I decided to splurge on transportation for a change (we didn’t feel up to navigating Barcelona’s limited night-time public transportation system after a full day of sightseeing and transit), and we had a hired driver (Miguel?) waiting for us at the airport. I sat in the front seat, and as Miguel drove us (in style) to our B&B, I talked to him in Spanish. It was comforting to know that from here on out - with our last stops being Spain, Portugal, and the U.K. - we would be able to communicate with everybody fairly easily. Or so we thought.
During my conversation with Miguel, I kept referring to the “pueblo” of Barcelona, saying how nice, friendly, and laid back I thought the people were. The word “povo” in Portuguese means “the people,” as in Utahns or Angelinos or New Yorkers. I was under the impression that the most similar word in Spanish was “pueblo.” Apparently, however, instead of referring to the laid back, relaxed, friendly people, I was telling Miguel how nice and relaxed I thought his little village, Barcelona, was. Every time I said “Es un pueblo muy relaxado,” Miguel laughed and added politely, “Es un ciudad.” That comment kept flying over my head, as I thought he was saying, “Yeah, it’s one heck of a city isn’t it?”. After about ten minutes of conversation, Jenny (who apparently has the gift of tongues) casually said, in English from the back seat , that I was calling Barcelona a village and that I needed to start calling it a city. Confused and annoyed at my back seat interpreter, I explained to her that we weren’t talking about the city at all. After another five minutes of conversation, in which Miguel corrected me twice, I asked for a definition of the word “pueblo.” Miguel explained to me that Barcelona, with its 5-8 million (?) inhabitants, was not a pueblo, but a city.
Tony, a Barcelona native, who operates The Patio with his British wife, Elizabeth, was waiting for us in the street outside the B&B. Prior to this trip, I have always booked hotels and hostels that are either in the middle of the busy/tourist part of town, or that were very fancy (the latter only because we got huge discounts from working for two separate hoteliers). After staying at The Patio (and other nice B&Bs this trip), I don’t think I’ll ever go back to the busy/touristy/oft fancy places. The Patio just felt too much like being at home in Barcelona. It was located in a pleasant residential neighborhood, and I twice sat out on the roof, observing the surrounding apartments with laundry hanging on lines out their windows. Elizabeth cares for dozens of plants that line the walkway from the street to the actual B&B, and the accommodations themselves are furnished with antique British and Spanish armoires, beds, etc. Tony gave us great advice on places to see and things to do, and Elizabeth baked fresh bread to go with our breakfast in the morning.
Before we could sleep, we decided that we needed to do our laundry, which had accumulated to an unmentionable extreme. Tony and Elizabeth couldn’t believe that we were going to do a load of laundry at 1:00 a.m., but they directed us to a Laundromat down the street. As all of our clothes were in the machine, I sat in the public building wearing nothing but a pair of Brazil soccer shorts. Fortunately, at 2:00 a.m. there aren’t a lot of people around to ask questions. To pass the time, Jenny and I played “Quarters,” where two people stand twelve feet from a wall, and one accumulates points by landing his quarter (in this case a Euro coin) closer to the wall than his opponent's quarter. It’s not a game I would recommend if you have an alternative, but Jenny and I had already talked consecutively for 3 and a half weeks, and we needed to inject a little healthy competition into the mix.
With a longer stay in Barcelona than we had had in any other city, and having stayed up playing quarters until 2:30 in the morning, we decided to take the first day in Barcelona a little slower. We woke up around 10:30 (I can hear both of my parents grinding their teeth) and took a train to the nearby beach town of Sitges. We hopped on the entirely wrong train, but, as in most cases this trip, things just went our way. We ended up arriving in Sitges earlier than we would have had we taken the right train. As we rode the train out, we passed by mile after mile of scenic beach. Sitges is a little resort town that feels a lot like Laguna or Newport Beach: small shops, good restaurants, and lots of people in bathing suits…or not.
