williamwataru

Day 8 – First full day in Barcelona

Last night was the roughest sleep I’ve had in a while.

I was on the top bunk in a 16-person hostel room. My bunk was closest to the AC, and I woke up several times in the middle of the night with my nose and mouth hurting from being so dry. It didn’t help that we went to bed around 2am and woke up at 9am. By the time I got out of bed, I was starting to feel sick.

Safe to say I was dragging for most of today, painfully reminded of the importance of rest while traveling.

But that didn’t stop the city from leaving an impact on me.

Our first objective of the day was to find a coffee shop and get something to eat with our espresso. By chance, we wandered past a cafe with a perfect 5-star rating, something that is rare to see.

Going inside, we were greeted by the smiling face of a Spanish grandma, and when I ordered in Spanish, she was warm and encouraging.

We ordered two espressos and a biquini sandwich, which turned out to be a Spanish grilled ham and cheese. Moments later, an older man came outside with our espressos, grinning ear-to-ear, and asked us where we were from.

“My mother is making your biquini now!” he gleefully exclaimed.

Sara and I looked at each other.

“I guess we aren’t in France anymore.”

It was a joke, but seriously, the warmth we felt upon arriving in Spain was noticeably different from our experiences in France. Not to say that people were especially mean to us in France, because they weren’t, but the mother-and-son duo at that cafe was something quite special. I think their energy actually made me feel physically better for a moment.

Before I left, I asked the man for his tapas restaurant recommendation.

Insert foreshadowing here.

After breakfast, we wandered around the city. Barcelona felt different from Nice, and the only way we could describe it was that it felt very lived in.

Some people were going on runs. Some people were dressed for work. There were parents and families, but there were also so many young twenty somethings. There were certainly plenty of tourists, but the area we were in didn’t feel like a tourist area. It just felt like a beautiful place where people happened to live.

We saw several Gaudí buildings today. Sara had told me about Gaudí before, a famous Catalan architect, but this was my first time actually looking closely at his work.

Casa Batlló was the first building I saw. Interestingly, Gaudí didn’t construct the building from scratch. He renovated an existing apartment building and completely transformed it.

I think it’s easy to have a million different interpretations of Gaudí’s work. I understand the legendary status his buildings have attained and why they are loved by so many people. I can also understand someone looking at them and thinking they are excessive or ridiculous.

For me, my immediate thought was that Casa Batlló looked like something from a Dr. Seuss book.

I don’t mean that in a degrading way. It was just the first thing that came to mind. The building seemed almost imaginary, like someone had drawn it without worrying about whether buildings were actually supposed to look that way.

I thought it was incredibly creative. I’ve never seen anything like it.

We checked out several other buildings in the area, including Casa Lleó Morera, Museu Tàpies, and La Pedrera–Casa Milà.

By then, it was time for lunch.

I had been told that Spanish lunch normally happens sometime between 1 and 3pm, while dinner often doesn’t begin until 8pm or later. Tapas culture also seemed to encourage the opposite of rushing. You order a few small dishes, have a drink, talk for a while, and maybe move on somewhere else afterward.

So around 1pm, we headed to the tapas restaurant that the man from the cafe had recommended earlier that morning.

He had specifically mentioned that there were nice Filipino waiters there, a detail Sara and I found hilarious.

Upon arriving at the restaurant, we were indeed greeted by extremely kind Filipino waiters. 

We sat outside, and the weather was perfect. It wasn’t nearly as humid as Nice and was easily some of the best weather we’ve had during our trip thus far.

We ordered two beers, a montadito, which is a small sandwich commonly eaten as a tapa, along with a Spanish omelette and a potato and shrimp dish.

Everything was delicious.

Nothing against France, but the tapas culture in Spain is hard to beat.

We drank our beers, ate our food, and then proceeded to the next spot. The food was relatively affordable, especially compared to France, and we were eager to try more.

At the next restaurant, we ordered two more beers, deep-fried squid, and a cuttlefish and shrimp montadito. Again, everything was delicious.

But unfortunately, I wasn’t feeling so good.

