Barcelona

The three-hour train trip from Valencia to Barcelona passed without incident through some rather stunning landscapes. One thing that caught my attention is that the Spanish trains have a security checkpoint that scans your luggage. They don’t do anything else, like looking at your passport or metal-detecting your body, or even talking to you, really. There is just a guy watching a screen beside a luggage scanner and you put your bag down on one side and pick it up on the other. I don’t recall having experienced that before.

A Place Without Street Corners
A unique architectural trope in Barcelona consists of the absence of corners where streets meet. Instead, nearly all the buildings have faces on the diagonal, so that there aren’t two walls forming a corner, but rather an additional short wall. This has several desirable effects, such as making more room for pedestrians and improving the lines of sight for drivers, which is good because the drivers here have a bad habit of treating a red light as a stock car starting line. In fact, the motorcycles will routinely creep up between the cars, so that just before the light changes, there is a burst of a couple of dozen motorcycles leaping forward, and heaven help the hindmost pedestrian.

City of Nudes
One of the striking features of some areas of Barcelona is that they are chock-a-block with marble statues of ladies who forgot to wear their clothes. They are kneeling in the park, sitting beside fountains, wearing wings but no heads, and in at least one case getting up to no good with a bull. One of my favourites is an odalisque lying on a pedestal in the median of a major street, eating an ice cream cone.

Gaudi
You can’t spend any time in Barcelona without becoming aware that the architect Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926) lived here, and created some iconic buildings such as his 6-storey apartments, an extensive park, and a cathedral, for which he was apparently still trying to raise funds at age 74 by going door-to-door, when he was hit and killed by a tram. This is not the land of Don Quixote for nothing. The buildings are variously called art nouveau or modernism, but to my way of thinking they are not so easy to classify except to say they have a lot of at least potentially disturbing influence of the organic. Take for instance the glass case in the top floor of the apartment block, where there is the skeleton of a snake as a reference for the way the internal brick arches have been built. As Teresa said, “I’m not sure I want to think of myself as walking around in the belly of a snake.” You can always exit the snake, however, and go up on the roof, to be greeted by rows of penises with faces.

San Jordi
Just as Valencia celebrates St. Joseph by blowing shit up, the Barcelonians celebrate the attributes of their patron saint by giving symbolic gifts. San Jordi, or in English St. George, is not only known for slaying dragons, but is also associated with books and roses. Accordingly, on April 24 the city is filled with temporary stalls that sell these items so that people can exchange them, as the tour guide phrased it, as tokens of love.

Stacks of Fashion Models
I first noted a peculiar behaviour at the 1992 Olympic park, where we’d gone to see the absolutely fabulous futuristic telecom tower by Santiago Calatrava. As we exited the grounds, there was a pile of people sleeping in the sunny corner of the wall. I thought to myself: “That’s quite a few more derelicts than I’m used to seeing together,” but as we got closer, it became clear that they were in fact lovely young women, very fashionably dressed, just taking a little communal nap. At first I assumed this was some anomalous event, like perhaps the break between photos at a fashion shoot. But then I saw a couple of other similar stacks in a completely different part of the city, in fact down on the pier.

Ironic Spanish Guitarists
One rainy night, we went to the little brick chapel off to one side of a cathedral to see a couple of Spanish guitarists named Ksenia Axelroud and Joan Benejam. They played up a storm, including a lot of what I have now begun to think of as the characteristic irony of Spain. For instance, in the signature section of the concert, they played four movements of Bizet’s Carmen, reverse-engineered from the symphony score to Spanish guitar, which Bizet had claimed as his inspiration. The second encore was what they introduced as “a little musical joke.” It was a version of Mozart’s Turkish March with one performer standing behind the seated other so that they could play at the same time on the same guitar.

He Never Got a Dinner
This was a comic line from the celebrity roasts that were fashionable in the 1980s. The comedian would list famous historical figures, which in contrast to the current roast victim had some genuinely remarkable achievements, but had never been honored with a public dinner. I’ve been having a somewhat similar experience throughout Spain, where they eat five meals a day: two breakfasts, a 2:00 lunch, tapas at 7:00, and dinner at midnight. Despite my inability to survive a day long enough to actually get to dinner, I couldn’t be happier with Spain in this respect, since it often happens, even in relatively cosmopolitan world centres, that there is nowhere to eat by 10:00 in the evening. In Spain, they aren’t even getting started eating by 10:00 in the evening.

Sing Coo Coo
Spain is, apparently, the land of green parakeets. We had the chance to sit under a palm tree and watch a pair of them making a nest. They would fly in with a beakful of string, then chatter away while they wove it into a bundle they had set into the crease of a palm leaf.