During family vacations as a kid, I remember spending over two hours at a beach only once. We were in Hawaii for a week and a half, and, as I recall, we spent one afternoon of our trip on End-of-the-Road Beach on Kauai. To be fair, we did other amazing things. But let’s just say, as a youth, I probably hung out at the beach as often as Josef Stalin. I made a promise to Jenny, though, that our Europe trip would include at least two trips to the beach. In the end, I think I enjoyed the beaches more than she did (and not for the reasons you’re probably thinking).
In Sitges, we bought a cheap flotation device covered with red hearts, a set of Brazilian-flag painted beach paddles, and a blue and white beach towel. 
After several hours of floating under the cloudless sky, experimenting with toplessness (just me), and reading on the beach, we took a lunch break. We sat in a sparsely furnished restaurant, overlooking the water. Fliers advertising weekend parties were posted on and around our table. An artist stood at one end of the restaurant flipping through several of his prints, hoping to sell to the resort crowd. After lunch, we walked along the hard packed, bleached dirt “boardwalk” towards the shops, whose post-siesta shuttered doors opened as slowly as did the eyes of their owners.
On our way back to Barcelona, I suggested that we needed another relaxing beach day, and Jenny agreed that, while she loved the day, I liked the beach as much or more than she had.
Once we had showered at The Patio, we went back out to continue our slow, laid back day with a slow, laid back evening. We walked along a street of shops selling everything from watches, to lotion, to dozens of cured hams (which were hanging in the shop’s windows). We excited the commercial road and walked through a residential neighborhood. We sat on a bench in a park that was the place to see and be seen if you were a canine. The most notable members of the crowd included:
· A pensive, scholastic Old English Sheepdog whose shoulder blades moved up and down like those of a bear. One got the impression that, in his Buddhist past, this one was a distinguished Harvard history professor.
· A sprightly outlaw who sprinted onto the scene from nowhere, wearing nothing but a black bandanna. He ran the width of the park several times, tongue dangling in the wind to his side, as he skirted beneath and between the feet of human onlookers and unabashedly sniffed the rectum of his canine neighbor. Finally, without extending a farewell or an apology to anyone, he ran to the edge of the park, bounded from the steps and disappeared into the same non-existence from whence he came.
· A perfectly and muscularly round, miniature bulldog, who was surprisingly quick and friendly. She looked at her master with stoic eyes, anticipating the throw of a ragged ball. She then sprinted, head-down, to the ball. To get the ball (which was far too big) into her mouth, she had to touch her nose to the dirt. After each engagement with the ball, she would sneeze and shake her face vigorously, before trotting proudly and defensively back to her master. I have been trying to convince Jenny for three years that we need a bulldog, and this one was my best reference. 
· A small civilized bitch who may as well have been having tea in the Hamptons. As she watched the rest of the crowd, I could almost hear her say, in a slightly British accent, “Oh children…” 
From the park, we walked all the way down to Las Ramblas, passing colonial Spanish architecture and architecture from the modernists like Gaudi. We marveled at how fun-loving Barcelona is, and at how perfect the weather felt. We tried to go to a movie theater along the way, but unfortunately all of the movies were either Spanish or dubbed in Spanish. We were directed to another theater in town and, after spending a little more time on Las Ramblas, which was wild and crazy but not as cool as I had remembered it, decided to call it a night and try our luck at the theater the following evening.
The next morning, we were up bright and early to catch a train out to Montserrat. Breakfast included fresh melon, grapes, and peaches, homemade bread, cereal, yogurt, and milk and juice. We walked down to the Barcelona train station, and caught one of the first trains out to the mountainous region an hour or so from Barcelona.
Montserrat is a monastery nestled into the side of a tall mountain overlooking the region. The monastery is only accessible to the public via an old yellow tram, which we took from the Montserrat train station to the top. We had read that one of the highlights of a visit to Montserrat is listening to the boys choir as they sing each afternoon. We had plenty of time before that, so we rode a funicular up to the top of the mountain and hiked around a bit. The view was spectacular. I had gone off on my own little trail (Jenny learned not to follow me after I got us lost in the bush on a deserted island during our honeymoon), and eventually had 360 degree views of the valley, thousands of feet below. Fortunately, there weren’t too many cliffs around, so I felt very comfortable being up there.
