One of the things (if not the thing) I love the most about Europe is how easy it is to travel. I’d known for months that two of my best friends would be doing a Eurotrip just as I was starting work in Spain, their first stop Barcelona. I hadn’t let myself get excited about the possibility of meeting them there, as I’d had no idea if I would even have a place to live by then. But after moving into my piso, I realized – hey, I can go to Barcelona this weekend. I didn’t decide to go for sure until a couple hours before the bus left – not a thing you can do from California.
I booked a hostel, packed a purse with clothes (being able to travel light is delightful), and boarded a nine-hour night bus, stepping off into a fresh Barcelona morning at the Nord station. I dropped my “stuff” at my nearby hostel and walked the short route from the bus station to Plaça de l’Àngel, which I remembered from my first trip to the city in March. It’s one of my favorite walks in the city – past the great brick Arc de Triomf and through a maze of narrow streets with buildings lined in indie cafes and shops at ground level and drying laundry higher up, the neighborhood dotted with the occasional oddly-shaped, tree-ceilinged square.
It was surreal to see my friends so far from our normal setting. We’d been to Europe together before, but not since graduating from high school over five years ago, and that time we’d been all together the whole time – this time I had a life (however new and provisional) in that country and wouldn’t be accompanying them on the rest of their adventure.
We hugged and talked for a few minutes, then went on the Sandeman’s free walking tour, a three-hour introduction to Barcelona. They’re available in many European cities, and they’re wonderful. It’s usually the first thing I try to do in any place that has one; every one I’ve been on has been given either by a local or by someone who visited, fell in love with the city, and stayed. The Barcelona one wasn’t my favorite (that goes to Berlin, like almost everything – I nearly ended up being one of those people), but it was nice to learn more about the city having already seen it.
We got empanadas at an art deco-y restaurant in the El Born neighborhood, then made our way across town to the Boqueria market, probably my favorite place in the city. My host had introduced me to it during my first trip to Barcelona, and after that I’d gone there at least once a day, collecting cheap fruit cups, smoothies, and bizarrely flavored pastries (e.g., guava and cheese) as I passed refrigerated cases displaying skinned sheep heads with the eyes still in them and soft, squishy-looking bags of bleached flesh (intestines? stomachs? not sure).
We went to the Alsur Café, where I’d wanted to go to since I’d seen it on my first trip (it was always closed). With colorful lamps and an explosion of pillows, it was a cozy place to spend the hour before it became free to enter the cathedral. We were particularly amused/terrified by the spherical toilets. Globes are surprisingly hard to sit on; Michelle and I were glad to make it out of the bathroom alive and dry.
The cathedral forbids bare shoulders, so Katie and I switched off going inside with the scandal-averting help of my cardigan. It’s beautiful, but the best part by far is the cloister, which is home to a gaggle of much-photographed geese.
Deciding to meet for dinner later that night, we parted ways, and I headed back to my hostel, Olé Barcelona. I was surprised by how nice it was considering it had cost all of five euros. It wasn’t especially clean, but few hostels are, and I was in a four-person room with only two other people. We even had a balcony.
Showered and dressed, I headed back out. My hostel was (amazingly, because five euros) around the corner from Sagrada Família, and having some free time before I had to meet my friends for dinner, I went to the park across the street from the hulking Gaudí cathedral.
In the park there is a pond, and that night the water was completely still. The cathedral – the whole lit, intricate, crannied façade broken by pools of bright blue, emerald, and rose glass – was doubled in front of me, the real building stretching up into the night and an identical image plunging into endless darkness at my feet. I felt like Harry Potter in the maze, my world flipped on end by the golden mist. I knew where I was and what I was looking at, but the reflection was so flawless that it was easy to let myself feel disoriented, to pretend that I really was hovering over the hanging cathedral and an oblivion of night.
Sɐƃɹɐpɐ Ⅎɐɯílᴉɐ
Down by the port in La Barceloneta, we wandered along the water, inspecting the Menús del Día before finally realizing that the best one was one of the first we’d walked by. We spent a couple hours at our outside table eating paella and flan and drinking wine. Then we headed along the beach to the club we’d decided on earlier that day.
I was under the impression that the beach club was actually on the beach – like on the sand. So, being a logical person, I wore flip-flops, and the bouncer guy was not impressed (beach clubs are in fact not on the beach). I made my friends go in and went down to the actual beach, where I sat for a while, when necessary warding off the guys wandering around selling beer by the can. One of them came back after the first rejection and knelt down next to me. At first I wasn’t offering much to the conversation, hoping he would get bored and leave, but as he launched into his life story, I realized he wasn’t doing anything creepy (aside from forcing his company on a stranger) and was actually interesting – I’d never met anyone from Pakistan before. He was from the Kashmir region (which I only knew about because of the naan) and told me that it was very beautiful, that I should visit.
