Our introduction to Spain was a really pleasant one, and pretty indicative of the five days we spent there. Immediately, we knew we weren't in Dublin. The air was warm and moist, and everything smelled like orange juice and wet trees. We shouldered our bags and, amused, followed the directions to our first hostel, a place out in the hilly suburbs --- "walk 500 paces up the mountain." Something had been lost in translation, we assumed. It couldn't have been a mountain we needed to march up!
It was, though, and it took much more than 500 paces to reach the summit. But what a reward, once we got there! Our bunks were really comfortable and actually kind of good-looking, a far cry from the sleepaway camp aesthetic we’d seen in so many hostels.
We threw our bags down and found a sweet Spanish senyora who handed us trays and plates and bowls of food --- our first meal in Barcelona, a real feast! Tomato soup ladled over rice and peas, fish sticks, good bread, salad with unbelievable olives, and a poached apple. The fish sticks I fed to a cat that was creeping around my ankles, but everything --- the food, the company, the view --- was wonderful.
We spent our first day exploring Barcelona, wandering up and down Las Ramblas, the main drag in the city center. La Boqueria, a giant marketplace, provided our entertainment. Stacks and stacks of fruits we’d never seen before, crates of eels and crabs and seashells meant to have their innards scraped out and eaten with broth. And of course, new and foreign words yelled at us.
Catalan is not at all an angular language, so no matter what volume it’s being spoken at, it sounds nice. Lots of eus, and xos, not many zs. It’s similar to French and Portuguese to my ear, at least. And Barcelona being bilingual is really something amazing. In galleries and museums where there are no English translations of texts, reading both panels of Castillian Spanish and Catalan will clue you in on most of the big ideas, in terms of the English cognates and similarities to other Romance languages.
And if all of this weren't enough for our first impressions, we had the absolute terror and delight of climbing the 500-plus paces back up the mountain to our hostel in the pitch black, clutching each other and hoping we didn't trip and fall off a cliff. Imagine the three of us, tiptoeing and clutching our keys between our knuckles to stab anyone who might try to emerge from the bushes and abduct us. Instead, we came across these little javelinas rummaging for food between the yucca plants and the morning glory.
If they had had tusks, we mightn't have gotten so close to take pictures. Hindsight's 20-20!
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