Jet-lagging in Barcelona

(I'm running behind on posting owing to a great trip, BIG hikes, bad WiFi, and much needed napping. More about that in a later post. Here's how the trip got started.)

With breakfast, I just love cafe con leche, fresh croissants, and hearing five languages being spoken. The combination kinda perks me up. That's how the day starts here in our hotel in Barcelona. This is a 3-night stay to get over jet lag and to meet up with Max, our fellow adventurer, prior to heading off on Monday to the Spanish Pyrenees National Parks for the first leg of this trip.

During this visit, we did a lot of walking in the old Gothic and El Born districts, literally just above the ruins of the oldest part of Barcelona. More on that in a moment. We also did most of our exploring as far away as we could get from Las Ramblas (LR)! The LR is called Champs-Elysées of Spain. While it does have a weird beauty of its own, for me it's basically a crowded tourist trap this time of year, filled with hawkers selling bad food and expensive drinks. There are people pretending to be statues, and of course, pick pockets everywhere. I guess you could call that beautiful?

In the oldest part of the city, you can still see the large stones of the old Roman fortifications combined, many times over, with the stone work of later days and other cultures. But to really get to know Barcelona, you have to dig a little and actually remove a few layers of the city to reveal the Roman and pre-Roman history just below. Turns out in 1920 when they were digging up the city, they discovered what came to be 43,000 square feet of the Roman town of Barcino from the 1st century AD. It was an amazing peek into the life of the ancient city with streets, villas, commercial laundry, a dyeing shop, and storage vats for oil and wine all two stories down.

One of the stops on our groggy first day walkabout was the Barcelona History Museum. While you can research the place yourself, among many fascinating details I learned was in the street outside the dyeing factory there was a fountain like structure men could pee into and the pee was then funneled into the dye shop! The dye shop actually paid the city for the collected urine because it was one of the valuable and necessary ingredients for setting different colored dyes into fabric. Fragrance aside, I think there's a business model in there somewhere!

Walking away from Las Ramblas to the east, we wound our way through the wonderfully crooked and shady streets of the Gothic and El Born sections of the old city. About as far away from LR as we could get on foot we came across a chocolate museum. Or, more correctly stated, the "Museu de la Xocolata." Nothing like a cold and almost frozen chocolate beverage, something between (dark) Xocolata milk and a malt in consistency, to fortify us for the walk back to our hotel.

We didn't take in the museum because we already knew about the history of cacao and we felt the many sculptures made of Xocolata were basically a waste of a precious resource. We finished our beverage, bought some dark Xocolata with raspberry and headed back out.

For our second evening out, we headed back to the Born District for tapas. It used to be seaside accommodations for the rich in the middle ages, but today it is far enough away from the tourist crush to have kept some charm, calm and most importantly, its dignity. Born is really still a "neighborhood" where real people live, yet speckled with small tapas bars, a little shopping and quaint small parks. The pictures at this link will give you a sense for the serenity this part of town bestowed on us weary travelers.

So let's say the story of the adventure is launched in a jet-laggy kind of way. We're landed, getting our feet under us, and coping with entry into a very different world. We're coping with lots of people, traffic, hawkers, exhaust, and a whole society who think starting dinner at 9:30 is perfectly natural. Apparently they also think socializing till 3 AM, and for drunks to alternately singing for joy and rage at the world in anger till 4:30 AM, is kind of about right.

With any luck, the next post will be from a quiet little hotel high in the Spanish Pyrenees Mountains.

Love to all and Why not go?

Earl and Gwen