Day 150: CaixaForum Barcelona

In the afternoon I went out with Clair from Northern Ireland, who was here doing workaway at the hostel, to visit a cultural center very near to where I had been yesterday.

At 4 Euros for entrance to all three exhibits, this cultural center is more affordable than the one nearer the city center, which looks like it runs 10+ Euros for a single exhibit. The first exhibit was supposed to be some sort of immersive experience about a fictional town that believes it has been visited by aliens, but it was a little too sophisticated for our tastes. The second exhibit featured a number of varied photo exhibitions. We found it much more palatable, and the majority of our time was spent there. The third exhibit was an exhibition of medieval history, borrowed from one of London's natural history museums. By this point we were over saturated with culture and merely strolled through the tour groups full of elderly people on our way out.

Clair was craving paella so we stopped at a sidewalk cafe and ordered a seafood paella and a pitcher of sangria. The meal absolutely wiped out my daily budget, but it was so delicious I didn't mind too much.

Around 9pm we arrived back at the hostel and Clair said goodnight to nap before her 2am-8am night shift. I went to bed not long after.

Day 149: Olympic Stadium, Razzmatazz

In the afternoon I took the Metro to Espanya Plaza Station, at the foot of a massive park and sports complex that sits within the Sants-Montjuïc district.

Here they have an abundance of museums that sit intertwined with gardens and the old Olympic stadium area.

Palau Nacional, a modern art museum

After getting lost among the gardens, I found the Olympic stadium, which sits behind the Palau Nacional pictured above. Originally constructed in 1927, it wasn't able to host an Olympic event until 1992.

I left the stadium to the west, where there is a large courtyard with a telecommunications tower posing as a piece of art.

For how expansive the place is, it was very empty. I left in the direction of the Gothic Quarter in search of food and WiFi.

An impressive view down a street in Eixample

The Ecuadorian girl I had met yesterday had invited me to go clubbing with her and her friend, who was having a birthday party the next night, so I decided to try to find some cheap pants to go in, since I had left my jeans in Budapest and I didn't want to go to the club in shorts. I ended up spending 33 Euros on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt that were on sale at an Urban Outfitters.

It was 10pm at that point, but I still had to go back to the hostel to change. We had arranged to meet at 12am at a club called Razzmatazz in the Sant Martí district.

At 11:30 I let my friend know I would be there in 40 minutes. When I arrived I got a doner for a mid-night dinner then left in search of a free WiFi hotspot, since I still didn't see my friends in front of the club. Some chap had left his WiFi hotspot unprotected (bless his soul) so I was able to connect, only to find a message my friend had sent me asking me to meet her there at 1 instead.

It was already 12:40, so I decided to wait. At 1:00 I gave her a call to check on her progress. She told me she would be there in 10 minutes. At one point during my wait I witnessed the trashiest thing I'd ever seen out on the streets of Europe. Two girls, one after the other, decided to drop their pants between a pair of parked cars, pop a squat, and pee on the street. At that point I was probably the only sober person in the area, so it must have seemed way weirder to me than anyone else around. At 1:50 my friend finally replied back to my subsequent messages and missed calls, saying she just got inside the club -- but by that time I had lost all enthusiasm for a night out and took a taxi back to the hostel.

Day 148: Meeting Old and New Friends!

I met Jerry in Ohrid, while I was in Macedonia almost exactly two weeks ago. I saw him post a photo with his friend in Barcelona and it made me do a double take! I messaged him and we arranged to meet up near Barceloneta Beach at 8pm.

After a successful rendezvous we walked along the boardwalk until we found some nice stairs to sit on. We ate cherries Jerry had brought with him and watched the locals play volleyball on the beach.

It's great to see you again, Jerry!

Jerry was in Barcelona to visit a friend while en route to Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage path that often begins in Pamplona and ends roughly one month and 800 km later in Galicia. He said he hadn't done any training and had just bought walking shoes the day before, so I wasn't very optimistic of his chances, but they say "with God all things are possible" so I'm waiting to be surprised.

We left for Catalunya Square to meet with Jerry's Friend, Domenica, who is studying here in Barcelona. We went to König, a hamburger place that also serves plenty of Spanish favorites.

We got tapas to share, I got a burger, and we each had two beers. The total only came out to 10 Euros for myself (including my share for tapas), which was a nice surprise for eating at a centrally located restaurant in Barcelona.

Pre-meal, post-tapas

We were able to just catch the final trains back home before they stopped running at midnight.

Day 147: Parc del Guinardó y Park Güell

At 11am I left The Loft Hostel and took the metro to Mellow Hostel up in the hills of Barcelona.

