Barthelona highs

Barcelona, Monday 19 October

I woke up this morning to a panoramic 7th floor view across to the north of the city back-dropped by clouds :-( Today is the first day I have been cold. The weather has turned and I have pulled out my two jumpers. Today I needed to be warm. The open top of a tourist bus is not such a happy place when there is a brisk breeze and forbidding grey skies. Still the weather held and I visited some of the highlights.

The Sagrada Familiar is the unfinished Gaudi church that reaches for the stars. It looks amazing in the brochures but like a lot of the city sights I have seen today, it is mostly covered up by building cloth and is surrounded by three cranes. (Madrid re-lived). When it is finished, in 30 years time, it will have 18 towers (there are currently 8) and three faces (2 are built). Gaudi’s grand design is now tasked to the city architects to complete and the funding is gained in great extent from the visitors to the building. It is still a fantastical piece of architecture and when all is revealed, around 150 years after it started, I am sure it will be worthy of a return visit.

The Gaudi works are unique and a must see for me. I didn’t realise though quite how many there are. The queues into the Casa Batllo (the house most photographed) were too long today so I have a plan to return. I also got my bearings to get to the Parc Guell later in the week , the city park which is where the mosaic sculptures and the tea cup looking seats are, which is right on the other side of town.

I wandered down the Passeig de Gracia past the Chanel, Armani and Prada shops to the Place de Catalunya and let the crowds take me down Les Ramblas. This is like a large traffic island which has become a central walkway where the tourists flock as do the souvenirs stands, florists, bird and pet sellers. I kept away from the mice and the hamsters (surprise surprise), drawn instead to the huge variety of busking street statues. There were at least a dozen performers providing much more interest than the stone statues we see. Weta Workshop would be particularly proud of the dragon imitator; his wings would have taken him flying if he dared to give them a good flap.

I popped into the Betlem Church which is one of the few here to be built in the baroque style. Its sweetest feature was the candles all in different coloured and different sized glass in edifices on either side of the entrance. Blues, greens, oranges, reds and yellows of all shapes and sizes adored Mary on one side and Christ on the other. I have been in more churches in the last month than I probably have in my life, still here they provide an enormously good art show and I am surprisingly still enthralled by the ancient architecture and building styles. The candles made this one very pretty.

Just along the road I was struck by masses of colour again at La Bouqueria. This traditional food market has been around for over a century and was absolutely packed with people. It sells fruit and veg, meats and cheeses and it was bustling. I had read the locals go there but today seemed to be tourist day or perhaps I was just there too late. Here I was amazed just how much English was spoken, there is definitely more than I have come across anywhere else in Spain, perhaps the legacy of the Olympics. In any case I am practicing my ‘th’ sounds, replacing c’s with the right pronunciation. Although this is dependent on dialect and every now and again I will go Grathias and some will say Gracias, then I feel like I have lisp and have no idea, but of course I don’t so really that’s ok.

A late lunch sorted, I headed along the back streets to Ramblas de Ravel (the street I am staying on), a much more intimate central walkway but smack bang in the middle of a really poor neighbourhood. Raval used to be Chinatown and the red light district. Following demolition of the worst bits the area is now used as an example of urban renewal. You can still its roots at every turn but there are now striking contrasts between the narrow old streets and modernism with new buildings, like the hotel I am in, appearing in the oddest places. This of course means too that there are little shops and Tapas restaurants all over the place. Using my learnings from Madrid I only go into the ones that have napkins and toothpicks on the floor. These are the ones with good food… and so far coffee. But I have to do so taking a deep breath and close my eyes, looking too closely at anything but the food sometimes makes me want to hightail it to some soap and cleaning products. I can only imagine what my father(renowned for walking out of places that weren’t clean enough) would have said.

Pic is Barcelona to the north part of town from the rooftop terrace of the hotel.