2016 August - Barcelona, Sagrada Familia

Barcelona! Now with 100% less pickpocketing!

3 years ago I went to Barcelona for the first time (really, Spain for the first time) with friends, and had my wallet stolen (relevant blog post). It was actually retrieved immediately, which I found out later -- once we were 6 hours away by train. I have a very google-able name, and the police officer who'd caught the thief had managed to track me down that way, and after some phone-tag, I arranged to fetch my wallet on the day before I had to fly out of Madrid. 

So, this time, I was prepared to gird my loins and do everything I could to keep thieves away from my valuables.  Thankfully, the measures I took paid off (or luck was with me), and this Barca trip was uneventful on the theft side.

We stayed in an interesting place, Hostal Oliva.  The deciding factor was that *everyone* who rated it on Booking.com loved it.  The building is right on Passeig de Gracia, which might be the best location in town. North of la Rambla, so fewer crowds and pickpockets, and right at the crossing of several metro lines as well as some regional trains. A 5 minute walk to Plaça Catalunya, where you can pick up an airport bus, or find something to eat (or buy).

The hotel is in a cool building with an old-school elevator made (mostly?) of wood.
There were staff around all day, as one had to be buzzed into the building and then let in the door.  The bed was super high quality, the room was small but adequate, and the Wifi was good. I'd definitely stay there again.

elevator of wood

[Aside on the term "La Rambla": Figueres had a "Rambla" as well. When we asked what would happen if they had to empty out all of the cisterns at the fortress, our guide said that the water would go into the river --What river? -- the river that in town was covered up and made into "La Rambla". That is, *that* is effectively the translation of that term. The part of town where they paved over the river (for purposes of hygiene ?!?) and now there's some lush trees and a nice place to hang out] 

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Day 1: Walking around, Flamenco, seeing the beach
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Barcelona has a beach, which I hadn't made it out to during the previous trip (a rainy March week). Not featured in this picture is the beach-based outdoor gym setup that 20-25 dudes were making use of. One guys had some pretty awesome moves.

complete with smudge. I need to have my camera cleaned.

As my companion had never seen flamenco before,  I looked into what was easiest/open on Mondays and got us tickets to the 21:30 show at Los Tarantos.
30 minutes, 15 euros, and their shows cycle regularly (every week or two).  Show up 30 minutes before the show to get in line for seats. I recommend the ones on the side (looking at both audience and stage), to get a good angle on both dancer and singer at the same time.

We were there opening night for the then-current act,  Isaac Barbero (& Compañia) which was absolutely incredible; the main star of the show was incredibly talented. He and the singer had a really great interaction, you could really see how the dance influenced the music and vice versa.

our view of the crowd

our view of the stage

No pictures or video were allowed during the show, otherwise I'd post something here.


After the awesome show, we walked around for a while and enjoyed the cooler night air.


Near the hotel is El Nacional. It looks like a former indoor (food) market. Now it's a mixture of restaurants and bars. Very fancy.

I liked the giant carved fish which denoted the fish (sub) restaurant. Super duper expensive, but no line.

Fish restaurant

The only places that seemed to have lines or waits were the tapas place (surprisingly standard/affordable prices) and the bar-areas in the middle.

Also a very fancy (and purposefully "retro") bathroom.  I only dared to snap a pick of the fore-area:

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Day 2: Sagrada Familia! Gelato! Barcelona History Museum!
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Bought tickets for the Sagrada Familia, Gaudi's ongoing masterpiece, way ahead of time, online, and with the Nativity Facade tower access as well, which was new for me. It was totally worth it, the views were gorgeous. This time through, the audio guide announced that there's a projected (mostly) finished date, in about 10 years. That is, they should be done with the Glory Facade and the various towers and things by then. I think there then remains work to go back and renovate the old stuff and add in some adornments and so on.

awesome views

Barca + tree of life

It was also pretty cool getting up in and amidst all of the construction that's been going on. We were right in the middle of a bunch of things which had been added since the first time I saw it (i.e. 3 years ago).

grapes for wine/blood, wheat/grains for bread/body

More grapes. Definitely new.

