A rainy day in Barcelona – one of the very few so far – but that is a good time for the first post in a blog of our year in Barcelona.
Pat arrived on 9-29 to move into our flat. We had arranged the rental before arriving with the help of the internet and the generous friend of a friend who looked at candidates, reported, and took pictures. Steve came 2 weeks later, on 10-13. Altogether, Pat has been here just over 4 weeks and Steve 2.
We knew that one should be careful to say Barcelona is in Catalunya, not Spain, but hadn’t realized how bilingual it is. There is as much or more Catalan spoken and written as Spanish – or Castellano as they say here. Even to give the address of our flat one has to choose. In Catalan, the flat is on Passeig de Sant Joan, and in Castellano on Paseo de San Juan. Getting in the cab at the airport I carefully repeated the address as I had rehearsed it – Passeig de Sant Joan (“g” pronounced as “tch”) – only to be corrected by the cabbie: Si, San Juan. Presumably he isn’t a native of Catalunya.
However you say it, our location is wonderful. It’s a 10 minute walk to Sagrada Familia – Gaudi’s large, still-under-construction church – and 15 minutes in the other direction to Passeig de Gracia (en Catalan), a central street in Barcelona that is home to many of other gems of modernisme architecture.
The street itself is delightful – there is a wide park in the middle between the car lanes with playgrounds, walking and bike paths, park benches, ping pong tables, and (last but certainly not least) grounds for boules.
At the end of our block there is a fountain (although I haven’t yet figured out exactly the statue represents).
Nearly every block of Sant Joan has a playground. Here is the one across from our flat; our building is in the middle of the picture behind the playground. The playground always is full of children. The other night I went out a little after 9pm and there must have been 15 children between the ages of 6 and 12 still playing. The Spanish (and Catalonians) do stay up late.
Passeig de Sant Joan was designed as one of the major streets in the Eixample. [The “x” in Catalan, we’ve learned, is pronounced “ch”; thus a Xiné restaurant is a Chinese restaurant .] Eixample was an early exercise in city planning, a grid of blocks laid out at the end of the 1850s. Before that, Barcelona was constricted behind city walls built by the (hated) Bourbon Spanish kings of Madrid after they besieged and conquered Barcelona in 1714. [Catalonia had made the mistake of supporting the non-Bourbon, and losing, candidate for the vacated Spanish throne.] Most of the area outside the walls was open, with only separate villages, such as Gracia, that since have been incorporated into Barcelona. The Bourbon walls were finally dismantled in the 1850s – apparently with much glee – and the Eixample was laid out as a new, planned city.
The most distinctive characteristic of the Eixample’s design is that the four corners of each bock are chamfered, cut back at a 45 degree angle at each intersection, as shown here on a couple of corners near our flat.
This creates a nice feeling of space – but is a bit inconvenient for walking. No walking a straight line in Eixample – to cross the street at each intersection you have to cut back to the point before the street widens into the intersection.
We are adjusting to the rhythm of living and shopping in a European city. Or perhaps I should say we are recovering our habits from when we lived in Paris 16 years ago, such as going each day to one of the many patisserias within a few blocks for bread. If anything the variety of breads is greater than in Paris. There are varieties of baguettes, much like in France, but also more indigenous, long but flatter, coarser breads. Here is the patisseria just a few doors from our flat.
And there are many nearby fruit (and other) markets.
And yes, that is Pat shopping at her favorite fruit stand (tomatoes that day were 3kg for 1 euro). The fruits and vegetables are a real treat – inexpensive and great quality. Last night we had figs (0.40 euros for 6) and fresh pineapple (from Costa Rica)
Another treat is the availability of decent, inexpensive table wine. I bought almost 3 litres (2 litre bottles plus 750 ml) at the market yesterday for less than 3 euros. And a shop two doors from our flat will fill any container with wine for 1.30 to 1.40 per euro.And I mean any container. We had a plastic water bottle filled with red wine. And as we walked out a little old lady came in with a jam jar. The reds we tried are drinkable, the whites less so.
With that I'll end this first post. We have been wandering around the nearby sights – down Sant Joan to the Parc de Ciutadella, up the hill to Parc Guell designed by Gaudi, over to the fortress and parks on Montjuic, and around the narrow streets and quaint squares of nearby Gracia, originally a separate town outside the city walls. But they will have to wait for later posts to the blog. Maybe by then I'll have figured out how to manipulate the layout of my posts a little better!
SB
