Summer's fiestas:
Townie and tourist alike
Dragged into good times.
After some weird dreams prevented us from sleeping entirely properly, we packed up our tent and gear and said good-by to the house that was ours for the night. I do wonder what it used to be, and why the land wasn't valuable enough to sell for apartment development or something...
A quick trip along the coast (including a segment in a beautiful and cliff-ridden "Natural Park" which is Spanish for "We can't build here, so let's just let people hike here and get over it") got us into Barcelona. It was fairly uneventful; we stopped for tea, rode along a beautiful boardwalk for several kilometres until it ended abruptly and forced us to take the autopista, and arrived around lunchtime.
Barcelona is a tourist mecca, what with all its fabulous beaches and amazing Gaudi buildings and general Catalan cultural awesomeness. For those who don't know, Catalunya (Cataluña in Castellano, Catalonia in English) is an autonomous state of Spain. They speak their own language, Catalá (Catalán in Castellano), and they like to distinguish themselves from the rest of Spain. The distinction between "Español" and "Castellano" is an important one here, mainly because they don't see Castellano as the language of Spain. Catalá is a blend of Spanish and French, since this part of Spain is very close to the border of France, and at least in our experience the Catalonian people are very friendly and helpful. Barcelona is the largest city, and it's actually the fourth most visited city in Europe according to Wikipedia (after London, Paris, and Rome). Anyway, it's a bumpin' place.
The first thing we had to do was, of course, find a place to sleep, so we stumbled around with our bicycles for an hour or so looking for a hostel. We found one and ditched the bikes, eager to explore this city.
Barcelona is big. Like, not really walkably big. It sucked to have to take public transit, but it was at least really nice public transit. We visited a couple of the Gaudi buildings in the centre of town and meandered along the Rambla for a while, enjoying the sound of a weekend in high season. People are buzzing around, and flurries of languages flashed past our ears. We soaked it all in as we wandered around town.
For the evening, we got some tickets to a Catalan music performance in the Palau de la Música Catalana. It was just 8€ for 30 minutes of fabulous piano duo. They played some Gershwin, and they also played stuff we had never heard of: for instance, a tango written by a Turkish man who spent a long time in Argentina. Some of it was wildly experimental (they played the wires of the piano directly by reaching in through the top), and some of it was fairly classical and supremely impressive.
Later we wandered the streets in an attempt to find one of the famous discotecas in town, but not much seemed to be happening. A bartender heading to work saw how lost we looked, and recommended that we check out an area further to the north called Gracias. There was a festival going on, and that was where everyone was tonight.
Part of the festival involved a competition between streets for being designated "the most playful." People took this in different ways, ranging from a street outfitted with gigantic Lego bricks to a street with a Singstar (karaoke game) competition to a street with Dragonball art plastered on every available surface. It was neat, and not something most tourists get to see, I'd wager.
Such was the night in Barcelona. Now we'll be lulled to sleep by the sea...