, in turn, we ended up pissing off some locals. Now those locals would go on to hate tourists even more and piss more people off. Especially Japanese Tourists... since, after all, that´s who the guy on the train said he was going to shove next time he saw one (since Masa, a Japanese Tourist, had pissed him off) great. We got back to the hostel thoroughly depressed and pretty much done with Barcelona. If we hadn´t booked two more nights at a different hotel, I think we would have left the next day.

Then the Germans got back from whereever they went and we all started chatting about stuff and about getting ripped off in the tourist centers of Barcelona and about life in general and, weirdly, things started looking better.

Next morning (this was yesterday, the 17th of September, we decided to lay low for the day. We did some laundry at the hostel, checked out, had some lunch in the park, checked into our new hotel (sooo much nicer, Masa found a good deal on Priceline, we´re out of the center of town and the room is nice and big with a great shower and CNN in english. Thanks to Mása´s dad for helping us make the online booking!!!!!) We spent time just lounging in our private room watching SWAT in spanish. Then we had some dinner at a bakery down the street and ran a couple errands and went back to the room for an early night. It was just the day we needed after our tourist overload. We did come down to the center for a bit but everything was closed and there were about 20 gabillion people milling around. Not one shop was open. not even the big department store. IT was weird.

Today we took our time getting up and moving. We came down to the center of town to get a couple of things, use the internet and stuff like that. We ended up having the best meal we´ve had yet in Barcelona. Now I think we´re going to see Gaudi´s Sagrado Familia and then find our way to the Olympic swimming pool and gym for a workout.

We will probably be heading out of here tomorrow for Toulouse, France. We´ll definitely keep you all posted. Untill Then Take care and be safe

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Photos

Gaudi's Park in Barcelona
This is one of the first places we visited in Barcelona upon arrival. On the way back from this park to the hostel, we noticed some grafiti that said "a good tourist = a dead tourist." nice.

masa being a tourist
that's our tour group walking past for our picasso in barcelona walking tour

dorm beds
just fyi, in case mike reads this, we were SOOO glad we had our sleeping bags with us. :) we both remain scabie free - and, incidentally bed bug free.

look at them all!
keep in mind this was taken on sunday when NOTHING was open except the restaurants.

me and some important spaniards
don't know who they are, but they are big.

a cool market we found
this was the first thing we found in barcelona that we both agreed actually made us more happy than stressed or sad. sounds odd but it is remarkably true.

my fave photo of la sagrada familia
this is in the interior of gaudi's unfinished cathedral

more sagrada familia
this is the nativity facade - or as much of it as I could fit.