Gaudi Barcelona and The Ring

3/7 - 3/13 + 3/29 - 4/3

Got drunk on 1 Euro wine and had fun chatting with fellow travellers a few times in Barcelona, which was great. Don't drink much these days, believe it or not, especially when unemployed (Montenegro being the only other occasion that comes to mind).
The street performers are fun and the overall ambience of La Rambla is great. Nice place for a stroll. We spent quite a lot of time in Barcelona, almost two weeks in all, hanging out and sometimes just killing time. Good place for it.

Nice work with the flags, lads.

We spent so long in Barcelona mainly because we'd finally run out of Europe to look for rings in. After scouring the city for goldsmiths we decided to use the general shape suggested to us by the designer in Naples, combined with the aesthetic of an insanely expensive British designer we'd found on line. We found an obscure little shop in the suburbs run by a really friendly couple who didn't speak much English but had a range of funky designs and - we guessed - the skill to produce something unusual. They took our sketches, produced a few 3D renderings for us to refine the design, then told us to come back in a couple of weeks for the finished product. We spent the time visiting the amazing Fallas festival in Valencia and a few towns around Madrid - more on those places later.

Getting the ring sketched, modelled and made isn't the whole story though, as at one point we were in Zaragosa, planning to head back to Barcelona as it was well past the ring's due date and we were getting a bit twitchy wondering why the jeweller hadn't contacted us. When we did finally get them on the phone it turned out my mobile wasn't taking calls, but more to the point they told us we couldn't travel to Barcelona on the 29th. We couldn't figure out why in Catalan and Spanish, but a bit of Googling turned up news of the nationwide general strike. With our hostel in Barcelona already booked and accommodation getting harder to find in late March we decided to hop on a midnight bus to get into Barcelona before the strike, then use the morning's 1/3 skeleton service to get to the hostel with the morning work crowd. We got to Barcelona around 6am without problems, although when we arrived the bus terminal was full of stranded travellers standing, sitting and sprawled all over the place. We got to the Ferrocarril light rail around 6:30am, only to see women running out of the tunnels waving their hands as explosions, whistles and alarms rocked the station behind them. We soon realised that the explosions were giant firecrackers and the whistles and 'alarms' were being made by people picketing the station and preventing people from going to work, but the first impression was pretty scary and there was clearly no way of getting to the platforms so we left the underground. A scrawny, lanky guy with that heroin-chic look, except without the chic, sprinted toward us from across the street and hid in the stairwell, doubled over and wheezing. After a minute he looked at us, peeked back across the street and then staggered off around another corner. We never saw the people chasing him. We figured out an alternative route from a station further down the line, using the metro to get there. When we arrived the station was deserted, but soon enough a thousand people with the same idea flooded into the station. We brute forced our way on to the next train with the rest, and got to our suburban hostel without any further incident.

The hostel itself turned out to be a non-profit organisation employing... er, what's the correct term for mentally handicapped people these days? I Googled it but the English internet doesn't seem to be too sure of itself on this one. I'll use 精神疾患のある人 for now. Anyway, the one non-精神疾患のある member of staff hadn't got our reservation, but found us two beds after a few hours. She had slept there instead of trying to travel to work during the strike.

The next day we went into town without any trouble, met the cheerful goldsmith who said he'd never seen anything like the ring he'd just made and collected our prize!

Finally the ring, complete! Suspended in a funky transparent case.

We met Mandy at the hostel, who was awesome. Hozumi and Mandy went clubbing together, which was the first time Hozumi had ever hung out with another non-Japanese person without me around. Good times were had.

Of course, we did a fair bit of sightseeing in Barcelona too, so, to the Gaudi pictures:

The Sagrada Familia is actually really ugly, especially the 'Nativity façade'. The rest of Gaudi's stuff is much better (as well as being 100% Gaudi, unlike this chimera)

The angular 'Passion façade' is a little better.

Love these houses. Wish the entry tickets for all these places were more reasonably priced, but I figure the exteriors are where 90% of the awesomeness is concentrated.

Gaudi's Parc Guell was deliberately built well away from all the main transport networks and was intended to be a retreat for a few wealthy residents. No one except Gaudi and Count Guell ever bought houses there though, which is fortunate for us as it's a nice park. But back to that transport thing. We planned our route there from what appeared to be the nearest metro station. We exited from the wrong end of that deserted metro and stood around looking lost until we asked someone where the park was. They looked quite distressed and said we'd best walk back through the metro station (buying another ticket) to the other side of the hill and ask someone there... We did so, went up an outdoor elevator and found the only road going in the right direction ended in private property. An old guy nearby suggested we go 'up the stairs'. The only stairs we found soon petered out and became gravel, then dirt as we climbed the hill. Soon enough we reached a burnt out car, wire mesh fencing, spray-painted anarchist slogans and HUGE ANGRY DOGS, that were fortunately the other side of the fencing along with a couple of brightly-coloured mohican types. We circled around all of that, climbed more shrub and were finally rewarded with this view of sprawling Barcelona. Nice. From there it was a downhill scramble to the park, which was also very fancy.