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| Gracia: my Barcelona neighbourhood, on my last day of wandering |
I left Barcelona yesterday morning, with a couple of excellent Portugese custard tarts in my bag to share with Georg in Berlin. So here's an account of my last week down there in Catalonia...
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| View from the Sant Jeroni lookout at Montserrat |
On Tuesday I took the train to Montserrat and went for a long walk through the beautiful forest to the top, after getting the cable car and 'funicular' - little mountain tram - up some of the way first. There were many tourons (a word I learned in Amercia, for tourist/moron) in the Montserrat village so walking up here was the best way to enjoy the place. No tourons up here! Just peace and quiet, and...
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| I got this picture from here |
...wild mountain goats!! I had Jason's binoculars with me, so I got a really good look at a couple of these beautiful goats, whose Catalan scientific name is 'Cabra salvatge'. Just googling now to try and find this picture, I see that their horns grow much longer than this. The ones I saw had horns just like this one above. So maybe they were juveniles.
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| Can you spot the tiny mountain goat on the rock face in the centre? |
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| Just some of the cool rocky mountain forms at Montserrat. The tiny speck on the left hand side of the highest peak there is a rock climber. |
So that was a great day.
On Wednesday I found some really good tapas, thanks to
this blog, at
Tapas 24. It was as good as Movida!
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| Bacallà amb samfaina (in Catalan) / Bacalao con samfaina (in Spanish - just to illustrate the subtle difference in the languages) / Salt cod with ratatouille, with a little bit of aioli on top of the fish, and finished under the grill, with a bit of thyme. MMM MMM. |
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| Postres: Xiuxos! - amazing custard-filled super light flaky crispy fresh donuts; awesome with a glass of moscatel. It was easy for me to remember the Spanish & Catalan word for dessert 'postres' - because in NZ some of us call dessert 'afters' and this word 'postres' is surely derived from the latin for 'after' - 'post'. |
That's all I did on Wednesday! On Thursday I went to a forest of a different kind...
The incredible
Sagrada Familia, Antoni Gaudi's masterpiece, which I liked so much better on the inside than the outside. Totally wow. Although I did learn in the museum (which is underneath the church) that several of the wacky-looking forms on the exterior are literally based on plant forms that were growing in the local area back in 1882, when construction began. And there's so much detail on the outside, it's hard to take note of it all - like I didn't notice that the gargoyles on the exterior were creatures like lizards, snakes and frogs (local species too!) until I read about it in the museum. Maybe when all the cranes and scaffolding have gone in the year 2026 I will like the exterior more.
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| And I think I went at a perfect time - 6pm, so the afternoon light coming in from outside was beautiful. |
Underneath was the crypt, a more conventional space in comparison, but still very pretty.
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| Looking up at the centre of the ceiling |
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| The pretty alcove where Gaudi is buried. Was the thing to bury notable people in churches back in the day. In Rome, I saw Raphael's grave in the Pantheon (a pic is in this flickr set) |
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Earlier that day I visited Gaudi's former house in Park Guell, which was a short walk up the hill from the place I was staying. There was a good view of Barcelona up there, but again, too many tourons.
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| Ceiling in Gaudi's house |
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| The pretty bathroom. |
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| Floor tiles in the house. |
Then on Saturday I saw some amazing Romanesque and Gothic paintings from Catalonia in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya. It's been so cool to be able to take photos in the museums over here in Europe, so I can look back and be reminded of the beautiful things I've seen.
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| Gothic amazing-ness circa 1295 |
I've made a flickr album of my
MNAC highlights
here. On Saturday night I saw the wonderful
Sharon Van Etten play songs with her band from her excellent
new album.
What happened on Sunday? Not much. I went up the hill of Montjuic to get a view of Barcelona. Those pics never look good, so I didn't take any - it's just another city sprawl like any other. But I did like this horse against the moody sky:
On Montjuic hill I was also hoping I might find a kind of
secret weekly flamenco event my airbnb host
Susanna told me about. Alas, with summer basically over, there was no such event
to be found. Next time...
And on Monday, I visited Gaudi's test run for La Sagrada Familia, out at
Colonia Guell. It was like a rough sketch in three dimensions.
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| Exterior view of the rough arches. |
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| Super rough interior columns |
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| The windows were so hippy for being created in the early 1900's. |
That night I ended a great couple weeks in Barcelona with
pinchos!
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| Not a great photo, but just to give you an idea of what pinchos are. |
If you clicked on the link above, you would have learned that 'pincho' literally means 'thorn' or 'spike'. So a pinchos place is a type of tapas place where you go to eat little spiked snacks. It's kind of like being at a wedding or a party. And those of you who know me well, know that my favourite place to be at a party, is the food table. So, this was my kind of place, needless to say.
What you do is, you stand around at the bar, with your plate issued by the friendly waiter, and peruse the offerings, and then make your choices. You can even pick up the plate to inspect it up close to find the best looking pincho. Then at the end, you are charged per toothpick. So it's kind of like yum cha. The waiter will also bring hot fresh plates out from the kitchen periodically and offer them around - just like you're at a party! From the hot plates I had an awesome slice of tortilla with bacalla, and an equally tasty mushroom croquette. MMMM. I think if we were there earlier (than 10.30pm on a Monday) there might have been more hot plate action. Based on the final bill, I would estimate that these cost about 2 Euros each.
Pretty, pretty, pretty good (that link is for Lydia, with love).
And now I'm back at Antoine & Georg's place in Berlin, where I began this trip 4 months ago now...
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| Summertime towels at Georg's place |
...when it was still warm enough to eat icecream...
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| Georg in those awesome shades with I think it was raspberry & chevre flavour. Typical Berlin wall covered in detritus in background. |
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| Me with rhubarb! Such a Berlin flavour I thought. |
...and now Autumn is on it's way. Leaves are changing colour and blowing around. I thought today when I went for a stroll around the boys' Neukölln neighbourhood that maybe the leaves put on such a colourful and charming show for us to cushion the blow of what's coming - winter, and coldness, and ice not in cones, but falling from the sky - yes, snow!
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| Autumn leaves littering the streets in Berlin. |
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| The towels have changed colour too. |
So I'm done in Europe. On Friday I fly to New York, and I'll stay in Brooklyn. I still have loads of photos to put up on flickr, so I may do some retrospective posts pointing to them, as the inspiration hits me.
Until then, au revoir! adios! tschüs!
