Barcelona, because Barça is just the soccer team

Okay team, take a deep breath and get ready to dive into the craziness of last weekend.

Friday through Sunday: we excursion-ed to Barcelona, a six, seven-hour bus ride to the north of Alicante. So we spent the majority of Friday in the bus, one of a caravan of three that schlepped 120-some-odd CIEE students of all three program levels from downtown Alicante at 7:00 am, and rolled into Barcelona around 5:30, 6:00pm. To be fair, we did stop at a bodega on the way.

The bodega//winery was called Cordiníu, the family name of the founder (though the next few generations passed the business down through the daughters, so the family name changed quickly). And yes, the date on that pillar (outside the front gate of the winery) is 1515. That's how long this place has been around.

They make cava here, a sparkling wine that's made exactly the same way as champagne, but as Lluis, our tour guide, informed us, European regulations state that only wines from the Champagne region of France can legally be called champagne, so this bodega makes cava. Lluis explained the process to us, but I don't remember the details. He walked us around the lovely grounds of the winery, and through the old processing building, which is now a museum where you can see old wine presses, ancient wine bottles, "the oldest bottle of cava in the world" (which we knew was a joke but didn't know how until we turned the corner and saw the big amethyst geode shaped like a wine bottle). I touched wine barrels from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There were wine barrels everywhere, stacked against walls, and in whole rooms, but Luis told us that their primary purpose these days is aesthetic. They don't keep the wine in them anymore because the wood affects the flavor, unlike the specially pressurized metal containers they use now.

He took us down to the cellars, full of green glass bottles covered in varying layers of dust. He explained the process of getting the sediment out of the bottles down there - how the bottles are stored upside-down at an angle, and rotated occasionally to bring all the sediment down to the neck of the bottle. (Remember this, Dad? I knew about this, so I must have watched something on Food Network with you?) They then used to uncap the bottles by hand, literally with a thumb over the bottle opening, and expertly release just enough pressure to send the sediment at the top spewing out without emptying the bottle. Lluis informed us that he'd tried it, and it had been a complete disaster. Today, technology has again taken over, and now they have a machine that freezes that wine and sediment at the very top, so when the bottle is uncapped, the little cube of ice pops out, and the rest of the wine is left intact, without sediment.

The cellars were huge, with signs on the walls that were effectively street signs, so that you don't get lost. To impress us even more by the expanse of wine storage, Lluis told us that the cellars hold 100 million liters, or 30 kilometers of wine! We got a glimpse of those 30 kilometers in the form of a short ride on a golf cart train through the low-ceilings passageways lined with dusty racks of bottles. Several of us agreed later that it was strongly reminiscent of Gringotts:

We exited the cellars by way of the tasting room, where we got to try two different varieties of cava, one rosé made with pinot noir grapes, that was light and floral and delicious, and a white that was decidedly drier, and seemed to be more strongly carbonated, and was also very good. After a quick picnic out in the parking lot, we headed back out on the road for the last few hours until Barcelona.

We had free time upon our arrival, so after checking into the hotel, a gang of us wandered around the streets near our hotel, one of which is named after me (not really). "Passeig de Gràcia" is Catalán, the traditional language of the region of Cataluña, and it is a much more prominent part of daily life in Barcelona than Valenciano (the equivalent here in the region of Valencia) is in Alicante. Many people in Barcelona speak Catalán more frequently than standard Castilian Spanish and it appears (in some cases exclusively) on almost every sign I saw. "Passeig de Gràcia" translates to Castilian: "Paseo de Gracia", or English: "Avenue of Grace".

As it got dark, we formed a Whitman gang, and met up with two more, temporarily Barcelonian Whitties in Plaza Cataluña, which is enormous and filled with pigeons by day, and enormous and prettily lit at night. It's surrounded by giant buildings of varying ages and styles, as seen in the background of this picture. The oddly sleek Corte Ingles (which is a sort of superstore chain) was definitely an odd man out, architecturally speaking.

