Friday, October 4

Ray Gets There First

Today is the day I flew to Barcelona.  I had allowed a great deal of time to be lost trying to return the SiXT car, but I found their little driveway on the first pass.  I got to the airport before Ryanair was even checking in.  The Bucharest airport Otopeni, now named Coanda, had the second best hot chocolate in Europe, in my experience, after Dalmas in Venice, but Dalmas no longer serves it.  I got hot chocolate, fresh and a croissant for 60 lei; maybe it isn’t the best in Europe but it is right up there.  It’s still better than the chocolate in Stockholm in 2010 that called itself the best in Europe.

Ryanair is getting mellow in its old age.  The guy didn’t charge me to print a boarding pass.  My flight was to BGY and then on to BCN.  All very quick.  We touched down in Barcelona at 1546 and by 1712 I was in my Airbnb near Mercat de Sant Antoni. It is a lovely part of town.  There are real people everywhere, kids playing on the walking streets, workers doing stuff, people talking who aren’t trying to sell you things.  I don’t know how the neighborhood has survived its proximity to Barri Gotic.  I will surely stay there the next time I come.

Around 7 P.M., Philipp showed up.  He is a friend of Justin’s, who had a job in Los Angeles for a while.  We have stayed in touch because he is cooler than we are and everyone should date above his level.  We began walking and continued for 10 kilometers, sometimes stopping to eat but mostly just walking and deciding.  We walked all the way to Barceloneta and back through the Gothic Quarter.  Then it was time to go to sleep.

Saturday, October 5

Philipp’s and my activities on this Saturday (before meeting Dave) were: going to the market, eating, taking a bus to the beach, sitting, looking for a place to eat, eating, taking the bus back.  Philipp wrote on the post card to Oliver, at breakfast.

Dave: Getting There from Kiev

I got picked up and taken to the airport.  I was flying on Air France, and had a very tight connection in Paris on my way to Barcelona.  

When I arrived in Paris, I was quick off the plane (row 5), immediately went through security (an agent helped me jump the line). Then I walked from terminal 2E to terminal 2F, and found a long line of people waiting to enter the Schengen zone.  I started panicking that I wouldn’t get to the flight on time, and all the agents seemed unwilling to help.  At one point, the number of officials looking at passports went from two to one, but after awhile a second one returned.  Finally I got stamped in, walked to my gate, where the flight was well into the boarding process.  So I guess a 55-minute connection is possible, though it seemed like it was cutting it close.

I arrived in Barcelona, took the airport bus into town, and Ray and Philipp met me at the bus stop.  

Together Again

We deposited the luggage, and then went off in the Sant Antoni district where we were staying to find some tapas.  The restaurants operated by the Adriá brothers (of El Bulli fame) were predictably full, and we ended up at a somewhat touristy but still delicious place.

One aspect of “touristy” is that people are back to walking up to us and wanting our photos and general beardedness.  The trio that approached us on this night were striking.  We look like J.R. “Bob” Dobbs compared to their colors and weaves and inserted jewelry and permanent fashion statements and the guy had an awesome light brown beard.  Some people say “ginger” when describing this color, but I think ginger should be reserved for people with red in their hair, which totally doesn’t make sense because ginger isn’t red, it’s light brown, just like the beard.  The grammarians at South Park need to get their act together.

Sunday, October 6

It was nice to see Philipp though I saw him only very briefly: it was time for him to return to Berlin.  We got up early, found some pastry, walked around the Sant Antoni market, then put him on the bus back to the airport.  Ray and I were staying at an airbnb inside a couple’s apartment, they rent out two rooms.  It was a great neighborhood, lots of great places to eat but comfortably distant from the most crowded areas.

Continuing the theme of little brothers of Germans, I stopped at the book fair at Mercado Sant Antoni and bought a 50 cent nudie calendar wallet card for Thomas Schaaf. Where do people get into these odd loops, of sending particular things to each other?  He sends the same to me.  The gender preference match about 75% of the time but the important thing is the generic Barbie/Ken sexless touristicity.  I made his card into a post card and felt very rewarded when I dropped it off at the post office and the man at the counter took it back to show his workmates.  Strategic Heterosexuality Mention is as traditional for workers as it is for pedophiles.  It has far outlasted any utility it could possibly have had, but I’m always happy to have made someone’s work environment just a little more hostile.

We set off with a list of places to see from TimeOut.  We ended up walking up the Ramblas to get to the first one.  There cannot ever be a reason to do so, and it gets worse every year.  There were any number of kiosks this time around, selling pepper seeds with packet photos showing them growing into penises, but later on when I inspected the Internet for them, I found nothing but complaints that they look like liberty bells or other objects.  This is disappointing in any penis, especially one intended for consumption.

After fighting our way through the Ramblas, we found La Musclera, a place which serves mussels in many different sauces, and had a snack.  Banners hanging pointed us towards the Gaudi house La Pedrera, which had an exhibition by video artist Bill Viola, who had connections to Barcelona.  The first work we saw on entering had video special effects which I have no idea how they might have been done in 1979.  It was an interesting survey of several of his works.

