Valencia vs Barcelona: Valenbisi vs Bicing

When I first thought of coming to Spain I narrowed the choice of cities down to Barcelona and Valencia.* I chose Valencia for a couple of reasons. I figured that it would be a better city for cycling and I also thought it would be a better place to learn Spanish. I think that I was right on both counts but I often think about how great it would be to live in Barcelona. In fact, I think that every time I go there for a visit but this thought fades when the train slows down to enter into Valencia airspace. I believe that I chose well.

Barcelona is truly one of the great cities of the world and rates right up there (in my book, at least) with Paris and New York.  On this last visit I covered my square kilometers than in all my previous trips thanks to my inclusion in Barcelona’s bike share program called Bicing. I noticed these funny bikes many years ago when I visited the city after the program’s inception and hated the fact that non-residents were left out of the fun. This time around a resident friend loaned me her card and I put if to very good use. My first impression of this program was to compare it to Valencia’s bike share program called Valenbisi.

First of all, the program in Valencia can be used by tourists and this use is encouraged. There are 10 day plans but if you are going to use it for more than that it’s probably easier to just go for the one year subscription which is 26€ these days. It is possible to be up and riding on a Valenbisi bicycle within 30 minutes if you know how to do it. As I said, the program in Barcelona is exclusive and for residents only. That just bugs me. I heard that the folks around town who rent bikes complained when the Bicing was initiated and forbade its use for tourists. In the Barcelona program you can take a bike for 30 minutes and after you dock it at a station you have to wait ten minutes to take another bike. In Valencia you can immediately take another bike. I don’t understand this point in Barcelona as the city is big enough that you often need more than 30 minutes to effect your trip.

As far as the bikes themselves I would lean towards the Valenbisi bikes which are sturdier. The basket on these bikes is very useful while the Bicing bikes just have a sort of slot on the front that is almost more trouble than it’s worth. This wouldn’t be such a big thing if I didn’t use the basket every time I take a damn bike. On Bicing I was forever trying to find a way to secure my small daypack so this little detail ends up being a huge pain in the ass.

The Bicing bikes have actual tube tires with air unlike the Valenbisi tires which are hard rubber. This means comfort and speed over no flats, ever. The Valenbisi bikes are also heavier so these two issues—weight and uncompromising and slow wheels—would make these bikes extremely difficult to pump up the hills in Barcelona. In fact, above a certain elevation they don’t even bother to include bike stations in Barcelona as few riders would be willing or able to ride up. They already have a big problem in Barcelona—much bigger than in Valencia—of having to redistribute the bikes from bottom to the top of the city with the Bicing fleet of trucks.

In conclusion, I prefer the Valenbisi bikes and system over Barcelona’s Bicing although I wouldn’t want to hump up the hills there on the hogs we have here. If they could only fix the damn baskets on Bicing!

*Madrid was a distant third in this race because of my desire to be near the Mediterranean.

Bikes Atop Barcelona

I'm sure this isn't a first but I doubt it happens very often that someone climbs to Parc Güell on one of these kind-a-crappy Bicing bikes. I asked a resident near the park gate if there was a Bicing station nearby. He looked down the steep slope of the hill and seemed to be thinking, "Why the fuck would they put a station on this street?" before telling me to look several blocks below.

Barcelona

2 Beers from Sagrada Familia

I think that all great trips should begin with a bike ride. We only had to pedal about six blocks on the Valencia bike-share bikes to get to Valencia’s beautiful Estació del Nord but it was as invigorating as the morning’s first cup of coffee. We had the morning’s second cup of coffee at a station café where we bought a sandwich of tortilla de patatas for a snack for the three and a half hour ride to Barcelona.  There wasn’t even a baggage scan for this train and they simply scanned our tickets and we found our seats. Right on schedule, words that would become our motto on a short excursion that couldn’t have had less of a schedule if the entire idea of schedules had never been invented. If I had ever thought myself to be flexible and amenable to change I had more than met my match with this match who I attached myself to for the length of the trip.

