Estoy en Barcelona 2
Blessedly late Friday morning, Sam’s dad picked us up (Sam and Jesus had to work, of course) and drove us all over Barcelona, bless his generous heart. We started at the top – a huge cathedral at the highest point in the city with views for miles in all directions. It was windy up there and even windier when I climbed up the side of the steeple. I actually had to hold on to keep from being blown off the stairs.
As the cold wind hit, I felt something wet on my right shin. When I got down to the basic tower level where Sylv and Clemente were, I pulled up my pants leg and to my great surprise found blood pouring out of a deep cut. I’d banged my leg on a steel platform that stuck out from the bottom of a telescope mount, but hadn’t realized it was anything but a bump. For a minute I thought Sylv was going to get to add to her collection of “Emergency Rooms Around the World” but a couple of staff people in the church rushed to help. They cleaned up the leg with alcohol, poured iodine in the wound, and bandaged it with a patch from a First Aid kit they luckily had on hand. There was no pain (and two days later there still isn’t any pain), so we just went on with the tour.
Next we visited a fantastic park where the walls and bridges and buildings had been designed by the same Barca architect who’d done the buildings we’d wow’d at Thursday night, Antoni Gaudi. In fact, he’d lived in a house in the park for a couple of decades, which was now a museum.
Sam broke away from the office long enough to take us to lunch at a stylish restaurant within walking distance of DDB called Balthazar. We didn’t sit down to eat ’til about 3PM, but that was OK because dinner was also going to be very late, all according to the Spanish custom.
After lunch Clemente took us back out for some more sightseeing, first to a big church/hospital complex named St. Paul’s (Sant Pau) that was undergoing major renovations. They had a clever sign apologizing for the inconvenience of the construction work that translated, “Forgive us our trespasses”!
Finally we ended up at another cathedral Sagrada Familia (Barcelona is full of them), the back half of which had also been designed by Gaudi. It was interesting to see the contrast between his work and the work of another architect who had done the front half.
Clemente handed us off to Sam and Jesus at the office around seven o’clock and we went down to have a stroll through an ancient part of the city called El Born. El Born is a rabbit warren of narrow, high-walled winding streets lined with shops and studded with museums, one of which is a Picasso museum complete with a billboard-size line art mural he’d done on the outside wall. (Picasso moved to Barca with his parents when he was 14; he always he thought of this city as his hometown, a biography I read says.)
Some of the walls and caves in El Born had been part of castles owned by wealthy people; other structures had been fortresses protecting the city and the harbor. (There’s even a large bit of the old Roman wall.) There were also more great old churches, usually fronted by a broad cobbled square where cafes and restaurants had spread their tables and umbrellas. The evening was warm and the alleys were thronged with people. The alleged recession (here called “the crisis”) was nowhere in evidence.
A little after 9PM we went to a fashionable haute cuisine restaurant to meet a friend of Sam’s and Jesus’s named Ana. She had worked for Ogilvy for 20 years (Jesus had been her client at some point); now she taught advertising at ESADE, a world-class business school in Barcelona. Needless to say, we never ran out of things to talk about! There was even some casual conversation to the effect that wouldn’t it be nice if I could come to Barcelona to teach a course at ESADE so we could really explore the area. If that conversation were to turn serious, we’d certainly be interested. We love Catalunya in general and Barcelona in particular and ESADE is more than a reputable institution. We’ll see.
It was nearing midnight by the time we finished dining. There were multiple small-portion courses and each dish was served with a flourish and described in detail by a waiter or waitress or by the woman who seemed to be the boss. Everything was unique and delicious and the wine was ambrosial. What an elegant experience.
Saturday morning I walked down the hill to the pedestrian mall center of Sant Cugat with Jesus while he did the shopping for tonight’s dinner. First we went to the fish store where there was a counter the length of the store a foot deep in fresh fish and shellfish, some of which I recognized and but most of which I didn’t. The prices seemed staggeringly high to me; the tag next to a little blue lobster said 37.80 Euros, which is nearly $60!!! Jesus chose a foot-and-a-half long sea fish I’d never heard of and bought four of them, which the lady behind the counter quickly and expertly trimmed, scaled and gutted. The place was scrupulously clean and smelled only of the sea. Catalunyans eat a lot of fish and shellfish, Jesus said, some caught in the Mediterranean here and some from the Atlantic Ocean on the other side of Spain (which of course isn’t all that far away).
Our next stop was the fruit and vegetable market, again super clean and featuring a great variety of produce. I counted 24 different kinds of olives alone!
Last he hit the bakery for a loaf of a bread type we particularly like that has olives embedded in it. Sam and Jesus eat it for breakfast. They spread it with olive oil, squeeze and rub a fresh tomato on it and add manchego cheese or slices of a dried salami-like meat or both, and wash it all down with espresso coffee.
In the afternoon Sam and Jesus took us back down to El Born to see it in the daylight. It was every bit as interesting. We had the usual late lunch in a tapas bar, something we’d never done before even though there is such a place right on Franklin Street in downtown Chapel Hill. From an ambiance point of view it’s sort of like a bistro, very casual. The food is brought on small plates and everybody shares. Good fun with good friends.
We wandered around the area a bit more before finally heading home to Sant Cugat for an hour or so’s rest before our wonderful seafood dinner. Jesus had picked up a couple of dozen razor clams for us to share as appetizers, done in olive oil and garlic and eaten with that great crusty bread, accompanied by a crisp, dry delicious wine of a local grape variety I’d never heard of. It was like a lemon-y sauvignon blanc from New Zealand, except – dare I say it? – better!
One of the things we loved when I was teaching in Monaco was that we could just go downstairs to the market in the alley below our apartment window and buy fresh baked croissants or whatever for breakfast. Sam and Jesus do the same, not exactly downstairs but still just a short walk into the cute little Sant Cugat town center.
Sunday after a leisurely breakfast and a stroll through town and a visit to the impressive monastery, we piled into the car to go down to the Barcelona waterfront for a delicious seafood paella lunch in a harbor front restaurant. There aren’t many cities in the world with both a big beach for swimming and snowy mountains an hour away for skiing.
We walked off lunch with a wander along the front toward the site of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Like all Olympic Games and World’s Fairs, the event had a transformative effect on its host city. Old buildings were refurbished, new ones got built, long-postponed infrastructure improvements happened, decayed urban areas were razed and reborn. Beyond the physical benefits, however, there was a spiritual uplift. In many people’s minds, the 1992 Olympics “put Barcelona on the map.” The citizenry rejoiced, even reveled when the decision was announced. Little old Barcelona, not the most important and certainly not the best-known city in Spain, was suddenly front and center on the world stage. I’d seen firsthand the same thing happen to another provincial capital tucked in a remote northern corner of its country when the Seattle World’s Fair came to town in 1962. The beneficial effects persist for decades — not least among them, civic pride.
Barcelonans LOVE their city. And so they should. It’s a unique and remarkable place. We hope someday we’ll get to go back.
We had a simple dinner of good bread and paper-thin sliced dried ham off the bone, accompanied of course by another excellent Spanish wine. Sam’s going to give me a list so I can see if I can find them in the U.S., so we can drink a toast to celebrate our delightful visit.