The audio guide said a bit about how Gaudi really wanted to control the light in the space; one side had glass with cooler tones (lefthand picture), the other warmer tones. Nature is a great painter (paraphrasing them quoting him)


 

We had lunch at an interesting self-serve place (Nostrum) that had pre-packaged (yet tasty) meals because we were in a bit of a hurry to end up at the Barcelona History Museum by 2pm to meet a friend we'd made in France, who was also passing through Barcelona.

With all the hurrying, we ended up with plenty of time to go find some good gelato. Most places had heaped-up gelato, so we kept walking, until we found Chocolat Box. 

I had their incredible super dark chocolate and another scoop of hazelnut.

We then went through the Barcelona History Museum (at Plaça del Rey), which I'd seen 3 years prior. It's an interesting museum as it's excavations, piled atop and to the side of each other (i.e. you go down into the ground for Roman-era Barcino, and walk up to the Gothic church, passing through various stages of the Roman Empire, then when Barcelona became a Gothic stronghold, etc. For a good array of pictures, see the post from 3 years ago.

Roman street, Roman shop, Roman drainage

After the museum, we walked around quite a bit, through the gothic quarter-- whose streets had been wide and on a grid when the Romans put them there, and over time they were made narrower and the drainage abandoned (I'm sure they've put drainage back in since the Middle Ages, though). Ended up taking a break in front of the cathedral. I have a hunch that those towers are reconstructed from the towers originally on the wall (400AD) around the city, based on this picture.

We wrapped up our stay in Barcelona with a stop of the tapas place, Divinus, that was almost adjacent to the hotel, where we had an array of Pinxtos ("pinches"? They are ridiculous mini-bruscetta things with a toothpic through them) and tapas. Very tasty. 

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[[Thoughts on Spain and travel, changes in the last 3 years:]]

I think Spain has been a place people go for vacation (see: Germans on Mallorca) for a while. But I have the sense that it's gotten much worse, that tourism is the main industry, especially with the massive unemployment (20% across all age brackets, but about 50% for ``youth").  

Here's a piece from a year ago on the problem:

"[A] growing number of working poor, with incomes below the state-set annual minimum wage of €9,080 ($9,830). About 24% of salaried workers are on temporary contracts; half of those quizzed by the country's Labour Force Survey say their contracts are for fewer than six months. Part-time jobs now account for 16% of the total. Young people and immigrants are leaving the country, shrinking the labour force—and making the high unemployment rate all the more striking."

One symptom of this (which was for me positive) was the large number of waitstaff and people working in the service sector who've now picked up a small amount of English.  

I hope Spain recovers, rather than becoming simply another resort country, dependent on its neighbors' love of sunshine and good food. 

Until next time. 

2016 August - Les Bacarès and Figueres

I just came back from vacation a week ago.  The first week was at a dance camp on the coast of France, in Le Barcarès, about 20 minutes by car east of Perpignan.  We then spent 2 days in Figueres, Spain, where Dali had lived (and saw his museum as well as the really cool fortress) and then 2 days in Barcelona (and this time, I didn't get robbed).

Contents of this installment:
(1) Dancing in Le Barcarès, France
(2) The (mega) Fortress (40 soccer fields!) in Figueres, Spain
(3) The Dalí Museum (at night!) in Figueres, Spain

next time: Barcelona.


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(1)Dancing in Le Barcarès, France.
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The first week was at dance camp in France; our lodgings were pretty minimalistic, but fine for a place to sleep and shower.

I managed to speak a little French with the natives, especially with the woman we shared a 2-room place with, but in general I stuck to English. I just can't do conversational speed yet with more than one other person, and I kept missing snippets of what people said, either from volume or whatnot. Also, a few times when I did try, I got the look, and the other person would switch back to English.

I have no pictures of the dance floors, set up inside of tents which were half-open to the outside.

Due to some scheduling issues, I ended up with my lessons mostly canceled for the first day, so I went to explore the beach. It was very wide and sandy:

view along the beach to the beach bar and the Pyrenees

This kind of beach is not that interesting for things I like doing (e.g. snorkeling -- too much sand and no rock formations, so water was murky, and what one did see was jellyfishes sometimes), and the water was rather brisk. Good for cooling down and quite refreshing, but not something to sit in for that long.

