BACK TO BARCELONA
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ANDORRA
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BARCELONA, AGAIN
May 15, 2018 to May 22, 2018
2018-05-15
SRI LANKA TO MALDIVES TO ISTANBUL TO LONDON TO BARCELONA – PART 1
All
that in only 24 hours…
We
hug Sajeewa and pat George. We will miss both of them after 22 days, 2801
kilometers (1848 miles), mountains, waterfalls, beaches, lots of temples, mobs
of elephants, pounds of rice and curry, an orchard of fresh fruit juice,
thousands of years of history, poses of peacocks, gallons of sweat, lots and
lots of laughs...and one leopard. We wave goodbye and watch them drive off,
friends, and faces permanently replacing the lines that others use to define
Sri Lanka on maps.
Plans
to return are already hardening on the 2020 calendar.
Lorry
and Janis head off thataway for their Sri Lanka-Dubai-New York flight on
Emirates. It will take us a lot longer to get to Barcelona, on the other side
of the dog leg up to England and the long layover in Gatwick Airport.
Turkish
Airlines TK731 lifts off in the dark, carrying rows of barren seats, drops into
the Maldives an hour later to relieve those islands of this week's determined
vacationers. They stream on, tropic roasted medium rare to well done, bleached
white now pre-melanomic pale pink to International Distress Orange. Their
paradise is not ours, but I recognize the puzzled look: why does this have to
end?
Dinner at 38 thousand feet, no matter how tangential
to the truly tasty, always feels like an adventure. My taste buds have another
opinion, miss the flavors of Sri Lanka. With that, I sleep.
2018-05-16 SRI LANKA TO MALDIVES TO ISTANBUL TO LONDON TO
BARCELONA – PART 2
“We can tell when the Northern Lights are out because we can hear the Chinese scream."
By the time we get to Gatwick we have crunched elbows through an airborne serial dining experience of a sandwich, 2 dinners, and 2 breakfasts, schlepped our carry-on through 4 security checks, and dozed across blurry time zones covering the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Peninsula, a chunk of the Middle East and a much bigger chunk of Europe.
The meals are unfortunate and the
security checks (after the first one, which makes sense) are unnecessary,
proforma exercises, futile inconveniences. The one at Gatwick Airport is a surprise
though, carefully thought through by designers more familiar with people than
cattle, and managed by polite facilitators, not prison warden wannabes with
control issues. Bravo Gatwick!
The slow ooze down the serpentine
line at Gatwick Passport Control has its rewards. She's young, silver blonde,
beautiful, and serves up a tantalizing smorgasbord of tidbits about her native
Finland, now up a few notches on our list. There are the Northern Lights, even
if they have been co-opted by Chinese tourists. (See the tidbit at the top.)
Vueling Airlines is Spain's budget
carrier, without frills, but sparkly. For $43 we get to fly across Western
Europe…and the seats are even inside the airplane...with very attractive flight
attendants. He is handsome in the Spanish soap opera
boy-next-door-dream-boat-mold, but with designer stubble. She is a Catherine
Zeta-Jones double, her beauty hobbled by a slight attitude, and by a most
unfortunate flat, round, headthingy stuck on the side of her head at an angle
on the tipsy side of precarious.
Dennis suggests she fell onto a
table of tapas plates and no one has had the courage to tell her “That Look
Doesn’t Work for You”. (Or for anyone else, I suspect, other than a drag queen
with a mountainous coiffure and a food fetish or frisbee fixation. Maybe.)
We climb steeply leaving England, then France, below thick northern clouds. We fly east of true south, but south nonetheless. The clouds can’t follow, fall apart, become puffs patting the snowy peaks of the Pyrenees, and then Spain stretches flat to the blue Mediterranean.
We land in Barcelona, 2 airlines,
3.5 time zones, 4 take-offs, 4 landings, 4 countries, 5 security checks, 6
meals, 24 hours, and 9935 kilometers after leaving Sri Lanka.
We walk the last 1 kilometer from the airport bus to our AirBnB.
2018-05-17
BACK TO BARCELONA– DAY 1
“My grandmother made croquettes like
these”.
