After Kate moved to Barcelona in January of 2007, I had started making plans to move to Granada because Úbeda can be really boring if you are not studying and are not accustomed to going out drinking until the wee hours of the morning every weekend. I was ready to move on. I had taken a couple of trips to Granada to house hunt and had found a place to live and even paid the deposit of about 200 euros. The night before Kate moved to Barcelona, she and I and another student went to Granada to spend one last night out before she flew out the next morning. I took a large suitcase with me, which I had been planning on leaving at my new apartment. I can't really remember what happened to spark it, but at some point I suddenly decided that I was just ready to go back to the States. I had been depressed and was just over it. Financially, it made more sense to buy a new plane ticket and get home with a few bucks left than to stay until I ran out of money completely and return empty-handed. At some point during the evening, I called my roommate-to-be to lie to him about how there had been a death in my family and that I had to return to the States. He expressed his sympathy, but still denied me a refund of my deposit.
The next morning I saw Kate off and then took the bus and my large suitcase back to Úbeda. When I got back, I consulted the professor overseeing my study-abroad contract to make sure that returning to the States wouldn't cause me to lose credit. Then I consulted my mom, and finally Charlie, with whom I would spend a short week in D.C. on my way back to Olympia. I scoped out a decently-priced plane ticket out of Barcelona so that I could visit Kate before I left and informed my teachers that I would be on my way in a couple of weeks. As a final "thank you" for the great education I had received, I left David with this collage that I had been making for him for several weeks. He has a nun fetish and I was happy to oblige.
Even though I resisted because I was feeling completely anti-social at that point, at their insistence, I went out with my teachers the night before I left. We had appetizers and a few drinks at a pizzeria near the school and I told them about my plans for the future, including my trip to Hong Kong. Later that evening, I asked one of my roommates if she would help me cart my luggage to the bus station since it was kind of far from our apartment and I had two large and very full suitcases. She agreed and then made me pay for it by forcing me to listen to her have loud sex with our other roommate all night so I didn't really get any sleep. Seriously - it was so loud that it woke me up even though I had been sleeping with earplugs in.
We lugged the suitcases to the bus station early enough the next morning for me to catch the first bus to Granada where I would then fly to Barcelona. I arrived at the airport so early that I could not even check in yet, so I had to sit around for a while. An older Spanish man, who was traveling with his wife, began to chat me up, telling me his life story and complementing my Spanish (he didn't realize I was a foreigner until much later in our conversation when I told him I was going back to the U.S.) and concluded our conversation by telling me that if I needed anything, I could just ask him for it. I wasn't sure what he thought I might need from him and didn't really want to find out, so I successfully avoided him for the rest of my trip.
When I got to Barcelona, I took a taxi down to La Rambla, a busy central district in the city where Kate had booked us a room in a hostel. At that time she had just enrolled in an English teaching course and was actually in class when I arrived so I checked into the shady hostel and waited for her. While waiting for her, I ventured down to the waterfront for a look and this is what I saw.
A couple of hours later, Kate showed up and commented on how seedy the neighborhood was where we were staying We had already seen several hookers and other ne'er-do-well types and it was only the early afternoon. I don't remember what we did once she got there that night. I remember at one point we were wandering around and had been harassed by several men in a short period of time, so I just started cursing at them in Spanish... and that just encouraged them. Later on when we returned to the hostel, we spent a couple of hours spying on the hookers in the street, an activity that we referred to as "puta watching".
As I wandered I happened upon a vegetarian restaurant, an extremely rare find in Spain, and decided to stop in for lunch. The food was so-so and the experience was a little awkward, as it always was in Spain, but even more so because I was alone.
After lunch, I continued on and found this pretty church: Església de Santa María del Mar
From what the internet tells me, it is pretty inside too, but for some reason I did not go in. Maybe I didn't have time or maybe I couldn't tell whether it was a place you could just go be a tourist. These things were never very obvious in Spain.
Next, I happened upon the Muralla Romana i Torres de Defensa (Roman City Wall and Defense Towers). Beneath the photo of the building is a photo of the informational plaque on the sidewalk. It is fortunate that I took it, otherwise I wouldn't be able to tell you the first thing about this monument.
