Where I left off in the last message on November 5th, I spent most of the day exploring the city in the aftermath of the U.S. election, then I left my new friends after eating dinner at a sushi restaurant. On the way back to my hotel I had my first very unpleasant experience on my vacation. I decided to have some ice cream since I had spent enough time walking around, I had "walked it off" in advance. (Yeah, that's my rationalization and I'm sticking with it). I finished a small cup I bought at an ice cream place on La Ramblas when I encountered someone near my hotel who behaved like an overly friendly drunk. This was Wednesday, the day after the U.S. Presidential election. He asked some questions about Obama in marginally good English. I tried to answer simply and not engage him. When I tried to excuse myself and head back to my hotel he took me by the arm and tried to bring me into a crowded bar. Not Since Shinzen have I had anyone lay hands on me and I reacted as the travel-advice books instructed: you're supposed to make a lot of noise and resist any attempt, however friendly it may seem, to take you anywhere you don't want to go.
A quick digression: I have a superpower (sort of, anyway). I am loud. I mean really loud. I speak as "quietly" as I speak because I am making an effort to do so. As a teenager my parents found that I was able to call my brother to dinner from the bottom of the stairs even with his stereo cranked up to 11. Not only did my brother know it was dinner time in our house but so did the neighbors. After I shouted the doorbell emitted a fading tone as if it had been rung. Typically I would startle everyone and my mother would drop something on her foot in the kitchen. (Then I was the one who was in trouble - unfair!). Strange, I realize, that I became a librarian, but life takes some strange turns sometimes.
Anyway, back to Barcelona on or about midnight: Mr. Too-Friendly took me by the arm. Then I pushed him off and yelled at about maybe half peak volume: "GET OFF ME!" What does "half peak volume" mean? Well, I woke up everyone who was sleeping in Barcelona (both of them) and I think that maybe someone who understood English who was taking an evening stroll in Seville wondered "get off who?" Mr. Friendly looked insulted and gave me a disgusted look then skulked off into the bar. I continued to the hotel, feeling a little rattled. Through the night I felt a little odd, wondering if I had just screamed at someone guilty of nothing more than being an overly-friendly drunk. But the next day, when I walked to the cafe for breakfast I spotted Mr. Friendly at the same intersection where he intercepted me the night before. If he were an overly friendly drunk he would be sleeping it off somewhere. He noticed me noticing him but stood still, eyeing some Guardia Civil busily doing something across the narrow street from him. On my way back to the hotel after breakfast he was no where in sight. Best guess is that he works with pick-pockets, drawing marks into crowds.
There is no such thing as a non-smoking room in Barcelona, and perhaps that's true of all of Spain. My hotel room had a hard tile floor and evidently they laundered the towels and bedding well enough. But the drapes stank of tobacco. I had to write in my travel journal sitting on the toilet like a chair, with the fan blowing in fresh air from the outside. I tried to close the sliding door but the handle was broken - I had to jam my pen into one of the holes in the door where the inside handle used to be in order to open and close the door.
It's Thursday, November 6th and I am not feeling well. I told my friend who came to spend the day with me that I had a sore throat and felt I was coming down with something. We agreed to ride the "tourist bus" together that day. A tour company in Barcelona has three color-coded bus lines that take intersecting and somewhat over-lapping routes along wide streets past the best examples of the architecture of the city. You buy a ticket and then leave a given bus where you like and then pick up that or another color-coded line of the same outfit and continue on your way. We decided to stay on the bus for most of the day. On a blustery day in November this was better for me that walking but a was still cold and felt a bit like a cold coming on. My friend was very nice and patient (and about 5 months pregnant and therefore happy not to be walking all over the place). I would recommend that bus company for anyone who likes to explore a lot of the city. Normally I stay on foot as I feel I acquire a better sense of a place by exploring it slowly and stopping as I need. The bus covers much more ground and works better for someone with a more ambitious agenda. For me this day it worked out well enough given my state. In the morning before we met I tried to do some of the Modernisma walking tour and perhaps covered a small part of it.
We did leave the bus at an art museum that had a special exhibit of an Art Nouveau painter, Alfonse Mucha. It was the best time I had in Spain thus far. You've seen his work everywhere, but not necessarily knew who it was. If you google his name you'll recognize the pictures immediately. I found it nice to see his work in full size. You see his pictures on small household objects, like coasters or you see small prints. The full size does justice to the intricacy and detail. The placards were in Spanish and Catalan. I was able to see some of the differences. Catalan resembles Italian - Donna for Mujer, for instance. I mentioned this to my friend who told me that there were French words in Catalan too, such as "Mercy" (as you would say it in English) for "thank you." Catalan is actually the earlier form language from which Spanish and French developed. After the museum we rode another "color" of the tour bus, one which took us up to a high point in the Southwestern part of the city. The bus had a recorded narration running - all you had to do was plug in a headphone set. Different flags denoted different languages of the narration. We wondered about one flag neither of us recognized. Mr. Know-it-all (one of my less endearing qualities) thought it was Hungary. But a moment of listening to it (hmmm, maybe you should try listening *first*?) proved it was Portuguese.