From Plaza Cataluña, we went in search of cena//dinner, deciding to opt for a restaurant known to Amy, one of our Barcelonian companions, as a place for traditional catalán food. We ate a regional specialty, called calçots, which are grilled second-sprouted greens of onions. To eat, you peel off the charred tough outer layer, dip the green in a tomato-base sauce, and awkwardly lower it into your mouth from above. We also ate toasted bread with tomato and alioli (garlic mayonnaise) to start, and finished with crema de catalunya, a custardly dessert that sort of resembles creme brulée, but is flavored differently - with orange, I think. The entire meal was the sort of affair where a picture is worth a thousand words, so I give you these:

Calçots and Pan con tomate:

Charlotte, following the steller examples of Amy and Brian, tackles the eating:

Marybeth enjoys crema de catalunya:

I've neglected to mention the assorted meat platter that came between calçots and crema, not because the tiny steak, lamb chop, turkey, and traditional catalán sausage weren't delicious, but because we really didn't look funny eating them.

Moving on: Saturday morning. We kicked off our only full day in the city with a walking tour of the older center of Barcelona. We started with the obligatory introduction to Gaudí. Meet Antoni Gaudí, architect, 1852-1926, and pretty much the biggest deal in Barcelona. And, to be fair, it's well deserved. We started our day gawking at his impressive Casa Batlló (that's Catalán too, and no, I don't remember how to pronounce it). There are lots of stories and interpretations regarding the design of this particular house, but my favorite is the Saint George and the Dragon version. Not unlike Gaudí, George is also a big deal in Barcelona, and small representations of him slaying all manner of dragons can be found in the detailing on buildings all around the city. Gaudí went a little more abstract with his depiction: see the dragon in the roofline of the house? He's just hanging out up top there, while all the oddly shaped balconies? Do they remind you of skulls with bone columns at all? Because after all, the dragon ate a lot of virgins before George came along. (The happier interpretation, our tour guide informed us, is that the balconies are party masks, and the colorful mosaic behind them, which doesn't show up so well in photos, is confetti.)

The rest of the tour is best highlighted in photos:

La Rambla: teaming with tourists/thieves' hunting ground:

The streets get narrower the farther into the old city you get:

Window of a church:

A weekend market in a plaza hidden in the labyrinth of the old city:
A wall in the old Jewish barrio//neighborhood near the synagogue:

Stone man, real bird:

Inside the Cathedral of Barcelona:

Street musicians - she was playing Pachelbel's Canon:

This is all that's left of what used to be a Roman temple:

La Iglesia de Santa Maria del Mar//Saint Mary of the Sea:

After the tour, we were on our own for a few hours to get lunch. Three of us ventured to la Boqueria, the most epic farmers' market you can imagine, and loaded up with bread, cheese, ham (obviously), fruit, veggies, nuts, and the most spectacular fresh juice. We set up picnic in Plaza Cataluña, and enjoyed it all immensely.

After lunch we headed to Gaudí destination #2: Parç Güell (basically, our friend Antoni's playground):

Gaudí's house, which we walked through, but wasn't that cool. We did get to see his bathroom...

The view down and out from the enormous plaza. It was breathtaking despite the slight haze. On a clear day, I imagine it would be spectacular.

Underneat that same plaza. The acoustics down here are really cool...

...as these musicians demonstrated.

This style was fairly typical of the rest of the grounds:

Gaudí's style is very organic, and fits into the landscape in an interesting and unique way. Parç Güell is a fascinating place to wander around. It's also home to what was, I think, the most expensive Coke I have ever bought, which, in a country where Coke can be cheaper than water, is saying something.

For dinner, we wandered back down to the part of the city we had toured earlier, noting cool lighting and shadows, even though it decided to rain for a while. We ended up bypassing tapas bar after tapas bar and ate at a little stir-fry restaurant called "Wok to Walk". The cooks were Asian, and we had a mish-mash conversation of English and Spanish mixing Barcelona culture with American stereotypes, and generally having a fun time.
Sunday: morning - la Sagrada Familia; afternoon - bus.

So, la Sagrada Familia. It's a church - I guess that's the place to start? It was Gaudí destination #3, and is considered (completely accurately) his masterpiece. The construction was begun during his lifetime, but when he realized that he wasn't going to live to see it completed, he started working up models and drawings of the whole thing so that they would know what to do when he was dead. The drawings and models themselves are spectacularly beautiful, and the real thing is just awe-inspiring. The thing is, it's a good job Gaudí foresaw the potential length of the job because, just to refresh your memory, he's been dead for 85 years now, and guess what. His church? Still not done. They're currently aiming to have it done for the hundredth anniversary of his death. We'll see. There's still scaffolding everywhere. However, they did recently finish the interior, in time for the Pope's visit last year, so it's only relatively recently that visitors such as we have been able to see the inside as well as the outer façades.

