Barcelona 2.0

So! The javelinas have made their grand entrance. If that were the most exciting thing that happened to us in Barcelona, it would still make a great story. However! We still had four more jam-packed days in the city.

We moved on to our second hostel, perfectly located on the Paseig de Gracia, Barcelona’s answer to the Champs-Elysees. And we were just a short walk from Placa Catalunya, just like Union Square in Greenwich Village. Below Placa Catalunya stretches Las Ramblas, the main drag of Barcelona. Along Las Ramblas there are cozy cafes, Hemingway's favorite absinthe haunts, and quite a few merchants selling plants and animals of all sorts.
Believe you me, it took every ounce of willpower I had not to buy a chipmunk as a little companion. Only 15 Euro!

About six more NYU kids met up with us there --- although somehow I was put in a different room from them, which was not altogether unpleasant, since my Brazilian roommates all looked like disciples or fishers of men and had strong penchants for playing “Dear Prudence” on their guitars at all hours of the day. That’s half the fun of budget hostelling, isn’t it?

Our Barcelona days were spent trying to get as much sunshine and culture into our lives as we possibly could. We took in the Museu Picasso (a mind-blowing collection of his early exercises and artwork, so humbling to look at what he produced at only 15 years old!) and a Alphonse Mucha exhibit at the CaixaForum (beautiful, feminine posters in the style of Toulouse-Lautrec) and blew dozens of Euros on postcards and prints. We walked kilometer after kilometer, taking in the strong Spanish faces. There’s something about the “Old World” countries, I’ve found. It’s effortless to look at the man sitting across from you on the subway and imagine his face in a 17th century court. Something about the eyebrows and the nose --- they’re just timeless, compared to all of our muddled American features.

That’s something else --- in Ireland, we blend in fairly well. With our pale film-school faces and big eyes, we’re actually considered kind of beautiful here! Not so in Barcelona. While here in Dublin we can get away with messy Rapunzel hair and pasty arms, in Spain we looked like short albino mushrooms, all moist and mutant. It was humbling, and a little mortifying.

You can imagine our new priority was to soak in as much sun as possible. Carmen and I started a feeding frenzy in the harbor, coaxing fish two feet long to fight over cookie crumbs. All the beaches in Barcelona itself are manmade, but that only means that the sand is dark and trucked in monthly, and falls like cornstarch under our feet. It was such a welcome rest from the gloomy seashores of Ireland --- the Mediterranean, how exotic!
Pasty Irish moonface and all, I was really, really happy there.