Barcelona

Thursday, April 11, 2013

It started snowing at around midnight. By the time we awoke, there was heavy snow falling among occasional long, low rumbles of thunder. Today is the day we were to leave for Spain and Portugal to celebrate Abby’s 60th birthday. Our tickets said that we would fly from St. Paul to Newark, and then board our plane to Barcelona at 7:00 p.m. What would plane schedules be like with all this snow falling? The forecasters said we would get 6-9 inches of heavy, wet snow.

The sense of foreboding increased when we read United Airlines’ email that our flight would be delayed by a half hour because our incoming aircraft would arrive late. Thus half of our one-hour layover in Newark had already been consumed.

Our plane was almost exactly a half hour late pushing back from the gate, but the pilot said not to worry, we still were going to get to Newark on time. Then we sat on the edge of the runway for 15 minutes before we actually took off. Now 45 minutes of our one-hour layover had been consumed.

The flight to Newark was a bit bumpy, but otherwise uneventful until the pilot said we were beginning our approach into Newark and could expect to be on the ground at 6:20, giving us enough time to catch our 7:00 flight to Barcelona. Then we began circling the airport. We landed at 6:45 and taxied toward our gate, where we sat for another 5 minutes while waiting for a plane to clear. It took another precious 5 minutes for us to disembark. I waited for our gate-checked luggage while Abby boarded a bus to the other terminal that our flight to Barcelona would leave from. She raced to the departure gate for the Barcelona flight. When she got to the gate, the door was closed. The plane was still there but they would not let us board.

Rather than wait in the shockingly long United customer service line, I called United’s customer service phone number. A very helpful gentleman on the other end of the line put us on a Lufthansa flight to Munich and thence to Barcelona. The Munich flight was leaving a bit late, so we had plenty of time to take the Newark Air Train to yet a third terminal to catch it. A very nice young man traded seats with Abby so that we could sit together as we crossed the Atlantic. Before leaving Newark, I called and emailed our travel agent to let them know that we would be four hours late arriving in Barcelona.

Friday, April 12, 2013

We landed in Barcelona at about 1:20 p.m. We encountered Ricardo, our driver, in a lineup of men in black suits holding printed sheets with people’s names on them. He drove us to our hotel, regaling us with highlights of Barcelona along the way, including a bull ring that had been turned into a mall, bullfighting having been outlawed in Catalonia.

Carles, our guide, met is in the hotel lobby at 5:30. We thanked him for being willing to modify the original schedule, which called for us to meet him at 2:00. He is a slim man, about 40, with brown eyes and brown hair graying at the temples. His manner is very engaging and he is quite knowledgeable about art history and architectural history in Barcelona, his home town.

Today would be our introduction to Antoni Gaudi, Barcelona’s most famous and influential architect, a member of the modernist school. Casa Mila, Gaudi’s most famous house, is in the same block as our hotel. However, we walked past it to Casa Batllo and the Block of Disagreement, which contains Gaudi’s Casa Batllo and two other modernist houses. Gaudi’s Casa Battlo has bone-shaped pillars in front supporting a porch roof, skull-shaped balconies, and broken tiles in various shades of blue and green on the façade that look like waves or streams of water.

We walked the few blocks back to Casa Mila, where Carles bought tickets for us. He led us to the attic, where there is an upside-model of La Sagrada Familia church, showing how the parabolic arch would support building loads without the use of flying buttresses. The model constituted chains hanging from above to demonstrate that the parabolic arch was more natural shape for a load-bearing arch. Nowadays such models would be made on computer. In Gaudis’ day, he used chains hanging upside-down.

The roof of Gaudi’s Casa Mila is so unusually beautiful that Fodor’s uses it as a two-page frontispiece for their guidebook on Spain. The echimneys were nicknamed “witch-scarers” when the apartment building was first opened in 1910. Gaudi’s design did not use load-bearing walls, but instead used interior pillars, which allow the walls inside the apartment building to be placed in various configurations. So much limestone, in curving shapes, with rough surfaces was used during construction that neighbors referred to the house as the “La Pedrera,” – the Stone Quarry – a name that is still used today. Carles, our guide, said that some of the ideas advanced by the design and construction of La

Pedrera were used in Gaudi’s magnum opus, the Sagrada Familia.