That night there was a massive thunderstorm. I experienced it like a dream, waking up with bleary memories of flashing light and the room’s long purple curtain writhing in the wind; the window to the balcony had been left open, and at one point the storm slammed the door shut.
Katie, Michelle, and I met at the intersection of Avinguda Diagonal and Passeig de Gràcia and headed down the later to see the Gaudí houses. La Pedrera, the bigger of the two, has been hidden by scaffolding both times I’ve seen it, but it’s swathed in a covering displaying what one would see if the construction weren’t in the way. Along the way we admired some equally cool-looking buildings, surprised to learn that they hadn’t been designed by the famous architect.
Starving once we’d reached Plaça de Catalunya, we consulted Yelp and found Ciutat Comtal, a popular restaurant nearby. We ate on a balcony overlooking the wood-paneled room. The menu was not very descriptive, but I was pretty thrilled with what I received – a mesa of roasted vegetables topped with a slice of goat cheese, and a skewered chunk of camembert coated in chopped almonds and gleaming with a band of strawberry jelly.
Camembert Lollipops
We got gelato at Amorino and ate it around the fountain in Plaça Reial, a beautiful square of yellow buildings that I’d happened upon while wandering El Barri Gòtic (the gothic quarter) on my first morning in Barcelona in March. I was glad to be able to find it again, and to discover that it hadn’t changed.
The three of us in Plaça Reial
I would have to leave soon to meet my blablacar driver, so we checked out some nearby shops, then hung out on the steps beside Santa Maria del Pi, a church near La Rambla.
Katie and Michelle waited for the bus with me, but the bus never came (or rather it bypassed the stop entirely), so we rushed to the metro and said our goodbyes on the platform before heading to different lines.
I hadn’t decided on how I was getting home – bus or blablacar – until that morning, but though I had to leave earlier I was very happy I’d chosen blablacar. It’s a car-sharing service that allows people to post rides on a website – as a passenger, you pay a (usually quite reasonable) fee to tag along. It’s generally the cheapest, fastest way to get around (for example, Barcelona-Murcia cost thirty euros instead of the bus’s fifty-four and took five and a half hours instead of nine). As long as the driver has good reviews, I don’t worry much about safety. I’ve used it over five times – in France, Belgium, and Spain – and have never had a bad experience. This particular time was by far the best though.
I met Maria, the driver, in a roundabout towards the north of the city. She was in the passenger seat beside a blond man in a polo shirt, but she got out, kissed my cheeks in greeting, and motioned for me to take her place as she went around the other side to meet the man, who had gotten out. I waited in the car as they bid each other goodbye; they were clearly in a relationship. After a couple minutes, Maria got in and we were off.
We talked almost the whole time, at first in Spanish. She is from Cartagena and lives in Murcia but goes up to Barcelona almost every weekend to see her boyfriend (or vice versa). She is incredibly sweet – before leaving the city, we stopped at a gas station, and when she came back to the car, she had a lollipop for each of us.
At first we talked about superficial stuff – work, what I was doing in Spain, travel. She gave me endless recommendations on what to do in Murcia – restaurants, yoga studios, a swimming pool. She taught me about the Murcian accent/dialect, explaining that many people use “-ico/a” instead of “-ito/a” (e.g., bonito becomes bonico) and teaching me the word “acho,” which she said doesn’t really mean anything but is just used as sort of an interjection word – “Acho! I forgot to buy milk.” or “Acho! That’s so cool.” Now that I know about it, I hear it about as much as I hear “like” from American English speakers.
Somewhere around Valencia, we stopped to stretch our legs, and afterwards we switched to English. She and her boyfriend had called each other about five times during the four or so hours we’d been driving. I asked her how she’d met him. She told me she’d been at a bar with her friend, who had been talking to another friend on the phone. Maria had gotten annoyed with her for being on the phone while they were supposed to be spending time together and had taken the phone to tell the guy to let her friend go so they could hang out. Maria and the guy had ended up talking for twenty minutes.
Though they live on opposite sides of the country, they see each other every weekend, and Maria knows that if they truly love each other, they will wait for each other. She seemed so calm, sure, wise. Her attitude was refreshing and inspiring and made it very easy to talk to her.
We reached the outskirts of Murcia, and Maria took a longer way into the city to point out some of the places she’d recommended. We drove down the wide, deserted Avenida Juan Carlos I with the windows open, a foggy coolness seeping in. She dropped me off on my street, and I headed up to my piso for an eleven o’clock dinner before my first day at my primary school, back at the place that I was just starting to call home.
Claire Where 