A bit of gazing out the window along this coast of Spain, a good sandwich, a very cold beer from the cafeteria car, and a short nap later we arrived at Barcelona Sants Station, a charmless, utilitarian construction which looks more like a modern, soulless airport than the grand railroad stations of the past (there’s a metaphor or lesson or something in there about trains and planes). Of course Sants is integrated into the city’s wonderful metro system and for 9.90€ I bought a card in a machine good for 10 rides.  We found our train to take us to the Liceu stop in the heart of Las Ramblas. I know Barcelona fairly well but getting around is extremely easy and intuitive for even the first-time visitor. The metro is beautiful and there are trains every couple of minutes. We had excellent luck with buses and trains and had to run a bit to catch many of them with the longest wait being less than four minutes. The metro cars are usually crowded and at this time of year there is nothing but tourists. After a few short minutes we surfaced directly on Las Ramblas into a tidal wave of people.

If you’ve never been to Barcelona and have never heard of Las Ramblas it is one of the main tourist thoroughfares in the city. It’s a gorgeous boulevard lined with plane trees (kind of like a sycamore) that meanders down to the port area at the Plaza de Colón where a towering Christopher Columbus points towards the new world. The street is packed with cafés and shops and because of the huge crowds it looks something like a rugby scrum from sunrise until the early hours of the morning. The Liceu metro stop was only about 50 meters from our hotel and it also serves Barcelona’s Boqueria market.

Àngel Guimerà, Top Chrysler-Plymouth Salesman

You could spend an entire vacation and be completely satisfied without leaving a three block radius of our hotel. We quickly adopted the Plaza San Josep as our own as well as the Plaza Real, both only a few steps from the door of the hotel. There is a statue of Angel Guimera in the Plaza San Josep, a figure also revered in Valencia as they have a big Metro stop with his name. I had taken a picture of this statue before. I always look up the name of the person being honored by the bronze depictions but I drew a blank as to why Angel Guimera was a public figure. Sue me, I have a crap memory.  I improvised when asked what he was famous for back in the day and said he was the top salesman for Barcelona Chrysler-Plymouth three years in a row, a feat never achieved before and never since repeated.  I looked online later to discover that he was a Catalan playwright and poet (6 May 1845 – 18 July 1924).

Leo Messi wasn’t in her vocabulary upon arriving in Barcelona but I quickly filled her in on this cultural icon in Barcelona and all over the world. The FC Barcelona #10 Messi jersey can probably be seen in every village in Africa, South America, and the Far East.  Not knowing who he is would be like asking about Mohammed in a Muslim countries or John Wayne in America. I wouldn’t venture to compare the men but Messi sells more T-shirts.

The essence of our stay was walks around the city punctuated by stops in cafés, each one more beautiful and quaint than the last, with just the right view. We had uncanny luck finding just the right thing to eat at just the right time of day in just the right spot…or maybe we were just very easy to please because everything else in our lives was so perfect? When you’re with someone you are crazy about you tend to see absolutely everything in a more favorable light and even the most miserable of souls must find it difficult to bitch about Barcelona in the summer.

We had too many café pit stops to list them all but a few of the standouts would be the Plaza de la Virreina in the super-charming Gracia district where I had stayed on a previous visit.  It’s not a spectacular square as far as Barcelona goes but to me it represents the essence of what makes up a great neighborhood. It offers a few shaded benches, a statue, a fountain, a place for the kids to kick a ball or learn to ride a bike, and a few cafés between home and everything else in your life.  From here we moved on to a cold beer and a slice of tortilla de patatas (I created a fan of this iconic Spanish dish) in front of Sagrada Familia on Avinguda de Gaudi. I think that we were both more interested in the quiet, comfortable public spaces in the city more than the iconic landmarks.

We shared everything except coffee and the individual bottles of beer.  We rarely ordered more than one serving of anything in any one place, preferring instead to split something small and then move on to the next café. Trying to choose a favorite out of all of the great places we visited would be difficult but if pressed I’d have to say the lovely inner courtyard café at the Museo Frederic Marès. I had never been in there before and we came upon it by accident. I simply wanted to get out of the sun and poked my head in the doorway and saw the very inviting courtyard fountain and the café behind it. We sat at a table that looked down from the fortress wall to the quiet street below and had a view of the rest of the inner area of the building.  I couldn’t imagine a more perfect place to be with the perfect woman.

