Day 15-17: Burn, baby, burn
Burn fat, that is. I am meant to be on holiday, why am I exercising so much?
12th January
Today we rolled out of bed barely in time for 10:00am breakfast: at 20 minutes to 10. I staggered downstairs in a state of dishevelledness, consumed all the food I could consume in 20 minutes, and insisted fervently to Jean-Yves and mum that yes, I was planning the day and no, they got no say in it.
Barcelona is well known for lots of things, but its most visible son is probably the architect Antoni Gaudi. His buildings are a bunch of weird and wonderful fairytale concoctions which my mum kept insisting she wanted to eat. Admittedly, she has a point. They look like gingerbread houses coated in thick, shiny icing.
So as the Map-Bearer I guided us down to Gaudi's baby, the Sagrada Familia, or Church of the Sacred Family. There is truly nothing I can say about the place which will do it justice, but as a writer supposedly worth some salt, I can try.
Due to its 8 huge, jagged towers, which stab up towards the sky like giant pinecones, I could see the place from blocks away. There are meant to be 12, one for each apostle, but the Sagrada Familia is a century-old work in progress. That is part of what makes it so great: on one side are the finished curves and swerves of the walls and stained glass, on the other the straight lines of the scaffolding. Everything about the completed church is organic-looking. That's practically Gaudi's signature. The roof of the church and its supporting pillars look like a stylized forest from a fever dream, and then you get outside.
Two of the Sagrada Familia's walls - 'facades', or faces - are complete. Serious, adequate words fail me. Gaudi wins as an architect influenced by nature because what he's made doesn't look anything like nature but is instantly recognizable as nature anyway. And, just like nature, you can keep looking and looking and looking and there's something that you can swear on the holy book of your choice wasn't there before.
There is a lift that takes visitors up to the tower tops for a modest two-euro-fifty fee, which goes towards furthering construction work. The sign kindly warns informs tourists that 'way up is by lift, way down is by foot' via the charmingly-named 'long and narrow stairs'.
Warning: the Spanish do not exaggerate with their naming conventions.
The view from the towers is totally worth the money. It's a bit of a vertical maze of narrow bridges, tiny balconies and long-and-narrow-stairs, but the latter is not recommended for the claustrophobic, agoraphobic, dark-phobic, uncoordinated, exhausted, drunk, drugged or pregnant. (Why, little cheese, did you think it would be a good idea?) The stairs are one-person-across narrow and honestly, sincerely long. Also, the way down has narrow windows evenly spaced along the tower. Looking out is not suggested if you don't want to play Human Slinky for 250 vertical metres or so. The light was bright, the tower dark, and for about two metres after every window I would have to make my way down by feel because I was light-blind. I did this all the way down. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me; fool me 30 times - fail, fromagette, fail. But the view, it was so pretty~!
So after the stairs which were long and narrow, we walked to Gaudi's other famous creation, Parc Guell. The park rests atop a huge hill from which you can see all of Barcelona. Unlike the Sagrada Familia, there is no lift. Suffice to say my flabby thighs are no longer flabby.
At the entrance to Parc Guell are two gatehouses that Lonely Planet described as 'Hansel and Gretel', and I agree. I had to agree. They looked edible, and I swear I wasn't hungry at the time. While I was at the map trying to figure out where Gaudi had put his house, three guys started talking to me in terrible Spanish. I told them I didn't speak Spanish. In Spanish. This resulted in a conversation of medium length in which it was revealed that they were Australian, Melburnians and from the same direction of Melbourne as me. They asked me where exactly, the bastards. I lied. Hideously. And thus was filled my social interaction quota for the day.
We went to the top of Parc Guell for the view, to a point known as the Place of the Three Crosses, where I got a lovely view of Barcelona but had to limit the urge to burst out laughing at the sight of Tower Agrab, which looks like nothing more than a gigantic multicoloured penis. The words 'fucking the sky', pardon my French (Spanish?), sprang to mind.
There was a busker at the Place of the Three Crosses who I will swear was uni-days Evan: neck-length hair, hilariously garish mostly-yellow shirt, guitar, sunglasses, rockstar attitude. He sang terribly, but was so damn earnest about it that it was kind of cute, so we gave him money.
After that we wandered off in search of foods and found nothing but a pizzeria. So we asked a local for directions and he recommended us a 'good cheap place' but warned us that everything was closed because in Spain, 8pm is early for dinner, kind of like a 5pm dinner in Australia. Thwarted by culture, we returned to the hotel. When we later sallied forth, the 'good cheap place' turned out to be some kind of organic hippy shop with mediocre food and no good wine. Damn you, artist subculture!
