Blocks à la BSG-style

Location: Barcelona and Mataró, Spain

Friday May 21, 2010

We hurried and checked out of the hostel in the morning by 11:00. Thankfully, the hostel allowed us to store our luggage until 4:00 pm, so we took advantage of the time to explore BCN for a bit more before heading to our next destination, Mataró, for beach camping.

Question: is it bad that I fall in love so easily when I’m on vacation? Where is this coming from? From me falling in love with the street performer who was working on La Rambla right outside our hostel. He played Edward Scissorhands, complete with the costume, hair, makeup, and fake scissors for fingers. It was crazy, because he got Edward’s innocent expressions and awkward mannerisms down pat. Imagine Edward Scissorhands played by Johnny Depp. Yep, that’s it. Just that. And you’ve got this street performer. He was that good. Jo can attest to my swooning.

Why is this entry entitled so? Simply check out aerial view of Barcelona:

Sí, sí, the blocks are square with the corners cut off. So the cross walks do not actually extend from the same corners. If you want to cross the street and then cross it again (going from diagonal to diagonal), it takes a bit longer, if you can imagine. Check out the similarity to the paper of BSG (I’m listening to the soundtrack of season 1 as I write this):

We walked to another house designed by Gaudí, as we finished our fermented fruit from two days ago. The house was amazing from the outside, and it was not only appreciated by us but also by many other tourists crowded on the sidewalk, taking pictures, pointing at this and that, and sketching with large sketchpads. Apparently Gaudí had a fascination with building crazy balconies to make the buildings look way out-there. There were so many details to ponder. Jo or Nat commented that it was like looking at some crazy architecture in Disneyland. And yes, it did look like that. It was also similar to Disney, because it wanted to rip us off by charging us 15 or 18 or whatever euros to go inside La Casa. (We didn’t.)

Oh, I forgot to include in the previous entry that after La Pedrera on Thursday, Nat went to visit el Mercat Boqueteria by herself while Jo and I visited El Museo de Picasso. We were worried that an hour and a half to two hours wouldn’t be sufficient time to visit the museum, but it turns out it was the perfect amount, because the museum was small/medium size, since most of his art is in private collections/museums. Getting there was a bit of adventure though. We took the metro during rush hour. I ran on the train as it was about to leave, sardining myself into the mass of people. Jo had less luck, because the door was closing on her, so she backed away. I told her to meet me on our destination platform. She made it two and half minutes later. Yes, they run that fast. C’mon NYC subway! Get with it! Here’s Jo getting off the train:

Jo had also gotten on a fully packed train. She felt someone touch her large, red Longchamp bag from behind, so she immediately clenched down tightly on it with her right arm. When she got off the train, she noticed the zipper was unzipped to the brown leather snap. But thankfully, she had placed her black cardigan in her bag when she got into the metro, because it covered all the shit inside her bag, making it difficult for the thief to find stuff. Nothing went missing. I told Jo that she should put the zipper in front and hold it, as I do with my bag. She replied with that she doesn’t like carrying it on the left shoulder. I said she could just flip the bag around, as long as she were okay with keeping the leather snap against her body, which would probably be safer anyway. But Jo didn’t understand that comment until a couple of days later, when she finally realized my spatial logic. Haha. Oh Jo, you space cadet.

The Picasso museum was quite nice. It was arranged chronologically from his start as a child through his trials of different styles though his development of Cubism. I tagged along with an English-speaking tour group (is that a form of stealing? I’m pretty sure the group had to pay for the guide) that had a lady who spoke of specific pieces and anecdotes into a headset that transmitted to the green earbuds that the old people wore in the group. Hey, I can’t help it if I happen to be in the same room all the time and that the tour guide spoke pretty loudly… It was a franker form of tour-crashing than the form we executed in Monteverde, CR when we would peek into other people’s trained bird-watching telescopes. The lady had interesting things to say. But I also took some time to wander off by myself.

My favorite was his series on Velázquez’s Las Meninas. In the beginning of the exhibit, the museum had a great video the original, and it would zoom in on to specific characters then slowly transform to Picasso’s version of those characters or parts of the painting. Sometimes it would change to one of Picasso’s studies of the entire painting. In the entrance of the exhibit, the first room held a giant black-and-white rendition of Las Meninas in its entirety. After that, a large blue room (in the space of what was originally a courtyard) holds the series with Picasso’s initial sketches. It’s crazy seeing the classic through Picasso’s eyes. What a fascinating remix.

On our way back from the Picasso Museum, Jo got herself some churros con chocolate from a little blue and white café that specialized in the dish, because it smelled so appetizing on our rush to el Museo. Walking back to the hostel, we were approached by a group of Italian tourists in a large plaza who desired to take pictures with “las bellas.” After taking it with them, they insisted that we get one too. And the guy on the left wanted to take a picture of his friend taking a picture of us. Haha.

Anyhoo, back to Friday. We got to la Catedral de Barcelona only to find out that I was too whoreish to get in with my tanktop. So we explored the historical neighborhood of Barcio (the original name of Barcelona when it used to be enclosed by a stone wall/aqueduct).The buildings were beautiful with courtyards that were open to the public and beautiful bridges.

We walked down La Rambla to the beach, where I got my first glimpse of the Mediterranean. After, we found that Mercat Barcelona was quite disappointing. It was a bit bigger than Mercat Boquetaria, the one close to our hostel. But it was quite a walk away and turned out to be all indoors, pricier, and just more commercialized. It did not have the cool-I’m-totally-shopping-at-a-market feel. I might as well have been buying groceries at Albertson’s or something. We returned to Mercat Boquetaria, where I bought myself some food for beach camping.