We also made plans to extricate me from my hotel and the Raval La Rambla. Reading my travel journal I see that I described it as "a circle of Hell beyond Dante's imagination." That's a bit of hyperbole and definitely undeserved. I should note here that in attempting to write an account of this part of my trip almost a year since it happened I find that my travel journal here skips and jumps all over the place, chronologically and otherwise, making it as much of a hindrance as an aid to recalling details. I think this constitutes a symptom of my having started to experience "travel fatigue" and culture shock and not really a fair reflection on Spain in general or Barcelona in particular. I'm pretty sure that when I go to Europe again I start in Barcelona, I will have a much better experience of the place. Please keep in my my fatigue and inexperience with travel as you read this and the last installments of the travelogue and do not let anything negative influence your perception of Barcelona or Spain. On Friday morning at 11 a.m. I would leave Barcelona, The Raval, etc. and go to stay at my friends new apartment in a resort town called Stiges (pronounced "stitches" like in sewing). I started counting the hours to my escape.
On Friday I tried (and failed) to find Gaudi's "Casa Battlo" (pronounced "Bat-yo" with the emphasis on the 2nd syllable). I used my Barcelona "Street wise" map I bought in San Francisco, but it did not show Battlo's location very clearly. But I'm the one who had trouble finding the Eiffel Tower in Paris. I gave up because I wanted to make sure I did not delay my egress from the Spanish circle of hell. On the way back to the hotel I finally bought the deck of cards I saw the first day. I like to collect unusual playing cards and decided such would be my souvenirs for France and Spain. I tried to find the shop the day before, right before I crashed in my room for the rest of the day following my excursion on the tour bus. Not open at about 2:30 on a Thursday. But it *was* open on a Friday morning?? (I give up). Unfortunately, it was a tobacconist. The stench of smoggers nearly overpowered me but I managed to tough it out. Unlike the shop in France, this one did not have samples mounted on a board. I had to take a 10 Euro gamble (fitting, as these are playing cards). The gamble did pay off, as I found the deck has unusual pictures and a unique composition (40 cards, not 52). Looking at a typical one of these cards I'm reminded of the scene from the trailer for the first Crocodile Dundee movie in which Paul Hogan scares off a NYC mugger by laughing at his switchblade saying "That's not a knife" then drawing his own huge one saying " *that's* a knife."
Now *that's* a club! Not one of the wimpy little clover-like abstractions of a club that looks like a symmetrical Rorschach test.
My friend arrived right on time. She took me through the labyrinth that is the transfer point between the Barcelona Metro and the trains to outlying suburbs. I tried to make note of the path we took, as I realized I would need to figure this out on my own later on. It was hopeless. On the train to Stiges I had my first look at the Mediterranean. There was one spectacular view, including a very beautiful building and a dramatic rock formation. Then a train going the the opposite direction blocked it. My friend told me that never happened before. Great, just for me.
The area around the train station at Stiges looked like post-card material. A few narrow old pre-automobile streets led off from the conventional modern one that fed into the parking lot where I waited for my friend to come pick me up. Since I was feeling ill we decided to have me hang out in the fresh air and sunshine for a while. In my travel journal I remarked that no one at the train station "looks angry or like they're zeroing in on me - unlike the US. (or the Raval)." Once at the apartment, my friend left for a class. I crashed for a couple of hours, chilled out with some of the DVD collection, then watched the sunset from the 3rd floor window. I wished I had a camera. Stiges is on a spit of land sticking out into the Mediterranean. There the sunset took about an hour with the light changing from reds and blues to teal in places. I saw at least two planets very clearly and maybe a third one (I tried to figure out if the iffy one was Venus). That day I took a vacation from vacation. I realized later that the symptoms of illness I felt most likely resulted from stress of so much travel and pushing myself too hard. I felt entirely better the next morning.
For the rest of my time in Europe I either hung out in Stiges or took the train into Barcelona where I walked along the "Moderisma" architecture tour.
Next installment : Gaudi, Gaudi and more Guadi, plus a Charles Ives paradise and an uncomfortable mirror.