Adjacent to the monument was this plaza, filled with pensive men and inquiring pigeons.
After this, I headed back to the hostel to wait for Kate and passed by this stone arch with the sun setting through it.
I met up with Kate after her class and we hopped on the metro and went to look at Gaudí's Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família. This was by far the most impressive architectural work of his that I saw and even it was a little disappointing. It looks cool in pictures, but when you are right there it just looks kind of fake and chintzy, like Sleeping Beauty's Castle in Disneyland. Kate said it reminded her of a drip castle.
We got back on the metro and made our way to Gracia, which was the district where Kate was renting an apartment. On our way we passed through the Eixample district, where many of Gaudí's other buildlings are located. This is Casa Milà, an actual inhabited apartment building.
When we got to Gracia, we met up with one of Kate's classmates, a woman from Hungary named Niki. The three of us had dinner at a Mexican restaurant where Kate ordered a large pitcher of a red, fruity, alcoholic drink that she could not finish and thus was forced to transfer it to her plastic water bottle and finish it later on the subway. Observe:
I reminded Kate about this photo recently when I visited her in Massachusetts and found myself sitting to her left on a bench in the Boston subway, watching her drink out of a plastic water bottle. However, the second time it was just water in the bottle.
I don't remember what we did after that. It was probably pretty late by then and we either made it back to the hostel or wandered around La Rambla for a while looking for entertainment. The best entertainment was found just by standing on the balcony, watching the 20+ prostitutes in a one-block radius harass men as they walked by, even going as far as hitting them if they refused. We saw a couple guys take the bait and realized that the door right next to the entrance of our hostel apparently led into a whorehouse. This was indeed a very shady neighborhood. I even saw one woman standing on the corner who had to have been 7 or 8 months pregant. It was pretty horrifying.
Puta Watching:
The following morning, Kate and I went down to the waterfront to visit the aquarium, which turned out to be expensive and really small. It still managed to be pretty cool though. There was an area that was basically a giant fish tank with a glass tunnel underneath it so that you could felt like you were underwater with all the sea creatures. Kate did NOT like this giant shark hovering over her head.
Mermaids!
This was by far my favorite exhibit:
After that we headed north again to visit Park Güell, another Gaudí work, in the Gracia district. On the way, we passed the stone arch that I had previously photographed, so I took the opportunity to snap another shot while the light was a little less invasive than before. Looking back on it, the first photo was cooler.
Walking through Gracia, we discussed how it reminded us of Seattle. It was the cleanest part of Spain I had seen so far (no dog poop on the sidewalk) and there were lots of chic upscale boutiques, both of local and international fame such as Gucci. Here is another Gaudí building we saw along the way: Casa Batlló. I actually liked this one.
The coolest way to actually get to Park Güell is by means of a series of outdoor escalators that take you straight up the hillside. You'll have to click on the photo to enlarge it so that you can actually see it, but at the end of the road the escalator starts and goes all the way up to the horizon.
Once you reach the park there is a scenic overlook area with a fantastic view of the city. Here you can see and appreciate the size of the Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família.
Another shot of the cityscape shows a building that I started referring to as the "[insert phallic euphemism here] of Barcelona" because I didn't know what it was actually called. Now I know it is the Torre Agbar.
If you look just a little closer at the banner hanging above "Resiste", you can see that it poses the riddle "Why call it tourist season if we can't shoot them?"
Even though the park was indeed chock-full of tourists, there were some really lovely quiet places to be enjoyed, such as this shady tree-lined path.
Another shot of the cityscape shows a building that I started referring to as the "[insert phallic euphemism here] of Barcelona" because I didn't know what it was actually called. Now I know it is the Torre Agbar.
This house just a little ways down the hill had "Okupa y Resiste" (Occupy and Resist) painted on the roof.
If you look just a little closer at the banner hanging above "Resiste", you can see that it poses the riddle "Why call it tourist season if we can't shoot them?"
Tiled mosaics on the ceiling.
This building at the entrance of the park reminded me of a gingerbread house.
And I will leave you with this shot of Kate and I resting on a bench in Park Güell as my final photo, because one of the things that makes traveling wonderful is having a great friend to accompany you along the way.
¡Adios, España!