For dinner we walked to Le Petit Comite, a restaurant featuring Catalan food that was decorated in a modern style. We had fried calamari and grilled asparagus as our appetizers. For the main course Abby had a salt cod, which we would later see for sale in the markets, and I had pork cheeks, something I’ve never had before. The pork cheeks were delicious, but a bit too rich for my constitution. For dessert we munched on chocolate-covered almonds served with a sherry-like liqueur.

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Carles and Ricardo picked us up in the Mercedes at 9:30 and drove us about 10 blocks to the Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Familia. Construction of the church began in 1882 under a different architect, then it was turned over to Antoni Gaudi in 1891. He worked on it until his death in 1926, when he was hit by a street car and died of his injuries.

The towers of the church constitute parabolic arches, so no flying buttresses are required. The structure of the church is internal; some of the columns actually slope inward to better bear the load. The outside of the church displays the history and scope of Christianity, with modernist statues of the holy family on the east, or nativity, façade. The main entrance is now through the nacimiento (nativity) façade because the main entrance to the nave, the Gloria façade, is still under construction. Completion of the structure will occur in 2026, the 100th anniversary of Gaudi’s death, just 144 years after construction began. A short construction period when compared to the time it took to build the great gothic cathedrals. And La Sagrada Familia is the tallest church in the world.

The interior of the La Sagrada Familia has been called “the forest” because the columns branch like trees as they rise to the ceiling. In this, as in his other works, Gaudi replicated natural forms. The stained glass has the same “broken tile” look that adorns the façade of Casa Batllo. Above the altar is suspended a giant crucifix and above that a canopy decorated with stalks of wheat and bunches of grapes to represent communion. Above the canopy, in the ceiling, is a dome lined with gold with a window at the top, to symbolize Christ rising heavenward after crucifixion. The inside of the dome glows with the natural light of the sun. Our guide, Carles, who has seen the church many times and professes to be an atheist, seemed to be having a religious experience as he again drank in the beauty of the basilica and then interpreted it for us.

The western façade is the passion façade, with another crucifix and also a large statue of Jesus tied to a pillar as he was scourged. The statue of Doubting Thomas seemed to have real doubt on his face as he contemplated the Divinity.

We hopped in Ricardo’s dark blue Mercedes and drove to Gaudi’s Park Guell, a trip seemingly from the sublime to the ridiculous. Fodor’s describes Park Guell as “light and playful, uplifting and restorative.” This was intended to be a new garden community just outside the city that would have as its nexus an open-air theater built over a covered marketplace, also open to the air. Only two houses were built, a house for Gaudi to live in, and a house for Gaudi’s patron, Eusebi Guell.

The gatehouses to the art nouveau community are topped with a red-and-white hallucinogenic mushroom and a large checkerboard column with a cross on top. The stairs going up to the market are decorated with a snake and a lizard whose skins consist of broken tiles decorated in wild art nouveau colors. The columns at the edge of the marketplace deliberately tilt inward to support the weight of the theater above.

Ricardo drove us to the Mercat de Santa Caterina, an open-air market where regular citizens of Barcelona buy anything and everything to eat – seafood, fruit, vegetables, olives and candy. We had lunch at a small café at the front of the market. Abby had a salad of tuna, grilled onions and tomatoes, while I ate grilled hake (a type of white fish), eggplant, zucchini and asparagus. We walked past the gothic cathedral to La Rambla and took a taxi back to our hotel.

After a brief siesta we took the subway to the Mercat de Boqueria, which Carles had described as the more touristy market adjoining La Rambla. We passed large Iberians hams hanging by the hoof for people to purchase. Here also a person could buy fruit already cut up with a plastic fork stuck in it, ready to eat. We bought a half kilo of green olives at a stall to snack on later. We watched what a couple of Catalans purchased before us and ordered the same two types of olives that they did.

We walked out the back of the Boqueria, across a parking lot, and encountered the Antic Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau, one of Fodor’s gold star attractions. I confess that I don’t understand what Fodor’s finds so attractive about it, and neither did our guide, Carles, when we later told him about it. The Antic Hospital encloses a grassy courtyard dotted with orange trees where people were exercising their dogs. A small black dog jumped up on the edge of the fountain and drank from it as we watched.

We quickly moved on to the church of Sant Pau del Camp, which translates as “St. Paul in the field.” The church was built on the site of a Roman and, later, a Visigoth cemetery. The present structure was built in 1127 and is the earliest Romanesque structure in Barcelona. The original church building on the site was built between 897 and 911, according to a gravestone discovered in 1596. On the wall of the north transept is a circular window believed to be the smallest stained glass window in Europe. The sculpted capitals of the columns in the cloister contain birdlike sirens that were meant to tempt monks away from prayer, according to Fodor’s. The monks must have been easily tempted. The church supposedly is a favorite site for small concerts because of its excellent acoustics, a fact which Carles later confirmed.