Perhaps the most striking thing about la Sagrada Familia is the sheer number of things that there are to look at. The entire building, inside and out, is covered in spectacular detail and chock-full of a symbolism that Gaudí intended to be intelligible to the general public. Two opposite sides of the church bear representations of the birth and the passion respectively, and the interior walls, floor and ceiling are covered in artistic symbols that are just begging Dan Brown to set his next book in Barcelona.

This might be my favorite example:

The betrayal of Judas. Note the devil in snake form sliding around on the bottom right, and take a good long gander at the cryptogram on the left. Keep adding numbers, and see how many times you can come up with 33, Jesus' age when he died.


Then you walk indoors.
It's like walking into a great marble forest, with pillars every which direction, geometrically arranged but with the sense of being completely natural. The church itself is shaped in a cross, with (per the orientation of this picture) the altar in front, main entrance - as yet incomplete - behind, Mary's doors to the Passion on the left, and Joseph's doors to the Birth on the right. Their respective figures guard the side doors. Four central pillars support the center, two of them appearing in the foreground of this photo. The colored lamps near the top bear the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in Catalán, and the two secondary columns nearer the altar have lamps for Peter and Paul. The altarpiece itself hangs, suspended, crucifix under a canopy above which grows wheat and under which hang grapes, representative of bread and wine. The whole thing appears to be ascending up into the gold-tinged light streaming down from what will be, when completed, Mary's tower, bearing on the outside a silver star and a crown in homage to the Queen of Heaven. It's not finished. On the inside however, it lets in the light into which a crucified Jesus ascends, up toward the more strongly colored gold triangle near the top. That's God, our tour guide says. The whole thing is shockingly beautiful.

The last thing I saw before we left, in search of lunch before the bus ride back to Alicante, was the school. It's in a corner of the enormous block where the church lives, and it's been in use as a school for the children of the workers. It's open as a museum now, with Gaudí's workshop displayed in one room, old black-and-white photographs of the classroom with colorful drawings done by children hanging in another. It's an open, cheery, comfortable building - an interesting contrast to the staggering awe of the structure that shadows it.


After a quick lunch in one of the many cafeterias in the few blocks around la Sagrada Familia, we were back on the bus. Several playlists, a short uncomfortable nap, and a stop in an impressive Spanish rest stop later, we were only a few hours out - just enough time to enjoy Gladiator, dubbed in Spanish, of course, with Spanish subtitles. The only distracting thing was that they didn't match up. Which seems a totally anticlimactic observation with which to end a weekend so full of new and beautiful things, but there you have it. Russell Crowe mouthing one thing, speaking another, and having it written out differently still was pretty odd.

Well, check that off the bucket list...

My host family and I went fishing in the Mediterranean today. No big deal.

After a late morning breakfast, we got dressed, gathered things, made sandwiches, etc, and were off. We drove up the coast a few minutes to a town called El Campello and walked out to a rocky point that I was assured was chulisimo//very cool. We were excited by the weather, which in Alicante (and indeed when we got out of the car in Campello) seemed perfect. Warmer than it's been since I got here, sunny, not a cloud in the sky... well, a picture's worth a thousand words:When we got out to the rocks, it was a slightly chillier than perfect. Of course, compared to the Pacific Coast, it was practically tropical, but my host sisters complained of the cold first thing. The wind was the real problem. My sister Ali explained that Alicante is sheltered by the surrounding hills and mountains from the brunt of wind and weather that hits other places along the coast, and indeed, it was much windier just ten, twenty minutes north than it had been in the city. Nevertheless, we made the best of it, throwing bread into the surrounding sea to tempt any cruising fish. My other sister Andrea set herself up with a long pole that she called valenciano, in reference to Valencia, which is the name of a city, but also this particular region of Spain. She hooked a piece of stale bread onto the end, and perched happily on a rock, the hood of her sweatshirt pulled up against the wind.

My host mom and I clambered around on the rocks, and she explained to me that this particular spot had been an ancient Roman village. There are a few scattered remains of walls and buildings up above, fenced off and open to visitors only during certain hours. But the rocks down by the sea were used by the Romans to form an old-school fishery. They shaped the rocks into pools, compartments where they could, with little floodgates, conceivably control the water flow and the fish populations. Very, very cool.
Other man-made holes in the rock have a more romantic story attached - one that gives it's name to this particular place: Los baños de la Reina//The Queen's baths. Story goes that in ancient (again, Roman) times, the queen would come here, of all the places in the Roman Empire, to hang out in the summertime. And looking around, wind aside, I can completely believe it. I can't wait to come back when the weather gets warmer, and swim around in the ancient Roman queen's pool.

