MKNonline Blog

Day 2 in Barcelona, I think we all may have had one of the best sleeps in our lives. I woke up so disoriented but refreshed, I could have sworn I had died. It was that deep of a sleep.

Today can be summed up as “Gaudi Worship Day.” A trip to Barcelona wouldn’t be complete without some Gaudi sites.

I hate being a dumb tourist, so I did some research on the guy before getting here. From what I can gather from Becky’s book, Antoni Gaudi was a brilliant architect who was known for his parabolic curves and inspiration derived from nature.

The Highlights

Palau Guell – We actually saw this one the day before wandering Las Ramblas, but it fit better in this post. It was the only Gaudi house with free admission, as they were renovating 90% of the house. We did see the basement, which was really cool and covered with arches and curved ceilings. A good taste of what was to come.

La Pedreira/Casa Milo – I think Alan and Ezeibe had been kind of apprehensive about Gaudi up until this point. This was the house that sold all of us on the guy. The rooftop of this apartment complex was the best part. There were great views of Barcelona (we would later become obsessive of views of Barcelona from high vantage points) and the warrior/smoke chimneys were so foreboding and a genius architectural and artistic feature. Gaudi really paid attention to the details, even the doorknobs of this place were carefully thought out as a functional and artistic presence.

Some of the chimney sculptures on the rooftop.

La Sagrada Familia – This cathedral is out of control. It’s almost excessive in the amount of sculptures and carvings and belltowers that make up this place. And it’s only halfway done. If this thing finishes before my lifetime, I am definitely going back. Outside admission, in hindsight, was probably good enough, as the inside was totally empty and the good stained glass and front theater area were blocked when we went. However, the museum is worth the admission fee if you do pay to go into the cathedral.

I thought the Big Dig took forever.

Park Guell – We got to the park close to sunset. We were a little overwhelmed with how much ground we had to cover before sunset, as that was when the park closed. We actually got to see most of it. We did miss Gaudi’s house though. We’re not even sure if we were even in Park Guell anymore, but we had wandered up the hill that it sits on through various paths and ended up with this incredible view of Barcelona and the Mediterranean. Barcelona at sunset is breathtaking.

Ezeibe captures a Kodak moment.

Not-So-Cool Stuff

Walking – La Sagrada and Park Guell…just on the border of a reasonable walking distance. It’s an uphill climb. But, we did get to see another Gaudi-esque hospital (not designed by Gaudi though, but in a similar modernisme style)

All this walking makes me want to break a leg and get admitted...

Paella – Ezeibe was on a mission to find the perfect authentic paella. This did not happen on this day. We found a place for lunch a bit up from La Sagrada Familia that seemed local, authentic, and cheap. However, the paella seemed like it came out of the frozen food section.

Casa Batillo – Another one of Gaudi’s houses. Very nice on the outside. The inside seemed amazing. The price of admission: 20 euros. That was a bit much for our wallets. We and Gaudi are not that tight.

At Park Guell –
Me: Hey, isn’t this the place where they had that America’s Next Top Model finale?
Alan: I just heard someone say that it was.
Me: …How should I feel about knowing this?
Alan: Not good.

America's Next Top Model cave...where's Tyra?

Disasters

Arsticket – We decided at La Pedrera to get a museum pass. I’ll talk more about this on the next day in Barcelona, but this was an ill-advised choice as we didn’t really see any other museums.

Dinner – Our hunger and lack of research and ability to agree on one restaurant led us to another overpriced and sub-par-food chain. This one was another Ruby Tuesday’s type of incarnation, just in Barcelona. The menu looked promising, but Ezeibe and Alan realized they had eaten at a restaurant with the same exact menu the night before. And thus the dilemma of picking a dinnertime restaurant with Mike, Ezeibe, and Alan: We can all agree we want something authentic, although none of us really know what authentic would be, and authentic doesn’t sound very appetizing in Catalonia when push comes to shove. Ezeibe is a stickler for quality. He lives for that pricey five-star shit. Alan prefers inexpensive and reasonable prices, but not a chain. And me, I’ve been craving Kentucky Fried Chicken for the past week and a half. And their ads were everywhere in Barcelona. You can see how these opposing viewpoints and our passive-aggressive introverted ways can lead to a lot of awkward silent tension come dinnertime.

Other photos:

I'll always looked unprepared in any of our group shots because I'm too anti-social to ask someone to take our picture. Therefore, I use my mini-tripod to set up the shot, set the 10-second timer, and run into the group shot to varying levels of effectiveness.

Merry Christmas, everyone! I first need to apologize. As usual, i overestimated my ability to write blog posts after our packed days. At this point in real time, we’re out of Barcelona, but I’ll continue to catch you guys up day by day.

So, we made it to the airport and past customs. Alan and I asked Ezeibe multiple times what happens next and the response was always “We call the place and they come pick us up at the airport.” That was until Ezeibe actually read the confirmation message and saw that we had to find our own way there.