How perfect? Perfect enough to let me have the last anchovy on the great pizza we split at the Brasería Rossini restaurant in the Plaza Real.  This is one of those places that is full of tourists and in many cases would be dreadful but the food was quite good and the service was actually charming (possibly the result of the company I was keeping).  We had equally good luck with a lunch at Les Quinze Nuits on the other side of the same square (on another trip with my brother we had horrible luck with another restaurant in the Plaza Real).  Once again seated on the terrace we split a bottle of wine and braised lamb with potatoes. The food and wine were good and reasonably priced and the location was absolutely impeccable.

If you suffer from agoraphobia you should definitely steer clear of Barcelona in August as there are legions of tourists. Everywhere you walked it was as if a sports stadium were emptying out, and at all times of the day and night. Because of the crowds the city has an incredible energy. In some of the major thoroughfares the pedestrian traffic rolls along like a tsunami but it’s easy to find refuge in a quiet shop or the terrace of a café. It’s fun for me to try to count as many different languages as I can identify being spoken around me which isn’t too many. Among those which I can positively identify are English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, Arabic, Hebrew, German, Chinese, Japanese, and maybe Russian but I could probably be fooled. There are dozens more being spoken on every corner of this very cosmopolitan city that are a complete mystery to me.

The Ruins at Almenara

A planned bike ride turned into more of a day of climbing in the town of Almenara in the Valencia Community. It’s about a 40 minutes train ride from Valencia’s Estación del Norte on the cercanía which plies between Valencia and Castellon to the north. It was 5.80€ for a round trip ticket. I bought the round trip simply because I don’t know how to get from Almenara to Sagunto and didn’t feel like spending my day getting lost like I did on Saturday.  I did enough riding on Saturday for the entire weekend so I didn’t feel guilty at all sitting on the train up and back while I read my book.

The weather has been spectacular although it was hazy.*  When I reached the top of the little precipice in Almenara I couldn’t see the Mediterranean, not that I have anything to complain about. I’m already lathering up my face and arms with SFP50 for my bike rides. There aren’t any signs pointing to the way to the two towers and the fort about the village so I just started riding up. At the top of the village I found a scenic path that goes up a bit further and across the little mountain. I was lucky to run across a young girl walking her dog who directed me to the path leading up to the old Moorish defensive structures. Once again, the path wasn’t marked at all and I would have ridden straight past it without her guidance.

The wasn’t any bike riding to do at this point so I pushed  my wheels a bit up the trail and ditched it. There really wasn’t much of a path at all but the ascent was fairly logical: you just choose the easiest way up meaning the one with the best hand-holds and the fewest thorns.

I need to get out as much as possible during the next two months or so before it gets really HOT.

*Hazy = Calinoso in Spanish, at least according to the Real Academia Española.
 Calinoso - Cargado de calina. Calina (del latín calīgo, -igĭnis, oscuridad) - f. Accidente atmosférico que enturbia el aire y suele producirse por vapores de agua.
It's hazy = Hay calina.

Barcelona II

Wow, Barcelona really sucks on a bike. I don’t remember it being so bad the last time I was here. The are few bike paths and the traffic is horrible. I’ll take Valencia any day—at least as far as bikes are concerned.  To paraphrase The Smiths, there’s more to life than bikes, but not much more. As bad as riding around the city was, it beats walking around the city.

Since I know Barcelona from previous visits I don’t feel obligated to run around like an idiot touching all of the bases required of tourists.  Where I am staying is in such a great location. I skipped up to the Boqueria market this morning to buy some olives to accompany the great bottle of wine I brought along on this trip. It took longer once inside the market to find a stall selling olives than it took me to walk there from my apartment.

From yesterday’s solid 10 hours of walking and today’s cycling, my legs feel like cement. Humping up Montjuic after wine and lunch was a chore.  On the ride down we stopped in the quiet Plaça Surtidor and had a beer from the restaurant of that name.

Barcelona

Probably what most impressed me as a young traveller in Europe on my first visit were the trains. Ever since I’ve loved trains and I try to travel by rail whenever possible. I started out by taking a Valenbisi bike from my apartment to Valencia’s Estación del Norte. The TALGO train to Barcelona was 15 minutes late in leaving—not very Spanish, as I’ve found trains here to be a marvel of precesion. We still arrived at the scheduled time at Barcelona Sants station which looks more like an airport than a train terminal. The train was completely booked as this is a holiday weekend for Valencianos (October 9th is when they celebrate the reconquest of the city from the Moors by Jaume I).