It's not the two strong beers
talking. The croquette sampler at Le Petit Paris is six tasty bites of memory. Grandma's
were bigger, hefty, light potato pillows with a mozzarella core and fried
casing, crisp and soft and gooey and unforgettable, even 60 years since I last
heard that gentle ‘mangia, mangia'. I get why Proust's one taste of a cookie
led him to write seven volumes of ‘Remembrance of Things Past’. I forego seven
volumes and concentrate on the 6 croquettes…and the next goodies. Caramelized
apple and blue cheese on crisp baguette, and patatas bravas, spuds in cheesy/chili sauce, follow the croquettes
and chase the memory of yesterday's airborne glop from my taste buds.
That was last night, 10 pm, and
fashionably the right time to eat. Spaniards end one day, late, with
gastronomic bang, begin the next, also late, with a whimper that barely
registers on our dietary Richter scale. I prefer the reverse, but such
croquettes are not to be denied.
This morning, Nescafé (Or “No es
café” according to travel buddy, Luis), milk, and yummy pound cake, all late
night post-croquette purchases, do us for day starters on our tiny balcony,
through the shuttered French doors, and just one chair deep, two chairs (and
some wiggle room) long, We hang 6 stories up over the trees of Carrer d'Arago, our home street until we
leave for Andorra in 2 days. All the apartment buildings on our street have
thin balconies like ours, one per residence, human aeries bound by artful
railings and flowers, sky gardens. A few hang the flag of Catalonia, none the
flag of Spain.
We walk 20 minutes up these new streets
to Wakka, our foodie discovery last March, sit at a sidewalk table, order. My
wrap is a tongue orgasm: chicken, Serrano ham bacon, cream cheese, greens, an
inspired dressing. Dennis’ sandwich is a smoked salmon and pistachio omelette,
equally good. Cook Gabriel runs out and grabs our hands. “I made it special for
you”. The man can cook, oh, can he cook.
“The beer is from me.” Cappuccino with a beer chaser works when the catalyst is
such beaming good will. We'll go back tomorrow.
Then it is our turn to enter the
Sagrada Familia. I usually avoid churches, especially big ones, though not
sacred spaces per se.
Buddhas are abstractions of an
inward state, calming. The Hindu images are wild imaginings of the
unimaginable, in no way real, often fun. Mosques have no human images, just
space in which to contemplate divinity. But Catholic church imagery is too
obvious, too literal, for me.
So,I go to Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia
because friends whose opinions I respect have urged me to, expectations muted.
It wins me over with my first sight
of the whimsy of its exterior. And bowls me over inside. The central image of
that faith hangs suspended, a tiny almost abstract particle, in a space that
soars into brilliant light, irradiated, and unencumbered with saints and other
didactic intrusions. The Sagrada Familia doesn't tell about the divine. It
gives it a place.
The rest is
up to us.
2018-05-18 BACK TO BARCELONA – DAY 2
Gaudi = gaudy???
No, our word ‘gaudy’ was not spawned
in reviews of architect Gaudi's over-the-top confections. The word predates
those by centuries. It may derive from words meaning ‘ornament’ or ‘rejoice’…
or ‘delight in', which we certainly do, rejoicing in Gaudi’s exuberance refusal
of straight lines and right angles. He melts geometry to produce riveting eye
candy. No, not gaudy. Tasty. And in La Sagrada Familia, something both deeper
and higher.
I realize why I’ve moved away from
those programmed headset self-guided tour. They reduce great places to tiny
details, scholarship beffudling experience, the part preventing the whole from
taking hold, offering a taste, but no flavor. Mywould put it this way: ‘mangia,
mangia’ (translation: one strand of spaghetti has only a truncated story to
tell your taste buds’.
We spend the late afternoon at Wakka
, nursing , sandwiches, fruit juice, beers, and conversation. Jonathan has
studied Chinese medicine. I know now what meridian to press, how and where to
stop diarrhea. It’s not where you think.