Cool Things of Day 1:

-Our Barcelona apartment was pimpin’. Extremely well-decorated, a Top Chef worthy kitchen, and this awesome sun room that looked out into the street. Ezeibe got his own bedroom, while Alan and I shared the second bedroom with two twin beds. Our room had a balcony overlooking the street. We were only a block or two away from Placa Catalunya, which is a busy part of Barcelona. It’s where Las Ramblas kind of begins. Apartment came with a bunch of city guides and we would be attached to the hip to our Time Out Barcelona book and our City Walk cards.

The perfect chair for contemplation

-Las Ramblas and especially the La Boquiera market. It was quite an orgy of dead animals and fresh fruits and vegetables. I wish we had something like that in Connecticut. Everything looked so fresh. We had our first Barcelona meal at Ra, a small restaurant behind La Boquiera. We had a breakfast.

This little piggy went to market...

Yumm...

- While we’re on the subject, the Old Barcelona districts were pretty stunning (Barri Gothic, Born, etc.). You didn’t really have to go inside of anything, just the windy streets and old Spanish houses were pretty cool to look at. Plaza Real off the Las Ramblas looked like it was a Hollywood charicature of a Spanish square, but it was the real thing.

Plaza Real

- Random churches, seemingly on every corner. All of them very old and medieval.

- People-watching in front of a random church. A true “Holy shit, we’re on vacation…in EUROPE” moment. There was a small Christmas market in front of the church. Alan and I got some coffee and tapas. We just sat there for a long while as we tried to adjust our bodies to the time difference. A crazy guy with an accordian was being mad enthusiastic about his accordian Christmas music in the church square. I would internally declare him my BFF.

- Barcelona is CLEAN. And very green. A lot of quiet buses that probably use some alternative fuel, human street cleaners on every other block, and these well tiled sidewalk streets. It’s definitely no NYC.

Not-So-Cool Things of Day 1:

- Late lunches and dinners. I just got off an eight hour flight. I’m hungry. But alas, lunch isn’t until 2PM and dinner isn’t until 9 or 10PM. And that would lead me to…

- Les Quinze Nits in the aforementioned Plaza Real. Totally a Ruby Tuesdays in a cool setting. People lined up for this stuff. It was a total tourist trap. No one in queue was a local.

Downright Disasters of Day 1:

- Jetlag. And then walking for miles when you’re body is jetlagged. And you have to stay up for dinner because you don’t want to be further jetlagged the rest of the trip. Ezeibe was about to drop by breakfast, and only held out a few hours longer. I held out until 10′ish and then crashed pretty mightily. Alan would stay up even later as we had left Ezeibe to pass out in the apartment in the afternoon. Ezeibe would wake up at around 10PM and had gotten hungry. After walking for miles while he was sleeping, I was not about to join him. Alan was nicer, but he was dying inside.

Day 1 was entirely travel. Still, there are some interesting/boring notes to share. This post was written mid-flight and is being posted after the fact. We have since arrived safely in Barcelona and going through some serious jetlag. The day’s not over yet, so I’ll recap the day later tonight.

–

I’m writing this blog post on our flight. it just hit midnight EST, and we’re about two hours from landing in Barcelona, where it will be about 7:30 in the morning. Inflight movies were that one where Vince Vaughn is Santa Claus’ brother or something and Mamma Mia. I opted not to view either. Before I go further, let’s start from the beginning:

Day 1 has been all travel. Nothing eventful picking up our rental car. Ezeibe decided to bring two suitcases, which I’m sure will probably come back to haunt us when we fly to Paris.

I shouldn’t be surprised, but we hit some annoying random construction traffic on I-84 on our way to the airport. Fun nugget of information: Alan has incredible road rage.

The Delta terminal was pretty chaotic. Looked like holiday traveling is starting pretty early this year. Even though I checked in the night before, there was a good half hour queue to drop off your bags. Security, however, went very quickly. So it evened out.

Now we’re on this flight. Ezeibe is next to me. We’ve entertained ourselves through an exciting game of Geography trivia on his phone and Checkers over our Zunes. I won both.

Alan is a few rows ahead of us in the emergency exit row due to his vertical handicap. While he stressed about not being able to sleep on the plane, it was all bullshit. He’s getting more sleep than either Ezeibe or I.

I downloaded the Pimsleur Quick and Easy Spanish audio and have been trying to memorize basic Spanish phrases. I’m sure it will be futile due to the fact that Barcelona speaks Catalan. My faith in Ezeibe and Alan’s Spanish proficiency kind of went out the window when they couldn’t decide how to say “Go” or “Left.”

I’ll be keeping connected as best as I can throughout the trip. If you’re a friend/family, why bother waiting for me to come back to hear about my trip?