From Sants Station I descended into the Metro, bought a ticket, checked the map, and walked through the bowels of the city to my platform. It was a direct line to the Liceu stop and the sign indicated that the next train was due in three minutes. From the metro stop to where I'm staying is about three blocks. My big complaint about Barcelona is that I can't use their bike share system. Unlike Valencia's model theirs is only for residents. It's too bad because they have stations everywhere.

As I was packing earlier in the day I was sweating. This probably explains the fact that I only brought along one pair of long pants. Waking up this morning was the first day without total sunshine that I have experienced in about four months. I just can’t break out of the summer mentality. It’s not like I risk freezing to death; I just feel a little under-dressed, too casual. I can get away with it because I’m just a tourist after all. I made a decision not to bring a rain jacket. I fugured if it was going to rain I could just visit a museum or two. On my last visit to Barcelona I didn’t go iinto a single museum.

Between the tourists and the immigrant workers you hear almost nothing except bad English here. One of the features of living in the Barri Gotic is hearing all of the late night-earlyu morning revelers, almost all of whom are speaking pigeon English. If it isn't bad English then it's even worse, mostly cringe-worthy Spanish.

*The photo above is the Valenbisi station at the Estació del Nord

24 Hour Bike Tour

I was afraid to leave the rented, big, Dutch bike I rented outside of my apartment at night because the chain they gave me with it was fairly unimpressive. They gave me two rather unimpressive locks for it, not including the built-in lock for the rear tire. If I were a professional bike thief I would target these bright orange monsters to steal. You can buy a bolt cutter at any Chinese Wal-Mart here in Spain for about 7€; these would cut through most bike locks quite easily. Instead of leaving it on the street I decided to keep it in the apartment. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

My apartment is on the top fourth floor. The staircase winds around the elevator shaft and it was difficult going up this narrow spiral when all I was carrying was my backpack. The elevator seemed like the prudent choice and this old model is actually deeper than the one where I used to live in Valencia. These Dutch bikes have a terrifically long wheelbase which I didn’t factor in but I was able to get the monster in the elevator. The problem was that I had a hell of a time shutting the doors. There are two doors that come together inside the elevator and then an outside door. I guess that I need to start doing more yoga exercises to help me through these contortionist routines, but I did get the doors shut and I was on my way to the fourth floor.

Coming out of the elevator proved to be a bigger challenge because the door to my apartment is only about three feet directly in front of the door to the elevator. Trying to get that bike out of the elevator I couldn’t help but think about all of the problems inherent in childbirth. When I finally did pop out I cried just like a newborn. The next morning I thought that I’d try taking it down the stairs. That would have to be easier than the death-trap elevator. I got so stuck I considered calling 911 but then realized that they don’t use that over here. What’s the number you call when you are stuck in a coal mine? I blame the American public school system for not teaching me more about geometry, or calculus, or physics, or whatever damn science knowledge would have prevented me from making this quixotic gesture and realizing that the stairwell was too damn narrow for the big, heavy, monstrous, rented Dutch bike.

Early on Sunday morning is a great time to explore on a bike. The Spanish are never early risers and especially not after Saturday night. I used the natural slope of the city to tack towards the north and the cathedral of Sagrada Familia. I had been by here earlier in the week but I just saw it from one angle as I was too lazy to walk all the way around it. There is a beautiful boulevard that approaches the cathedral from the north that was all but deserted on this morning. I hate the fact that mankind is still devoting endless resources to the construction of churches when there are so many things needed by so many people, but this is a cool-looking church. It looks like a Disney castle.

I really notice how incredibly clean this city is, especially when compare to Valencia. Everyone cleans up after their dogs which hasn’t caught on yet where I live. People also seem to take great pride in their city—as they should—and I even saw a man pick up garbage off the ground at a beachfront park and throw it away.

