This weekend’s travels brought a little taste of home for me. Upon landing near the Northern Mediterranean coast of Spain, my little airplane window was filled with, what do you call them again? Ah yes, hills! Mountains even! And trees, and beaches, and most of all, Hispanics.
Barcelona is perhaps known by many as “that place that hosted the Olympics about 10 years back,” or for some, “home of Ronaldinho,” arguably the best soccer player to date. But Barcelona has much more to offer. Located on the coast of Mediterranean Sea in the Northern part of Spain, it has a culture much different than the rest of Western Europe. It is a strange blend of what I have come to know as Latin American culture and Western European culture.
So what exactly do I mean? I’ll try to explain it using a brief recap of the weekend’s events.
Friday we covered the most ground. Probably the most well-known tourist attraction in Barcelona is an unfinished temple/church by the name of “
La Sagrada Familia.” It was conceptualized and designed by the oddball Spanish artist Antoni Gaudi, and is by far the most memorable piece of architecture I have ever seen. It has the strangest mix of gothic and contemporary styles, and really has no consistent theme or style throughout it. Each of the four facades is completely different and unique. The funniest part about the whole thing is that construction on it began in 1882, and it’s still not even near completion. Today there are a total of eight towers completed, but there are still ten more that need to be done. There is one for each of the 12 disciples, the four evangelists (whoever they are), one for Mary, the mother of God, and one for the Son himself (170 meters high). As breathtaking as it is, the church is still one big construction site, with very slow progress and no signs of completion anytime soon.
Because we just couldn’t get enough of Gaudi, we headed for his other masterpiece, the Parc Guell. Its landscape is multi-layered, and it carries a very odd mix of natural and artificial. One minute it looks like a
forest, the next like a
playground. And who could pass up the world’s longest park bench? Not us. We liked it so much that we stayed for a while and played some
hacky sack. Yeah, that’s right. Hacky sack.
It was off to the beach for the remainder of the afternoon, enjoying the salty Mediterranean water and doing a little more “hacking.” The actual
beach wasn’t that nice, but the sun-and-water mixture made for quite the afternoon delight.
For dinner we enjoyed an authentic Spanish, Mediterranean meal known as “
Paella.” It is, more or less, a giant mixture of curried rice and seafood. Shrimp, mussels, clams, octopus – you name it, they threw it in. I can’t say it was all that delicious, but when washed down with a nice white wine it made for a very memorable experience.
The nightlife in Barcelona, in all of Spain for that matter, is huge. Bars, clubs, and cafes line every street, square and back alley, with suspicious looking Spanish men selling six packs of cheap beer at every corner. Maybe that was more of a taste of TJ, but I felt at home, nonetheless. Things in town usually don’t settle down until about five or six in the morning in Barcelona, so when a few of us woke up early on Saturday morning to see the sunrise, we saw the remnants of the last night’s activities still on their way home. A funny thing happened that morning, too. I witnessed my first live graffiti. As our small group exited the youth hostel in the direction of the metro, we passed a young, rebellious commie practicing his art on a shop window nearby. His two buddies stood at a viewing distance and, upon completion, gave the young artist a “thumbs up.” You ask why I call him a
commie? Well, he wrote “Arbeit Macht Frei” (German for “work makes you free”) several times and also a Spanish sentence that went something like, “We need communism (with all due respect to the homosexual community).” But yeah, the
sunrise was cool, too.
Saturday was sports day. We first went to see all of the facilities that were built for the ’92 Olympic games, including a giant
outdoor ceremony square, the Olympic swimming arena, the soccer/track stadium. Next we visited the soccer shrine known as “
Camp Nou,” home of FC Barcelona. The field was amazing, the facilities the best in the world, and the souvenir shop was bigger than the Centre Mall. Inside the stadium was an entire museum dedicated to the over 100-year history of FC Barcelona, including hundreds of trophies and photographs. After the tour I met up with Ronaldinho, shook his hand, and we met up with Sister at a nice restaurant.
Finally, Saturday
night we found a nice Irish Pub and enjoyed a thick Guinness with our Spanish friends. It’s great to know that no matter where you travel, there’s always an Irish Pub in town with cold Guinness on tap.