Then we went to les Punxes, another interesting-looking Art Nouveau house, and decided to take the tour.  Big mistake forgetting to check it out on Trip Advisor first. Do not go in here.  The house has been gutted.  Inside is nothing but the conference rooms out of an Ibis hotel.  Gray wall to wall carpets.  An embarrassing narration of the legend of St. George on video screens in rooms to which you are carefully admitted sequentially, which presentation was meant to compete against Game Boy Color for the attention of children.

I think when you get well into middle age, there is a tendency to forget just how many generations there are.  There’s more to it than just remembering that you are no longer young: the Kids are no longer young, either.  Consider the pundits who speak even yet as though Millennials are the Spoiled Brats.  No, wrong, some of the older millennials are taxiing their children around to check out colleges.  The people who vandalized the Punxes house thought they’d be entertaining the children of tourists, but the children who once related to that level of graphic and narrative sophistication are thirty years old now, and definitely not traveling with their parents, and the ones who are nine and restless will be rolling their eyes unless they are truly precocious Pixelvision artists who throw up installations of cabbage patch fan art on their post-post-post-retro whatever-is-nine-year-old-for-deviantArt sites.

It would be interesting to learn what happened to the inside of the house.  Fire?  Termites?  It must have been irretrievably destroyed in order for anyone to be allowed to build this dumb experience inside.  The house is almost not mentioned by the audio guide and the video presentations.  Puig’s other works get much more coverage. As well they might.

Eventually, we pushed our way through and went to the roof, where it was more like a museum, and we could actually see traces of the original construction.

That was enough tourism.  We went to the highlight of our Barcelona visit, the restaurant Dos Pebrots.  Many of the dishes we ordered (a la carte) were awesome surprises. The alcohol-infused fruit to start, not so much.  The dried/cured fish plate was fine, especially the smoked mackerel, but the bottarga had a bitter taste.  The biggest hit was the sow nipples, little discs of amazingly flavorful fat served on an upside-down ceramic pig. There was some smoked ice cream, which also had a surprising flavor.

Monday, October 7

We found Cafe Cometa, a wonderful place to have breakfast, a few blocks from the apartment.

Then we headed to MACBA, Barcelona’s museum of contemporary art.  The main exhibit there was a timeline of art and world events covering the 90 years since the museum was founded.  Each decade was in its own room.  I looked for a long time at the Civil War era posters, as that is the part of history, and hence art, we are currently approaching.

Afterwards, we had dinner at Hisop, a fancier tasting-menu restaurant, where everything was beautiful and tasty.  But the most memorable part was talking to our waiter outside after the meal.  He’s from Mali / Niger / Burkina Faso (“which?”  “all of them, we’re nomadic”).  It was his last night of working there, and his shift was over.  He’d already found some other place to work.  We were in the area in 2006, and I can imagine him having gone from the area in a large truck to Libya, and then crossing to Italy or Spain.  He didn’t say the name of his tribe.  I would not have recognized it.

Tuesday, October 8

We had breakfast at Düal Cafe around the corner, and then walked around the Sant Antoni market to get some food for the flight. We checked out, and took the bus to the airport. We were flying back separately to the United States, me to San Francisco, and Ray to Miami. 

Dave: Off to San Francisco

My flight had been a mess the previous several days.  It was booked as an Iberia reservation, but was operated by their new budget airline LEVEL.  Having two companies be involved was an opportunity to avoid responsibility.  I wanted to find out if I had a baggage allowance.  We never had gotten an email confirmation of the booking, so there was no booking reference.  There was a ticket number on the credit card statement (yay for that!).  I called Iberia in the UK (right time zone, right language), and they looked up the booking reference.  Then I tried to find out about the baggage on the Iberia website using the booking reference, it said that information wasn’t available. Trying on the LEVEL website didn’t find the booking.  So I called Iberia in the UK again, and they told me I didn’t have baggage, but I could buy it, so I did.  (I also paid to get a window seat, I’d been assigned to an aisle.  A fee here, a fee there, pretty soon you’ve got an expensive fare!)  I never got any confirmation, so I had to call them a third time to get one, and this time the agent was able to email me.  The record he emailed said that there was no meal service.  

At the airport, the agent told me that I’d get a meal since I’d bought a baggage reservation.  That’s nice.  I got on the plane, the meals came around, and I wasn’t on the list. After having had my expectations built up, it was a bit demeaning to be turned down. As I left the plane, I said “delightful flight!  stupid airline!”

Getting into the US was amazingly swift.  I’d downloaded Mobile Passport, and submitted my information.  I was whisked into a very short line, said I had no food with me. When I got to the carousel, my bag arrived in front of me.  There was nothing else, I was sent directly to the exit.

Justin picked me up and took me home.  After recovering from some jet lag, I was back to work.

Ray: Off to Miami

My flight to Miami was uneventful.  My telephone started speaking Romanian to me again, at the airport, but this time I was able to pull out its SIM.  Daisy, Daisy…