We hiked around a little more and took the funicular down to hear the boys choir, which was sub par. I had actually anticipated better music. Aside from the mediocre performance, the chapel was absolutely packed with tourists, each telling the other to “sit down and shut up!”
Back in Barcelona, we ate Paella – risotto with shrimp, mussels, peppers and other spices – at a restaurant near the Montjuic park. After a relaxing meal, we took a funicular to the top of the park, stopping at various 1992 Olympics sites along our walk down.
We stopped at the Olympic museum to see exhibits on marketing the games, the different events, and the medals. We sprinted along a track and did the high jump to see how we compared to Olympic athletes. We had been walking all day, and we were literally the only two patrons in the museum, so Jenny took off her shoes. An over-zealous security guard informed her that this was against museum policy. From the museum, it was a short walk to the Olympic stadium and fountains overlooking Barcelona’s suburbs. The sun was hanging low in the sky as we walked past an old castle in the park and settled on a wall overlooking the famous Magical Fountains. 
Every Thurs-Sun night in the summer, the fountains do a show that rivals (and in my opinion exceeds) that of the Bellagio. We ate slushees as we watched with a few thousand other people. Finally, we made our way down to the movie theater to see Angels and Demons.
The best part about watching Angels and Demons, which takes place in Rome, was that we had visited all of the sites as little as 48 hours earlier. Each time we recognized a place, Jenny and I glanced at each other and laughed. We had taken a tour of the Vatican and recognized the different places in the Sistine Chapel, including the location of the stove that produces the white and black smoke indicating whether or not a Pope has been chose. We had seen the Papal tombs and pointed out that the previous Pope’s grave was not actually that of John Paul II. We even saw the Pope himself. I realize that Hollywood takes advantage of the new tourist-class society, but it was still cool to see the movie so briefly after we had been to the actual sites.
On the morning of our final day in Barcelona, we gave Las Ramblas one more shot. Again, it wasn’t as cool as I had remembered. A handful of street performers asked for money, the most entertaining of whom was a man acting as monkey. His impressions were uncanny. 
There were several merchants spread out over the mile-long plaza, and a flea market at the bottom, but nothing substantial.
Jenny and I visited the Barcelona maritime museum and we enjoyed looking at old maps, recreations of 16th – 19th century boating life, and a wooden submarine. We had lunch in the museum restaurant.
After the maritime museum, we walked over to the neighborhood Barceloneta, past the harbor with multi-million dollar yachts. Barceloneta is an outpost of traditional Barcelonistas who want to save their neighborhood from developers. Walking through the streets was just like walking through (nicer) parts of Brazil. Laundry hung from lines between apartment buildings, lunch cost $2 instead of $20, people lived above their bakeries, and small parks were filled with kids. As we walked past an open window, a man was sitting alone with a beer and a cigarette, enjoying the loud, romantic music emanating from some other room in his apartment. He was dressed in a silky, tuxedo shirt and wore a grey Spanish hat. This was one instance where, instead of asking “why”, I asked “Why not?” 
The man epitomized the relaxing, laid back nature of Barcelona (albeit an older, less populated version).
From Barceloneta, we went to Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia Cathedral, which is arguably one of the most spectacular religious buildings in the world. 
Gaudi’s style is based on patterns in nature, and the interior of the cathedral resembles a grove of trees. We enjoyed walking around the interior (which is a full blown construction site), and riding the elevators to the top to walk through the spires. Apparently I am quite a bit more concerned by heights than Jenny is. She was hop-scotching around the thin passage ways between spires like it was no big deal. 
After a quick visit to the Sagrada Familia Museum, we took the metro to Parc Guell, which was originally going to be a housing development for Barcelona’s late-18th Century elite. 
However, the Gaudi-designed development eventually became a public park, and it exhibits all the wackiness, simplicity, and beauty of Gaudi’s architecture. We spent a piece of the afternoon there, had some fruit from a stand on the way back to our B&B, and then headed out to the airport.
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