The lack of sleep was catching up to me and I needed to rest. The beers probably didn’t help, but I wasn’t going to NOT have beer with my tapas.

After lunch, we went back to the hostel and rested for a while before going on a walk through Parc de la Ciutadella, one of Barcelona’s largest parks. I loved it.

Similar to some of the parks we visited in Paris, it felt like an incredible public space. Get ready for my public space/third space spiel. 

When I think about parks I used to live near in Oregon, like Forest Park or Washington Park, they feel more like destinations. Places you drive to when you specifically want to spend some time in nature. They’re perfect for a long hike or an afternoon away from the city.

Ciutadella felt different.

It didn’t feel like somewhere you necessarily had to decide to go. It felt like somewhere you could simply end up as part of your normal life, just like we ended up there by walking in a random direction. 

People were walking their dogs, sitting in the grass, exercising, picnicking, talking, or doing nothing at all. It became clear to me that people who live in Barcelona actually use this park as part of their everyday lives.

We saw a group of people walking their dogs, with one man playing fetch with two of them while the others playfully wrestled with each other. Nearby, another group was having a picnic. Every once in a while, one of the dogs would run through their group, causing everyone to laugh.

In another part of the park, people were sitting near a beautiful fountain called the Cascada Monumental, which happens to be a project that a young Gaudí worked on while assisting architect Josep Fontserè, long before Gaudí became famous.

So in a way, we got to see the old, mature Gaudí and a young, learning Gaudí on the same day.

On the way out, I saw a basketball hoop between two gardens and a basketball sitting on the ground. Of course, I picked it up and took a shot.

Then suddenly, a man who had been running nearby appeared seemingly out of nowhere and told me I should take a few more shots while he “warmed up.”

It was a funny little moment, and another example of how normal life seemed to happen within this beautiful public space. 

One more thing about Forest Park and Washington Park in Portland.

I didn’t mention these parks as a comparison because I thought Ciutadella was better. I mentioned them because they are fundamentally different from the park we went to today.

Forest Park and Washington Park are preserving something worth preserving: wild forest within the city. It’s extraordinary. You go to these places to escape city life completely, and for a while, it feels like you are in a different world entirely.

Ciutadella, on the other hand, serves as a shared outdoor public space within a dense city. A place where you can continue living your personal life outside of a private space.

I think the density is the key here because, in Barcelona, people generally have less private space than they do in the Portland metro area.

And maybe that IS the tradeoff.

In America, I think we value private space a lot. We value buying large houses with yards and having cars. We invite friends over and hang out at home. We dream about having vacation homes where we can spend time with family.

When so much of life can happen within private spaces, maybe there is less pressure to create incredible shared public ones.

And when cities are built around private homes and cars, there is also less incentive to build public transit that allows people to move easily through those shared spaces.

Barcelona seems to operate differently.

Many people live in smaller apartments. A lot of people don’t have cars. As a result, good public transit and good public spaces become much more important.

But maybe it works in the other direction too.

Maybe people are able to live comfortably with less private space precisely because so much of the city functions as shared living space.

The cafe downstairs with the kind owners who know your name, the sidewalk with benches outside, the plaza around the corner, the metro, the park with a beautiful fountain. 

When you have places like Ciutadella, your life doesn’t have to fit entirely inside your home.

Otherwise, where are people supposed to live their lives?

Okay, okay. Enough about public spaces.

Really, though, I was not feeling good, and I needed something to eat.

The problem was that it was 7pm and many dinner restaurants didn’t open until 8pm or later. Also, when I feel myself getting sick, I usually want something warm and soupy, and I wasn’t familiar enough with Spanish cuisine to know what kind of soup I could easily find at that moment.

Alas, the time had come to break our streak of not eating Asian food. We thought we could last longer, but I suppose one week is pretty good. We found a ramen restaurant and gave it a try.

The ramen ended up being much better than the previous two ramen restaurants we had visited back home in California and Oregon. In this scenario, we like to call it our Ramen Redemption.

Anyway, I am writing this from the future, where I am very tired, borderline sick, and I should rest.