Barcelona is an easy city to explore because you can’t get lost. All of the streets run on a grid. Just walk down the hill and you will get to the waterfront. In all of my meanderings I was never lost or even slightly confused about my location. I didn’t need a map to tell me where I was, just to identify what I had passed.

The bike trail system is fairly extensive and there are plans to make it much bigger. They also have bike racks all over the city. Most apartment buildings have bike racks in front of them. Traffic here is a lot friendlier to bikes. People in cars will always give you the right-of-way, even mopeders—the scum of the earth—are courteous towards cyclists. Overall, Barcelona is a very bike-friendly city as we say in the cycling world.

Some Spanish tourist in a car looking for directions stopped me in the street and asked if I was from Barcelona. I told them (in Spanish) that everyone in Barcelona now was a tourist. The internet café by my apartment is always filled with Australians for some reason. The old city area is filled to the brim with out-of-towners. Unfortunately, there will be one less tourist in Barcelona when I leave today at 14:30. I just check my train ticket and I like the part that says that boarding stops two minutes before departure. I’m sure they make lots of exceptions to this rule. I remember getting scolded by airline employees because I arrived late for a flight. I was an hour early!

P.S. I was watching a program on French soccer sensation, Thierry Henry, who now plays for Barcelona. It was obviously produced while he still played for Arsenal as it was in English with Catalan subtitles. He is amazingly articulate in English, much more so than most athletes are in their native language. During the program there was an anti-racism ad featuring Henry and Ronaldinho. There wee holding up placards with stuff like “I love football” and “I like the sound of the ball hitting the net.” Then they held a sign saying something like “People still judge us by the color of our skin.” Then they were joined by Pujol, a white Spanish player, and they said in English that if people are making racial slurs “Stand up! Speak up!”

A Beer and a Book

More From Barcelona

Getting around on a bike is a lot more efficient than walking and saves a lot of wear and tear on my body. I rented a big, bulky Dutch bike that weighed probably close to 50 pounds. Now I know why these bikes are so popular in Holland: They don´t have mountains, they don´t even have hills. I about blew a bowel trying to ride to the top of Montjuic, the mountain looking over Barcelona from the south. It is a real mountain because they have a quad ski lift to ferry people to the top.

I was able to see the all of the beach area which I would have never attempted on foot. The beaches aren't as nice as the city beach in Valencia but it is a cooler area filled with cafes and restaurants.

Barcelona is like this huge object that I can´t really bring in to full view because I am too close. I will need a lot more time to be able to stand back and really describe it faithfully. After ten days I feel like I have just begun to scratch the surface. I haven´t been inside a single museum as I didn't want to take time away from just walking around trying to familiarize myself with as many neighborhoods as possible.

My willingness to explore grows exponentially when I am riding a bike. If I know exactly where I am going on foot I will walk all day, but I´m not about to walk three blocks out of my way on a whim. The investment in time and energy is a lot less on a bike—even a big, heavy Dutch bike. I saw more of the city in the last 24 hours than I´ve seen all week on foot. However, as I mentioned before, there are a lot of places in the old city that aren´t very accessible on a bike.

If I learned one thing about riding around Barcelona on a bike it´s that I need to live here for a while if I really want to know this place. I have said many times that I hate being a tourist; I prefer being a resident.

Getting Around

Just about everything that I have seen so far in Barcelona is right off of the L3 green metro line including where I am staying in the Gracia district. I have used other lines but I haven’t really needed them as most of the historic center of Barcelona is on the L3. I haven’t had to wait more than 3.5 minutes for a train and they run all night on weekends. The buses seem to fill in any holes there may be in the metro although when you look at the complicated metro map, there doesn’t seem to be any holes. There are so many lines that the map is almost impossible to read.

Some of the metro stations are so cavernous and the passageways so lengthy that I try to avoid them. If you enter the Plaza Catalunya station at the wrong point you may end up walking farther underground than if you had just walked to your destination. There is one passageway that is at least 200 meters longs.

The Barcelona Metro is fast and efficient, incredibly so. The 10 ride card I bought for 6.90€ can also be used on the buses. I don’t understand why so many people drive cars in this city. The car drivers are actually very courteous and respectful of pedestrians. There are also lots and lots of motor scooters and although I wouldn’t go so far as to call them courteous, the drivers aren’t nearly as obnoxious as they are in Valencia. From the looks of things, parking is every bit as much of a nightmare as it is in any major city.