Another view of the beach bar, from the beach:

Every night, there was live music from the bands at the beach bar, from 6pm to close to 8pm, when dinner was served. The guitarist in this picture was also one of the organizers, and played along with most of the bands:

Beach bar band

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(2) The (mega) Fortress (40 soccer fields!) in Figueres, Spain
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[Day 1 in Figueres:]

Our train from Perpignan to Figueres was very very delayed,  but we still managed to find time after checking into our hotel to eat (it was so-so), get some gelato (it was amazing) and call head to get a guided tour (a very well-spent €15) of the Fortress San Fernando. 

Fortress San Fernando

The tour is with a jeep, around the 40-soccer-fields sized fortress, then in a boat through part of the cisterns (enough water for 4,000 men for a year, and we only saw 1/4 of it).

View leading up to fortress:

The following is a schematic of the fortress.

The outer part is a bit green and is a wall made of dirt/stone. The darker areas are either walls or ground. The inner turtle-shaped thing protects the actual part of the fortress where people lived. The walls were designed so that the ground wall on the outside blocked the view of the inside series of walls so that any approaching army couldn't see how big it was and how many walls were involved.

This next picture is close to the tail of the turtle (the tail is to the left). The divets in the walls all housed canons, back in the day.

Look back up at the schematic; the ground above/past the "head" of the turtle they had to construct an artificial portion of the hill, and it looks kind of crown-like, with tunnels. Everything else was stone, this was all squishy soil. As a result, they built really ridiculous things , "counter mines".  Tunnels, where miners (during a siege) were to sit and wait and listen for enemy tunneling in, and, if they heard it, they would then start tunnel towards the enemy --- and then leave dynamite to try to blow them up. Which would then also connect the two tunnels!  This tactic was never put into use.

diagram of the counter-mines

During the Spanish Civil War ["1936 to 1939 and was fought between the Republicans, who were loyal to the democratic, left-leaning Second Spanish Republic, and the Nationalists, a group led by General Francisco Franco."], the Republicans had a cache of weapons in the fortress. As the nationalists seem to be winning, the Republicans blew up two parts of their fortress to get rid of their cache of weapons.  One part was an entire gate

picture of the gate, none of which still stands

The other part was a stable. Thankfully, they didn't blow up both stables, so we can have a feel for the size of the building they blew up. The stable could house ~450 horses. Here's a view from one side to the other of the remaining stable:

view along the stable

Damage on the building next to the stable which had been exploded:

nice view, in part due to missing stable

nice view, in part due to missing stable

The white thing in this next picture is part of the innermost part of the fortress. Anyone who saw them would know this. The architect messed something up, and these were actually visible from beyond the first/outermost wall of dirt, so when Napoleon invaded, (and surrounded them with 10,000) men, the soldiers destroyed them. They have since been rebuilt.

I don't have any pictures from the water part (I was worried about taking out my camera and having it fall in the water), but it was pretty cool. We had about 20 minutes after the whole tour to walk around the place, which is when we went to see the remaining stable.


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(3) The Dalí Museum (at night!) in Figueres, Spain
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[Day 2 in Figueres]

We had a full day prior to the museum to see a bit more of Figueres.  We mainly slept in.
Had lunch at Can Punyetes. Everything there is roasted/grilled over a wood fire. The rabbit was something else; an entirely different (and delicious) texture from any rabbit I had had before. The incredible heat we were experiencing led to sampling some more gelato -- this time at La Recuiteria, across from the toy museum. The tiramisu tasted just like a big scoop of tiramisu, it was awesome.

If you try to figure out what there is to do in Figueres (using our trusty friend, Google), the first result you'll get is the Dali museum. 

Museum during the day, in front of Church where Dali was baptised

Turns out, he was gentry, which explains how he could afford to spend his life painting, and also later on in life design and build a museum (which he donated to his city). He is also, oddly enough. buried there. The epitaph sits amidst the jewelry exhibit which he designed the pieces of. They weren't particularly surreal, so there are no pictures :)

Dali's bones

In the summer, they open the Museum up to 500 people per night and are open again from 10pm to 1am.  Smaller crowds, no screaming children, and a glass of Cava comes with the entrance price. Additionally, a silent film showing the building of the museum, complete with Dali overseeing with his wild mustache.

So, the Dalí museum was, as expected, a bit surreal. 

The museum was built from the bombed-out (from the Spanish civil war) remains of a theater.  In the next picture, you can see that they left the destroyed roof still off.  That yellow thing is an upside-down boat, with artistic water coming out of it. The white T-shaped lights flickered in some pattern.