Gabriel, chef extraordinaire, has
lived in Australia, travelled in Canada and the USA. He speaks 3 languages,
including superb English. In the USA he’d be shot by a toothless, brainless gun
nut who can’t read or write his own mother tongue (even though it was ‘good
enough for Jesus Christ’) encouraged by That Person s**tting in the White
House. We spend the afternoon thankful for shared experiences, kindness,
respect, openness, budding friendship.
We leave the guys hoping that soon
those same values will once again—and soon---regain their rightful place in our
country:
The Statue
of Liberty: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to
breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore
2018-05-19 ANDORRA
‘Ya Gotta Have A Gimmick’…
….sing the strippers in ‘Gypsy’.
Europe’s smallest countries listened.
Vatican City, has the Church,
crosses, and salvation (and for some, men in long dresses and funny hats, or
the hunky Swiss Guards in tights, or women in short supply)
Monaco, has the Casino, roulette
wheels, and hope
Andorra has the Mall, discounts,
freedom from taxes…and you get a receipt.
For
centuries it was a sleepy medieval vestigial of cow paths and spectacular
scenery hanging in the mountains between France and Spain. Then the skiers
discovered it. And Andorra discovered tourists will buy anything. The Unspoiled
Shangri La has been malled into a theme park, Tax-Free Nirvana.
Still,
the setting is spectacular, the former cow paths ramble, and charm peeks out
now and then between clusters of franchises, parfumeries, and shops catering to
all fetishes of the electronic-addicted. We even had a good meal, in the sun,
accompanied by geraniums. Andorra The Mall is far from a washout.
The
4-hour bus ride from Barcelona is however a stunner, worth the trip.
Barcelona
and the Mediterranean behind us, the landscape starts out soft, the new crops
green, the horizon sharpened by the angles of stone and tile roofed villages.
Red poppies and something white rim the roads and fields. This is a landscape
of guitars.
The
mountains start as droopy heaps, pliable leftovers from more serious geologic
works.
Then
the earth in front tilts, raw and rocky, too steep to hold green, or red, or
white.
At
47 kilometers before the borders of Andorra, the road gives us to a cleft in
the rock then bores straight through it. Again, and again, tunnels strung
through the dark and snippets of light.
Horizons
lost, we are tunnel troglodytes. Then...the light stays.
We
are in Andorra.
The
flowers are yellow. Snow caps the mountains, walls all around us.
Passports
are checked, not stamped. (It's the forty-somethingth country we have been to
since 2012. We don't need any more stamps.) Wallets and credit cards at the
ready, the other passengers follow the smell of money ‘saved’.
We
settle for lunch, red wine, and geraniums.
2018-05-20 BARCELONA, AGAIN
At 7am on a Sunday, well slept, we
leave Hotel Jordi, and walk down the deserted slope to the bus station. Stores
are closed but still bursting with goodies, undiminished by even yesterday's
hordes. Truth be told, my credit card does not leave Andorra unscathed. I
replaced my ragged and forgetful Casio watch, broken band and all, with a
spiffy descendant that also lets me lose track of time in 2 time zones
simultaneously.
The weather grinches are wrong.
There is no rain on our parade through this spectacular landscape, mountains
floating above valley mists in early sunlight. To the east, backlit poppies
rage translucent red against the green fields. To the west the same sunlight
singes the stacked stones of hilltop villages. Some people sleep. We do not.
By
mid-afternoon we have bussed and trained the 15 miles south from Barcelona
proper to our last AirBnB in Spain. On the way we regain a taste of Turkey with
perfect siş tavuk (ok, chicken
kebabs) in the town where we abandon the bus for one stop on the train to Castelldelfels
right on the Mediterranean. Our host’s parents welcome us with warmth, coffee,
and Spanish. The apartment is brilliant with Mediterranean light. We sip our
coffee on the balcony that runs the width of the apartment and share it with
flowers. The sea is a short block away. Our room also has a small balcony,
though we prefer it in Spanish, as mother Vivian calls it, la terrazita. Once again, we have lucked out.
