Barcelona, Spain
June 2005
It was a nice flight on Iberia, with some great Spanish red wine with dinner (Greek wine is nice, but it´s not one of Greece´s strengths, even
though we had plenty). The sun was going down when we walked out of Barcelona´s airport, so we got another great sunset. It took us a few hours
on the metro to get to the city and we checked into our hostel here. Lacking a few things like AC and a private bathroom, we are looking today
for someplace a little nicer and to see the Barcelona we have heard good things about.
Barcelona's wide avenue La Rambla and Gaudi's Familia Cathedral
We´ll start with the good parts of Barcelona, we explored the city, starting at the port and walking up the main La Rambla, the famous road
through the middle of the city which is a wide cobble-stone pedestrian street. The buildings and architecture in the city are truly amazing, it
is like a big outdoor museum. Some of the features the city is known for are the works of Gaudi, who has a very organic style of architecture
with lots of curving shapes and colors. His unfinished masterpiece, and what he devoted most of his life to, is the Familia cathedral. It was
started in the 1860's and is still not nearly finished. It is scheduled to be done by 2030, as it is entirely funded by donations and the fee for
tourists to walk through it. We entered and it is a major construction site. The outside has soaring spires and intricately carved pictures of
animals and nature scenes in the walls. The columns on the inside are made to look like trees, with the roots spreading into the floor at the
bottom and the branches and canopy spreading overhead to form the roof of the center of the church. At first, Gaudi´s work seems eccentric, but
we got to read his writings inside the church and he was a genius, with an understanding of math and nature that was ahead of his time. His
writings reminded us of Ayn Rand´s Fountainhead.
The restaurants in Barcelona were great, there is such a variety of foods there. We ate a long lunch at a Spanish-Morrocan style restaurant.
Another Indian meal for dinner, it was delicious, we don´t find as much Asian food here in the Mediterranean.
 Then there is the disappointing side of Barcelona. We´ve been told such good things by people who have been there before, so
we had high hopes, but we have to believe that Barcelona has changed dramatically the past few years or even months. There is a saying that
you never wash a rental car before returning it, and Barcelona seems like an old rental car that has been absolutely trashed. Our first view
of the city coming in on the train was through a shattered window, and even windows in the designer clothing stores in the city center were
smashed, and looked like they had been shot. There was trash everywhere in the streets and grafitti covered the beautiful buildings. Even
many of the sculptures in the city parks had grafitti on them. The La Rambla street was full of souvenir stands and people getting suckered
into a card game here, in which tourists play what they think is a game of chance, but they don´t realize there are accomplices of the
dealer playing alongside them. We wonder if the bombings right before the election, and the entry of a new government are part of it. Things
we read here (in the Iberia airlines magazine for example, which you would think would try and say good things) say that Barcelona is having
severe social problems lately due to the influx of poor immigrants. Walking around, we saw posters for only two political parties- the
Communists, and the anti-immigration Socialist party. The Catelonia separitist movement is also prevalent, with grafitti spray-painted "This
is not Spain" and "Bombers!". We met some nice people inside of buildings, but everyone on the street seemed to give us dirty looks. The
receptionist at our hotel told us it was perfectly safe to walk outside- as long as we weren´t drunk, we walked quickly, and clutched any
bags tightly to our chest. These our just our own views and possibly an isolated bad experience, but it was shocking and we didn´t even feel
safe.
So we made the first unscheduled change in all of our trips, and decided to leave Barcelona a day early and head to Ibiza- Yeah! Back to a small, sandy island in the Mediterranean!
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