For supper we walked six blocks to Casa Amalia, a small neighborhood restaurant in an alleyway, or passatge in Catalan. At the door of the restaurant, we walked past a group of six French 20-somethings who were deciding whether to eat there. Down the steps we went where we were greeted by the owner and shown to our table. The French followed us. I ordered the salt cod that we had seen at the markets and that Abby had enjoyed the night before. Abby ordered a Catalan sausage with white beans and we shared a salad and fried artichokes as our appetizers. This was a less expensive meal in a less elegant setting, but one that we found agreeable in every way. We walked back to our hotel past a 24-hour nursery that had for sale plants and flowers of every description.

Sunday, April 14, 2013

Today we had our walking tour of the old city of Barcelona. Carles pointed out to us the old medieval wall and, inside it, remains of the old Roman wall and aqueduct. We walked down narrow streets where old one-way signs showed a man and a horse, where only people and motorcycles would go today. We passed a monument to the Napoleonic wars and the effect they had on Spain. We walked into the cloister of the gothic cathedral, where green stone frogs spit water into a fountain swimming with white geese. We walked past the shoemakers guild with its carving of the lion of St. Mark, the patron saint of shoemakers, and into the old Jewish quarter. We peeked into the old synagogue, which had a red banner with a Hebrew word embroidered on it hanging from the lintel. We walked into the Placa de Sant Jaume, flanked by the city hall and the statehouse of Catalonia.

Down a flight of stairs we went to see the Columnes Romanes, four huge columns that are all that remain of the roman temple that was built in the first century B.C. Carles led us past the back of the gothic cathedral, where Abby noticed gargoyles in the shape of an elephant and a unicorn. Carles showed us the royal palace that was once inhabited by the king and queen of Catalonia and Aragon.

We visited the Museu Picasso, set in five adjoining town houses on Carrer Montcada. These were houses of the very wealthy, one of which was owned by Picasso at the time of his death in 1973. Although Picasso was born in Malaga, his family moved to Barcelona when he was a teenager, and he seems to have felt quite at home there. The Museu Picasso has a very large collection of his early works, including boyhood sketches, some self portraits and a beautiful still life. Several rooms display his 1950’s cubist variations on Velazquez’s Las Meninas, which I remember seeing at the Prado in 1975. I noticed that one of his cubist studies of Las Meninas was painted on my third birthday in 1957.

We stopped at a little shop where Carles explained that most peculiar of Catalan traditions, the Pooping Man. Catalans being a whimsical lot, it has become customary at Christmas time to decorate each Nativity scene with a pooping man, usually in an unobtrusive part of the display. The pooping man is traditionally dressed in a Catalan outfit consisting of a red cap, a tan vest and black pants. However, we saw figures representing a pooping President Obama, a pooping Angela Merkel, a pooping king of Spain, and so on. By tradition, the pooping man poops out presents and so must be fed. The more food, the more presents, is how the thinking goes. As a farewell gift to us, Carles bought us a traditional figure of the pooping man.

Our last stop was the Palau de la Musica Catalana, the Catalan music hall – okay, palace - an art nouveau masterpiece designed in 1908 by Lluis

Domenech i Montaner. We had a lunch of tapas – our first – in the café of the Palau. The brick columns of the café were topped by ceramic capitals of colorful roses. Inside the hall, the spindles of the balustrades were made of colored glass. The golden skylight of the hall represents the sun. Just to right of the stage, from the audience’s perspective, was a sculpture of the Flight of the Valkyries from Wagner, a local favorite, and to the left was a local musician surmounted by lush greenery carved in stone. The overall effect made it the most beautiful music hall in the world, and all in the art nouveau, or modernist, style.

We said, “Hasta la vista,” to Carles and took a taxi back to our hotel. Later that evening we walked a to Paco Meralgo, a tapas bar not far from our hotel. We had tapas of cod salad, batter-fried green onions, octopus and beefsteak, all in the Catalan style. We took a wrong turn on the way home and lengthened our walk by a couple of blocks, but it all turned out okay in the end. Abby’s Facebook friends in St. Paul are complaining about shoveling snow in St. Paul while we stroll contentedly through 63-degree weather in Barcelona. Tomorrow, Madrid.