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More about Barcelona

As I mentioned in my previous post, I just returned from a 3-day trip to Barcelona. My wife and I had a truly wonderful time there, and I really have to recommend it as a destination. It has a unique flavor as a city, with a lot of cultural, visual and culinary delights. Three days (with much of them occupied by a conference) hardly makes for a panoramic sense of such a rich place, so I’m just going to set down some of my impressions and experiences without trying to do the place justice.

I’ve put together a small photo album with a few of my favorite pictures from the trip. I’m not going to embed them all in this post, but here’s one emblematic building by the architect Gaudi:

There’s a lot I don’t know about Gaudi, but when I experience his work close-up I see a mixture of iconoclasm and daring coupled with tremendous patience, craft and respect for his materials. And this kind of spirit seems to be present a lot in the city in some form or other. It’s an exciting social nexus where people seem to rush around, shop like mad and party until late at night (just try eating dinner before 9 pm), but at the same time attention is paid to the details of civic life. Things seem to work in Barcelona, and work well.

There’s a great variety to the look of the city. It includes broad avenues with spacious Parisian-style intersections, lined with graceful stucco apartments sporting fantastic wrought-iron balconies. It also has medieval warrens of narrow Gothic alleys, mad modernista Art Deco storefronts, and of course some drab blocky buildings. In most places there are many delightful details and touches: someone cared how something looked. And like my hometown, Chicago, there’s a willingness to be playful with civic art and architecture. Playfulness counts for a lot in my book.

The food is truly great (especially if you like seafood), but I recommend getting away from the main drags and finding somewhere a little less geared to tourist tastes. I have to mention one fabulous dinner we had, at a restaurant called Passadis Del Pep. We heard about it from a friend who used to live in Barcelona and got its address on the web, but had some trouble finding it. We finally located it purely by address — there is no sign out front, just an anonymous doorway with no restaurant visible inside. You have to have faith that something is there and just keep walking further into the building. Eventually we wound up in a wonderfully intimate and friendly space with sort of a cellar-bistro look. There was no menu; the waiter simply started bringing food to the table. Eight small and intense courses of local seafood later (I think there were three different varieties of shrimp, each with its own distinct preparation and taste), we barely managed to get out of our chairs and leave. One of the best meals ever! Not for people who don’t like looking at the faces of the animals they’re eating, though.

I have to give the Barcelona Metro some props on their user interface (and on the fact that the trains run very frequently). On some of the lines, there’s a little linear map over each door showing the stations on that particular route. On one side of the car, the map runs in one direction, while on the other side of the car, the map runs oppositely — that is, it’s flipped horizontally. They apparently went to this trouble so that the map’s orientation would always match the train’s direction of travel. On some other lines, the same linear map has an indicator light set in each station. As the train approaches a station, the light for that station blinks. After the train leaves that station, the light remains on (so you can see where the train has been, as opposed to where it’s going). Good design there!

People were exceedingly friendly and there were no logistical problems on the trip. The city seems safe even in its less inviting regions. The prevailing language is Catalan, not Spanish — but everyone speaks some Spanish, and most people speak some English.

I’ve always wanted to go to Barcelona. It took me decades, but I’m glad I finally made it.