I think this is where cities are failing, they need to make less parking and not more, to encourage people to abandon this unsustainable transportation mode. I noticed this when I went to visit Camp Nou (pronounced Camp Now), the stadium that is home to the great Fútbol Club Barcelona. I came upon the stadium on the Northeast corner and wanted to go to the museum which is on the other side of the stadium.

I had to walk around the entire complex of the stadium which includes acres and acres of parking. The huge parking lots may make it convenient for a small fraction of the fans to drive to the games, but these dormant car parks isolate the pedestrians from the stadium and create huge detours if you are on foot. The stadium has plans to change all of this and it can’t happen soon enough. Valencia’s football stadium has almost no parking which means that it is integrated directly into the surrounding neighborhood. As I have mentioned before, there are dozens of bars outside the stadium that are so close to the action that you can hear the roar of the crowd during matches.

In the old section of Barcelona, called Ciutat Vella, there is almost no street parking at all. This is mostly true because the streets are so narrow that a car can barely fit between the buildings. There are a lot of underground parking garages and all new buildings in Barcelona, like in most cities, are required to have a set amount of parking spaces below ground. I think that a lot of people would be surprised to find how easy it is to live without a car, or at least to drive a lot less than they do. I haven’t driven an automobile in over a year now and it feels wonderful. I certainly don’t miss it.

Bikes are becoming more and more integrated into the transportation model of Barcelona. There are bike paths throughout the city that are marked as a special lane on the roads, unlike Valencia’s bike paths which are linked to the sidewalks so there is no mixing with traffic. I will write more on this after I spend the next two days renting a bike.

As much as I hate walking, I have done a hell of a lot of it this past week. In the old city you don’t have much choice except to walk as the streets are too narrow and too crowded to ride a bike. I have been forced, against my will, to rely on the oldest transportation method. Walking isn’t very sophisticated or sexy, and for me it certainly isn’t much fun, but you can get places this way.

Barcelona, Barça, Barcelonés

Pictures can be found on my picture page to the left. I have had problems taking pictures here because the computer I brought along can't download my photos. I have to go to an internet cafe and do it there which is a bit of a hassle and I don't have time to monkey with them.

You will often see Barcelona abbreviated as Barça, which is from Catalan which uses a “ç” like an “s.” They don’t lisp this sound as is done in Castilian Spanish. Someone from Barcelona is called a Barcelonés or Barcelonesa. Just in case you were wondering.

Along La Rambla, the main pedestrian path in Barcelona, the street performers are as numerous as they are mediocre: not much to see and little reason to stop and watch. In the Ciutat Vella, or the old city, the street musicians seem to be of the highest caliber. Maybe they are the only ones who get permits to play in this part of the city. I don’t know how it works; I just know that it sounds better. There are a couple of Brazilian guitarists that are very good and their music echoes well along these narrow streets. They are definitely worth at least a few minutes of you time as you wander around. As long as you are just lost anyway you may as well listen to some great music.

There was a group of Cuban musicians playing just of the square in front of the cathedral off of the Avenue Portal de L’Angel. This busy shopping thoroughfare funnels thousands of people into the old city and many were stopping to check out the great Cuban music coming from a couple of guitars and vocalist. I think they had a couple of ringers in the audience who were trying to get people to dance, guys who really knew how to dance to this stuff. They weren’t having much luck inducing the crowd to mambo. If musicians this talented were playing anywhere in Latin America or Miami, everyone in the square would have been dancing, even the dorky white folks, even the Scandinavians—the dorkiest of the white folks, or at least the whitest.

La Vanguardia is the name of one of the main Barcelona daily newspapers; a cool name for a newspaper. I’ve never read it before so I picked one up on the bar top as I was having a coffee. I came across quite a few articles that I wanted to read later so I asked the bartender if I could buy the paper from him. It was about 8:30 in the evening and a lot of kiosks would be closed. He told me I could have it so I carried it with me to the Plaza Diamant near my apartment. I found an empty park bench and began a more careful reading of La Vanguardia.