The man at the reception was less than accommodating, and indulged himself in a 10-minute business call in the middle of my check-in, leaving me standing there trying to figure out if he forgot that I'm literally directly in his line of sight. I ended up asking some guests where I can put the groceries I had brought with me. It was still an hour or so before check-in officially opened, so I kept my backpack with me for now.

The guests I had had to ask about food storage, WiFi, and bathrooms were finishing their breakfast and about to stroll up to "the bunkers", literally a bunch of old bunkers sitting atop a hill, now a park. I joined them.

As high up as Mellow Hostel seems, Parc del Guinardó is another 100m or so gain in elevation. But the views from the top are great.

We sat and chatted there for an hour or more before returning to the hostel.

After making myself lunch, I took the metro as close as I could get to Park Güell and walked into it from the backside (the best way to do it, in my opinion, since then you get to walk downhill to see the rest of the park).

Park Guell was originally planned to be a housing development, in the style of a garden city, where each house takes up no more than one sixth of its plot. In the end, only two houses were built, one of them being occupied by the Catalan architect Gaudi for the final 20 years of his life. What I'd heard about Barcelona was true here: you need to pay for everything. It was 8 Euros to go out on this dirt area, and into the lower complex with the Gaudi buildings:

Which I didn't see a reason to justify paying the price, so I didn't. I did dredge up 5.5 Euros in change from my pocket to see the nearby Gaudi House Museum, located in the house that Gaudi had occupied. It was lackluster. 

I always feel obligated to go to museums or see inside historical monuments when I visit new places, but 4 times out of 5 I feel like it's an experience that I didn't really need to have, even if it was free. In the specific case of Park Güell, unless you are short on time and long on money, you don't really need to pay to see anything to get the general experience of the place. But even if you pay, they ration tourists out onto the dirt viewpoint in 30 minute intervals, so there's an additional inconvenience factor to playing by their rules.

From Park Güell I walked downhill towards the ocean. At this point all I had was a 50 Euro note in my money belt, and I HATE breaking notes like that at restaurants when a meal and drink will cost you 5 Euro. So I tried my hand at a few ATMs to see if they'd give me four 10 Euro notes. None of them would, without a flat 5 Euro fee, and there was no way I was going to pay a 12.5% withdraw fee. By the time I passed through Sagrada Familia Park I was about to collapse from hunger so I sat down at a restaurant where I was sure I could get at least a 10 Euro meal.

When my 8 Euro, snack-size meat lasagna came out I was in such a hurry to eat it that I spilled a chunk of cheese all over the tablecloth. I felt shitty about that, and was still hungry, so I decided to order more overpriced food. At the end of the meal I forgot that Spain is a tipping country and the waiter asked me if I was going to leave him a tip after he saw me quickly shoveling the change into my pocket.

So 20 Euros got me an absolutely abysmal dining experience. But at least I broke that 50. 

The metro was only a few blocks away and I took it back to the hostel for the night.

Day 146: Sunday in Barcelona

I was still feeling low on energy from my illness, but I eventually mustered up the will to leave the hostel and head towards downtown. On the way I stopped at a bookstore that sold all kinds of books in Spanish. I thought it would be good motivation to pick out a Vonnegut book to read after my Spanish had improved. They had La Pianola (The Piano Player) and Matadero Cinco (Slaughterhouse Five). I hadn't read The Piano Player, but had heard it was good. Unfortunately, they wanted 22 Euros for this small, 300ish page paperback. I'd read Slaughterhouse Five, though it wasn't my favorite. But at 8 Euros, I bought it anyway. I already kind of regret it. The cover is hideous and the novels non-chronological structure and modern writing style are probably going to confuse the hell out of me if I can ever read it.

I first made it to Catalunya Plaza where I sat at a bench under a large rhododendron and tried to read my new book.

With the help of Google Translate, I made it through the first paragraph before I felt like my head was going to explode, so I continued further oceanward.

The next major landmark I ran into was the Cathedral of Barcelona, just a 5-minute walk southeast of Catalunya Plaza.

I need a haircut

This Gothic cathedral is located, predictably, in the Gothic Quarter. There are people busking and hawking wares all over the Gothic Quarter. I appreciated these guys doing opera, rather than something more typical.

I walked around for a bit, but was growing fatigued quickly and rain clouds were looming overhead, so I returned to the hostel. It began raining shortly afterwards, so being in bed near an open window overlooking the hostels courtyard was not an unpleasant place to be for most of the day's remainder.