In person, the following very strongly looks like a naked woman walking away, with a kind of pixelated background. In this picture, it looks like pixelated Lincoln.

wartime: "happy horse"

I want to call this guy "the mathematician"

So, one of the more famous Dalí paintings is at the Art Institute in Chicago:
Mae West's Face which May be Used as a Surrealist Apartment

Lacking said painting, another artist created an installation of something like an apartment setup realizing the picture. There's a lens up some stairs which you can look through to see it all "assembled":

through the lens

Not a bad likeness (See the picture of the picture, below and right).

from the side

Next time: Barcelona (Sagrada Familia!)

2016 July Canterbury, UK for a few days

If you've never been forced to read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales(the link is a side-by-side original and modern English version of the prologue),  I recommend looking into it. I had to go through it in an AP English class in high school. The tales are about pilgrims en route to Canterbury Cathedral to view Beckett's bones, and their ridiculous and bawdy life stories.

1: Whan that aprill with his shoures soote
2: The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,
3: And bathed every veyne in swich licour
4: Of which vertu engendred is the flour; 

[Geoffrey Chaucer, d. 1400]

Cathedral from afar (walking to the uni)

Canterbury is a town of about 30,000 and about 2 hrs from any London airport. Münster is a similar distance from the Düsseldorf airport. Factoring in the flight length and showing up early etc, it's not much longer to take the trains (Münster to Cologne, Cologne to Brussels, Brussels to Ashford Int'l, then local trains to Canterbury). 

So, I took the train! Yay chunnel. 

Towards and through the chunnel, our train-car was full of screaming babies, so I turned to my seat-mate and offered her some fancy chocolate and asked her about the purpose of her trip. She was going to London for a conference on setting syllabi for international primary schools; i.e. those aimed at multilingual kids, with some kind of international standard they're developing (to help people who move countries, I suppose).

I got to Canterbury and walked around town a bit. There are a lot of older preserved buildings. All that remains of the wall (well, on the side of town I was on) is one gate, which stands out.

view along street to gate

the gate from the other side; former jail to the right

If I had turned around and looked slightly to the right, I'd've had also a picture of the Freemasonry Museum. I didn't make it inside the cathedral, but made it to the museum and had a guided tour (it's very tiny, the tour was really the feature). It was great, and odd. Freemasons aren't masons, but they did sponsor the traineeship of a bunch of actual stonemasons who've then gone on to work on the cathedral restoration.

The first night I had dinner at La Trappiste (pretty good, if pricey, and AMAZING beer selection). Their beer menu was lovingly written. Made me feel a bit nostalgic for craft beers.

my lambic

I can't make the pic any bigger, but click to actually read the descriptions:

beer bible page

I didn't manage to find time (and reasonable weather) to take a punt on the Great Stour, but I appreciated the view adjacent to the place selling tickets for such a tour: 

right next to the place where you can take boat tours on the Great Stour

another view of the same building

Due to the chunnel/eurostar connection, Canterbury seems to be a popular weekend or day-trip destination. I heard a lot of French spoken in the street, to the point where I was sitting outside eating lunch at a restaurant and told the French family in front of me (deliberating the menu, in French): "C'est très délicieux, mais très lentement". 

Ah. Could someone remind me what comic this is clearly plagiarized from? (placemats at the tasty-yet-horribly-slow place):

Is it xkcd?

I wanted to write to said comic and let them know.

Nearby amusement:

the jokes just write themselves...

That Thursday (the last full day there, also the most exhausting), I made it to the vicinity of the cathedral, and took some pictures. The half-timbered homes are both cute and a horrible construction (terrible insulation, etc). I like how there are a fair amount of architectural things which people like as old/quaint/whatever which were just symptoms of people not knowing how to build properly (half-timbered homes, flying buttresses, e.g.) .

view of cathedral from by the restaurant where I had dinner

half-timbered homes facing the gate to the cathedral

'

gate to the cathedral

cathedral (closed during mass)

cloister

surprisingly old aged people (80, 84, 74) for the 1600s and 1700s.

In general, Canterbury was quaint,  full of tourists and some decent food. For a place of 30,000 people, it's pretty lively. The weather changed almost constantly, probably due to its proximity to the ocean. I was woken up by seagulls at least once, so don't forget your rain jacket if you visit.

a nice picture of a picture of Kent