I came across an interesting article by Albert Manent lamenting the loss of the formal usted form of the personal pronoun for “you.” I have always found this an interesting topic since I first learned about formal and informal address when I started learning French in the 10th grade. The author says that with the loss of the formal pronoun and young people addressing their elders with the informal “tú” form it means a loss of gradations in the language and imposes a forced egalitarianism. I’m all for treating elder with respect but I think there is a better way to do that than with this awkward split in the use of the personal pronoun, and I’m all for egalitarianism—forced or otherwise.

One thing about reading a newspaper on a park bench in Spain that you have to remember is that it’s like being at a baseball game: Fans must be aware that balls and bats may enter the seating area. As I read the pages of La Vanguardia with one eye, I kept the other on the ball being bounced around the square by four young hoodlums. On two occasions I had to raise a foot to fend off an errant attempt on the goal, which for the sake of this makeshift pitch was the door of an underground parking garage. A woman took a seat next to me and she also had to block a ball. She used her hands and I had to remind her that as we were midfielders (being equidistant from the two goals), we were only allowed to use our feet and head.

Plaza Real

Barcelona Day 3

Barcelona is so big and there is so much to see that I am completely overwhelmed thus far. 11 days won’t be enough to do and see everything that I want to do here. I will have to come back, probably to live. Forever?

One thing at a time and at the moment I have a bit of tourism to accomplish, something that always seems to come at the expense of my feet. I went on another extended walking tour of the city yesterday until I almost dropped from fatigue. Yesterday’s walking tour from hell started from the metro stop in Plaza de España. I wanted to see as much of the Monjuïc section of Barcelona as I could after being completely overwhelmed by the beautiful National Museum of Art of Catalonia from the night previous. Montjuïc occupies a mountaintop on the southern flank of the city and is loaded with parks, gardens, museums, theaters, as well as the Olympic Stadium.

You can take the day off from the stairmaster when you do this city walk. To get from the Plaza de España and the Exposition Towers at street level to the National Museum, you’ll need to climb a few hundred stairs. There are escalators for anyone who isn’t out to double the size of their thigh muscles, at least for some of the climb. You can read about this area in any guide book and they may actually have the facts straight—something I would never bother with.

I did get out with a local resident last night and saw a bit of my neighborhood here in the Gracia district. There are wonderful areas here that you would easily miss if you didn’t know what to look for. The Carrer de Verdi is a narrow little passage that would be easy to pass by during the day, and I did walk right through it without taking much notice on my first day here. At night this area is full of people going in and out of a few dozen nice little restaurants and bars. This area is probably in the guide books but if it isn’t, it should be.

Just another block from Carrer de Verdi is the Plaza de la Virreina (vice queen?) with the Cathedral of Sant Joan (that’s John, not Joan). This modest little plaza in this quiet little neighborhood exemplifies everything that is wonderful about Spanish life. It is shaded and filled with benches, my favorite are the little individual chairs that you see all over Barcelona. The perimeter is lined with cafes. It is a place to hang out both night and day. During the morning and early afternoon people on their way to work or shopping can sit down for a coffee and a bite to eat. For the kids of the area it’s a football field, a skating rink, and a playground.

As the day wears on the square changes character a bit and becomes more of a destination than a way station. By nightfall everything is in full swing and the cafes are completely full. The main attraction, other than conversation, seems to be the pack of dogs running wild in the center of the plaza. The weather at this time of year is perfect for hanging out and no one seems in any hurry to go anywhere else. Later at night the square takes on the aspects of a night club as it fills to the brim with young people. Immigrants looking to make a few extra euros sell cold beer out of plastic bags which adds to the party atmosphere. This was on a Sunday night so I would imagine that weekends and holidays are even livelier.

This is just one small corner of Barcelona that happens to be two blocks from where I am staying. I wonder how many other great little neighborhoods there are in the city?

The Barrio Gótico, or Gothic Quarter, is frightfully mobbed with tourists at this point in the season, although I’m sure that visitors here don’t ebb much in the winter months. I have taken a few walks through here already and plan on it again today. I would know this like the back of my hand if I had a bicycle. Most of the streets are way too narrow even for bike access unless you go early in the morning before everyone else is out. I’ll just manage on foot today like the rest of the chumps.