13th January
I will swear with honesty brutal enough to club baby seals with that I don't remember what I did today. No, that is not completely accurate; I remember what I did today in vague terms like breakfast shopping shopping shopping shopping shopping disorientedness shopping shopping Gaudi shopping shopping shopping shopping paella shopping shopping shopping the Gothic Quarter shopping shopping shopping shopping. (When you come to Europe, please don't shop in France. Shop in Spain. Eat in Spain. Booze in Spain. Whore in Spain. Everything is cheaper in Spain.)
My feet! Red-hot needles! The conjunction thereof that seems to have taken place!
So in place of a journal entry I will present Observations Of Interest From Europe.
Observation of Interest about Barcelona, number one: it is the capital of Catalunia, a province of Spain where they will refuse to speak the Castellano dialect - the dialect known to the outside world as Spanish. The written languages are similar enough that a Castellano speaker could decipher Catalan, but a Catalan talking at full pace would be indecipherable to a Castellano. I, being neither a native Castellano or educated to some degree in Catalan, was totally useless as an interpreter because people would rather speak English than Castellano.
Observation of Interest about Barcelona, number two: when the team playing against Barcelona FC scores a goal, the mood is something not unlike a funeral parlour during the middle of the service. Tears are not amiss, and even expected.
Observation of Interest about the French, number one: they are obsessed with beauty. Un-beautiful building being built? Protest in the streets. Un-beautiful decorations for the Eiffel Tower? Protest in the streets. Un-beautiful team (read: anyone but the French) winning the Euro Cup? Protest in the streets. It should surprise no one that President Sarkozy married a supermodel.
Observation of Interest about the French, number two: social norms. The Minister for Justice has a brother in jail and a child of unknown paternity, and nobody cares. These are social norms I can agree with, understand, and respect: not the Hollywood style so favoured by the US and Australia, where the moment you get on TV your life doesn't belong to you any more.
Observation of interest about the Europeans: they drive like madmen down narrow and often one-way streets. They switch lanes at the drop of a gear and take corners at 20km above the speed limit. But their parking spaces require an uncanny amount of skill and narrow manouevring; cars are nearly kissing bumpers. Forget owning a big car in Europe. You'd never get parking.
14th January
I woke up to the melodic and thoroughly unwelcome chimes of Jean-Yves' alarm clock at 8:30am, whereupon I lay in bed and stared at the pillow until I felt human enough to get up and get clothed. Breakfast, then a brief walk through the narrow back alleyways to the garage where the car was parked. Goodbye, Barcelona. You're not bad. Same place, same time?
We had only one mission: reach the town of Figueres. Figueres is a one-trick pony, but it's a very famous trick: the artist Salvador Dali. His legacy to his hometown was the Teatro-Museo Dali, a converted theater that is like a slice of insight into a crazy, crazy mind.
Reaching there was harder than we thought due to construction works that took so long to circumvent that Jean-Yves would nap whenever we had to stop and get us to wake him up. We got to Figueres and spent fifteen minutes driving around trying to find the museum, only to have it loom out at us from behind an alleyway in hideous flesh-pink and cream tones, the roof dotted with eggs like it had been attacked by a giant hen.
We spent another five minutes looking for the entry and being continuously redirected, until finally we managed to make our way in.
There is nothing much I can say about Dali. Dali needs to be experienced rather than described. I am not sure I'm deluded enough to call it part of his charm - I doubt there was much charming about Dali - but it is a fascinating, fascinating place. The further into the museum you go, the more convinced you get of three things.
1) If you dried Dali's brain and inhaled it it would have the same effect as lots and lots of LSD
2) Freud would have a field day with Dali
3) The fine line between genius and madness was, to Dali, nothing more than a bright pink smear dotted with strange egg-shapes in lurid colours.
I find that after a while, there's something about Dali's paintings that makes a person incredibly uncomfortable. He didn't paint to be contemplated, though, he painted to be looked at and to attack rather than invite. But at the same time there's a claustrophobic, feverish intensity to everything he created, as though everything is a snapshot of a lifelong hallucination. Of interest: his body is actually entombed in the Teatro-Museo Dali, commemorated by an uncharacteristically somber plaque.
One piece I particularly liked was a piece of jewellery he designed. The shape of it on the outside is a golden heart in the traditional heart shape. On the inside: a heart as it actually looks, made from rubies and diamonds, and it throbs like a real heart would. It's unnervingly, terrifyingly beautiful.
Also, Dali had a bitching mustache.