The
sand is warm, the Mediterranean chills my feet and shins. I wonder if they
remember the first and last time they steeped in this ‘sea at the center of the
world’, in Nice, 57 years ago. Many of the women are topless…well, clearly they
have tops, in fact. I'd LOVE to see the reaction of those Christian Wrong Breast
Bigots who think women nursing in public is ‘obscene'. (Funny, they have no
comment about those pictures of Mrs. tRump when she was selling views of her
bits on the Internet. And, by the way, I have no problem with what she did back
then, either. It's the hypocrisy that rankles.)
We join leftover beachers for dinner by the sea…at
10pm, our stomachs now adjusted to Spanish notions of meal time. Our pizzas go
down so easily, but raggedly compared to the three scoops of silken gelato, crema , xocolata, caramelo, that follow.
Across the sand, the Mediterranean ripples.
2018-05-21 CASTELLDELFELS AND SITGES
“Domestic flight”.
Says Manuel's father and everyone
gapes. He grins the equivalent of “betcha that surprised you.” And he got that
right. We thought English an unknown territory for him and his wife. Their son,
Manuel, can get by (and just about anything else in those jeans and tee shirt
). Manuel's equally gene-blessed girlfriend fills in the blanks. Dad’s English
has been sitting somewhere deep, conjured by our conversation about cheap
travel around Europe. He grins again. We see where Manuel gets his charm. It's
a nice coda to a lovely day.
Earlier in the day we take the train
to the town of Sitges, just 20 minutes down the coast from Castelldelfels,
mountains to the right, blue sea to the left, warming sun above. The town is
surpassingly lovely, its narrow streets and balconies, survivors of a more
aggressive chunk of history, now quiet and draped with flowers, red geraniums
setting the color scheme. This is where Barcelona comes to chill. And play.
And…
We see clusters of women scoping out
the possibilities, but judging from the lithe physiques and fashion sense of
the clusters of men, the ladies are not only barking up the wrong tree, they’re
not even in the right forest.
Chocolate croissants and
cappuccinos, brunch of choice for the no longer lithe, keeps us happy at the
sidewalk café. A truly stunning teenager from the next tiny table asks us to
snap a photo of her, her equally gorgeous friend, and their boyfriends, worthy
of the two goddesses. Spain’s genes have a future.
I find a replacement for my
telescoping walking stick, lost somewhere in Sri Lanka. It had a compass and a light,
and a pedigree from a market in Rwanda. This one is less adventurous but also
less likely to send security guards into Search Mode.
This day,
the day before the end of the trip goes too fast. Memories tumble and stack,
lose sequence, pop up and out from places deep, but retrieved when needed, our
own ‘Domestic flights’.
2018-05-22 CASTELLDELFELS TO FLORIDA
“Sehr gut!”
And I mean it. The chicken kebabs at
Kapodokya Turc Bar in Castelldelfels are dream-making. The cook is Turkish, speaks
German, no English. I exhume fragments from my 1963 German 101 class. We
connect over intent, and gestures, and drool.
Barcelona airport has no signs in
any language directing us to Norwegian Air. Terminal 1 is a bust. Terminal Two
is a long shuttle ride away. It also lacks signs. And the shuttle driver has
disappeared. “Norwegian?” and a helpful passerby nods. Inside, security and
passport control are a breeze. Finding Gates WY not so much. The signs peter
out or are angled oddly and ambiguously. Apparently getting from HERE to THERE
is no great priority to the Spanish, wandering being more the thing. I'm
beginning to understand all those Spanish voyages in the 14 and 15 hundreds.
They didn’t discover the New World so much as bump into it while trying to find
something else. Even Chris Colombus said so.
At 18:40 we lift off, for Ft.
Lauderdale, 9 hours and 6 time zones west. We two share 3 comfortable seats,
the middle seat our dining table for our carry-on empanadas. Our $364 roundtrip Ft. Lauderdale-Barcelona Economy gets
us a seat. Everything else, including drinks, meals, headphones, blankets is
pay as you go…except the bathroom, still free as you go. At that price I can
pass on airline food and carry my own water and headsets.
The film ‘Three Billboards outside
Epping, Missouri’ is stupendously well acted by the three main characters, 2 of
whom won Oscars. It reminds us to know the facts, that violence is never the
answer, and to be kind.
Then we land.
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