Save me the trouble of repeating myself and just read/watch/hear all about it in real-time. The power of the internet is amazing like that…

Clearly, this blog will serve as my journal of lofty thoughts.

View all my photos as I take them on my Flickr. I upload every shot I take, good, bad, and ugly.

My twitter feed to see all of my realtime thoughts. Facebook will work too.

Picture of my house

Eating breakfast, about to head to JFK in about three hours.

I had a video journal ready yesterday, but then I got mad self-conscious about my facial hair. It was that horrifying look of “I shaved, but clearly with an electric razor, which is fine, except I clearly missed significant patches of almost-hair that made me look creepy.” I tend to have this look two out of seven days a week.

Books I’m taking along: Blink (thanks Leslie!), Renaissance Art: A Short Introduction (thanks Becky!), and a book on Gaudi and his works (thanks again Becky!). I hope to pick up some magazines or fiction on the way.

I had a horrible fight with my 2GB SD card and getting the Canon CHDK firmware to autoload on my camera starting up. Sadly, it does not, so I have to install it every time I start the camera. I must be stupid. I’m still not sure if I’ve figured out how to play with the shutter and exposure settings with the new firmware hack.

I now have routine panic attacks that occur every 5 minutes that I’m going to run out the door and forget something major I intended to bring. Suspects are Passport, digital camera, charger, or my backup spare clothing.

I have no fucking clue what we’re going to do when we land in Barcelona.

So less than 24 hours before I leave for Europe. I’ve been answering a lot of repetitive questions, so thought I’d post them here:

Why Europe? Why now?

Why not?! There’s never a good time to travel, so now is as good of a time as ever. In fact, there are a lot of positives for the timing of this trip. Winter is off-season, so less tourists and wait times. The economy sucks, so strong dollar versus the Euro. And, I’m in between job rotations, so I don’t even have the stress of work lingering over me. As much as I’m against it, I’m still that guy that would be sending out work emails all day. That’s just my hard-working tendencies.

You’re going to blog and stuff while you’re on vacation?

Um…yeah. Got a problem with that? Listen, I don’t intend to be totally lame and spend my entire trip on a laptop screen. My -3 regular visitors sure don’t expect any constant updates or anything anyways. I hope to be as disconnected as possible from my regular world. But writing, photography, video journals, it’s all very therapeutic for me. So let me do my thing and enjoy the rants as they get published…

Aren’t you making this a bigger deal than it is?

Yes, I’m being mad overexcited for a two week holiday in some very ordinary destinations. Forgive me. The reality is I never had that life-changing study abroad. While I consider myself well-traveled, I don’t really venture far and away that much. No money, no time, too much going on, etc. I think all young, new working professionals need to take full advantage of their very limited time off and do something amazing with it. There’s nothing wrong with a little excitement in life.

Oh lord, I’m 23. I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about that. While my birthday was yesterday and therefore the most awesome day of the year, it was pretty typical of every day I’ve had this year: lots of work and lots of homework. No big celebration this year, not necessarily by choice. “Celebrate birthday” just happened to fall pretty low on my priority list of planning this week compared to other importantly amazing events (Screw birthday. I’m going to Europe in 6 days!) and not-so-amazing events (oh wait…I have a paper due tonight…and I’m sick…for the third birthday in a row). I thought the best way to recap my life is ranking my favorite birthdays thus far:

My 21st – The saying is true. On the 21st, you drink because you can. Every birthday after that, you drink because you have to. Or something like that. Either way, I got real drunk.

My 18th, 19th, 20th – Birthdays celebrated in college were awesome because friends were there. Even though they were usually in the middle of finals or after finals when no one could make attend. Ok, wait, maybe this shouldn’t be so highly ranked.

My birth – I would imagine I was one of those babies happy to leave the womb, since I like my private space.

My 16th – Old enough to drive, good enough for me. Certainly not close to Super Sweet 16 level. If only that show started airing back when, I could’ve probably pressured my parents into

My 1st birthday – Ranked in the middle because I don’t remember it. But since I was the only child at that time (see 2nd birthday), I was probably treated like a king.

5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th – At some point, I had a birthday at Scooters, the local arcade. This was pretty awesome, and I’m 75% certain it happened at some point here.

14th, 15th, 17th – The other High school years. Hm…From what I recall, I think my birthday was largely ignored by the Bristol Eastern population.

My 2nd birthday – My brother would be born 12 days later. Sorry, Dave!

My 3rd, 4th – I probably had to share this with kid bro. And knowing me, I was probably not happy about it.

11th, 12th, 13th – These were probably really sucky birthday years. It’s that age where I’m getting too old for people to figure out what I want in presents, if I even got presents at all at this point. Plus, I was all too aware that splitting a birthday with Jesus and my little brother was not what December 12th was intended for.

My 22nd – I was supposed to celebrate with all my friends at Mohegan Sun. Instead, I got mono.