The Traveling Martens

A quick stay (and exit) in Barcelona

We´ll start with the good parts of Barcelona, we explored the city, starting at the port and walking up the main La Rambla, the famous road through the middle of the city which is a wide cobble-stone pedestrian street. The buildings and architecture in the city are truly amazing, it is like a big outdoor museum. Some of the features the city is known for are the works of Gaudi, who has a very organic style of architecture with lots of curving shapes and colors. His unfinished masterpiece, and what he devoted most of his life to, is the Familia cathedral. It was started in the 1860's and is still not nearly finished. It is scheduled to be done by 2030, as it is entirely funded by donations and the fee for tourists to walk through it. We entered and it is a major construction site. The outside has soaring spires and intricately carved pictures of animals and nature scenes in the walls. The columns on the inside are made to look like trees, with the roots spreading into the floor at the bottom and the branches and canopy spreading overhead to form the roof of the center of the church. At first, Gaudi´s work seems eccentric, but we got to read his writings inside the church and he was a genius, with an understanding of math and nature that was ahead of his time. His writings reminded us of Ayn Rand´s Fountainhead.

The restaurants in Barcelona were great, there is such a variety of foods there. We ate a long lunch at a Spanish-Morrocan style restaurant. Another Indian meal for dinner, it was delicious, we don´t find as much Asian food here in the Mediterranean.

Then there is the disappointing side of Barcelona. We´ve been told such good things by people who have been there before, so we had high hopes, but we have to believe that Barcelona has changed dramatically the past few years or even months. There is a saying that you never wash a rental car before returning it, and Barcelona seems like an old rental car that has been absolutely trashed. Our first view of the city coming in on the train was through a shattered window, and even windows in the designer clothing stores in the city center were smashed, and looked like they had been shot. There was trash everywhere in the streets and grafitti covered the beautiful buildings. Even many of the sculptures in the city parks had grafitti on them. The La Rambla street was full of souvenir stands and people getting suckered into a card game here, in which tourists play what they think is a game of chance, but they don´t realize there are accomplices of the dealer playing alongside them. We wonder if the bombings right before the election, and the entry of a new government are part of it. Things we read here (in the Iberia airlines magazine for example, which you would think would try and say good things) say that Barcelona is having severe social problems lately due to the influx of poor immigrants. Walking around, we saw posters for only two political parties- the Communists, and the anti-immigration Socialist party. The Catelonia separitist movement is also prevalent, with grafitti spray-painted "This is not Spain" and "Bombers!". We met some nice people inside of buildings, but everyone on the street seemed to give us dirty looks. The receptionist at our hotel told us it was perfectly safe to walk outside- as long as we weren´t drunk, walked quickly, and clutched any bags tightly to our chest. These our just our own views and possibly an isolated bad experience, but it was shocking and we didn´t even feel safe.

So we made the first unscheduled change in all of our trips, and decided to leave Barcelona a day early and head to Ibiza- Yeah! Back to a small, sandy island in the Mediterranean!

posted by Mel and Stacy Marten @ 5:19 AM