We fished, picnic-ed, and ended up shivering. Andrea was determined to catch something, so we lingered, huddled on the lee side of the rocks, while Ali and I discussed her English class, the lyrics of popular songs in Spanish and English, how she finds starfish and octopi here with her cousin Dani in the summers, and how she wants to be a marine biologist. By the time we made it back to the car, we were all glad for its sun-baked interior.

Next on the list: actually catch a fish.

¡Que raro!

Welcome to the world of all-purpose Spanish phrases. The above is one such, generally used to express varying levels of disbelief or shock. In my experience, it spans the emotional spectrum from a semi-committal "huh, you don't say," to a freaked-out "whoa, dude, that's totally bizarre", and thus is appropriate for all manner of occasions, from the on-going saga of your host grandmother's allergy medicine (And none of the doctors knew what was wrong!? Que raro...), to a(nother) mysterious irregularity in the bus schedule (The 34 usually comes at 12:05 but today it came at 11:57? Que raro...). Lots and lots of things can be raro, which lends to it's all-purpose nature, and makes it an excellent opener to a blog post about some weird things that I've seen during this first month in Alicante.

I feel as though lots of people have been asking me that: What's the weirdest thing you've seen? What's so different in Spain than in the States? For the most part, it seems like it's been Spaniards who want to know - my host father keeps asking me if I recognize things, if we have something like this in the States. He seems almost disappointed that the answer is generally, yes. It's not as if things here are the same as they are at home, because of course it's different here. I'm in a different country, different culture, different history, different brand names (sometimes). But the fact remains that there have been very few things that I have noticed and thought - Wow, that's odd. (Que raro.) It's happening so infrequently, in fact, that I've been keeping a list of the weird things, adding one or two every five days or so. They're not all strange-weird. Sometimes they're just cool, like

1) the fact that postal workers here, the ones who drive around the big yellow vans and collect mail from the big yellow receptacles, wear normal clothes. Not only normal, but the postwoman I saw while waiting for the bus the other day was really nicely dressed. In the States she could have been going to work in an office, and a nice one at that.

But sometimes they're strange, like

2) the guy at the plaza, walking around the children's playground with his daughter, who was running circles around him. He was disposing of a cigarette (because as of January 1st it's illegal to smoke in children's parks, which people don't seem to be protesting nearly as much as not being able to smoke in bars. Go figure), but more importantly and noticeably, he was wearing pink pants. Okay, you're thinking, that's weird... but not that weird. Allow me to elaborate on the pants. They were unflatteringly tight, considering the man's less than svelte build, and appeared to be of a denim-esque material, although perhaps they only gave that impression because the fading on them was reminiscent of faded jeans. Except pink. And tight. And on a middle-aged man walking through a park with his daughter. Maybe you had to be there.

And then sometimes they're just funny-lookin', like

3) that other time at that other bus stop (because bus stops are prime observation posts) when a guy stopped his Vespa at a nearby traffic light. This in and of itself: not unusual. Well-dressed guy, probably in his late twenties or early thirties, leather jacket, motorcycle helmet, headed home for the midday meal on his snazzy little almost-motorcycle. And then I looked down, and the illusion was shattered by the enormous (and I'm talking enormous) package of diapers sitting on the Vespa "floor" between his feet.

Or there's irony, like

4) the sloppy graffiti adorning the side of a building adjacent to a vacant lot along the bus route from the university to el centro. It reads "No tirar basura."//"Don't throw trash."

And then, the raro to end all raros, there's

5) Kung Fu Fighting. As in the song.* Every afternoon, periodically, one can hear, clearly, from my room, strains of that epic musical piece, played over some sort of loudspeaker at such a volume as to be heard, I would suspect, by the entire neighborhood. Not the whole song, just part of it. Then, a few hours later, the ritual is repeated. Twice, sometimes three times a day? My schedule is such that I haven't been able to pin down exact frequency or timing, nor have I ascertained location. It's all quite a mystery. And it's (in the Spanish tradition of repeating words for emphasis) raro raro raro.

*For those of you unfamiliar with this essential piece of culture, I attempt to include as an example, this (provided I actually know how to attach a video to a blog post):