Saturday, October 10, 2015 - San Sebastián or Donostia

Finding the washer still locked this morning, we abandon the wet towels inside it as we have no choice anyway. We leave the flat’s keys on the table and descend to our waiting taxi, the driver having arrived just as promised. He takes us and all our junk to Barcelona Sants. For disabled loading, the train people want us there an hour early. For a 7:30AM train, this translates into a 6:30AM appearance at the train station. In the early morning hours, Bear forages, gathering tea for me, coffee for himself, accompanied once again by bad cafeteria train station quasi-food.

Slightly before 7:30AM, the RENFE people load Bird and me onto the train. Our adventure begins! The train leaves the station, heading northeast. Wouldn’t it be cool if trains still chugged? Probably not, those coal engines really stank and blew soot everywhere. Ah well, so much for romanticism. Aboard, gazing out of the window, I watch the terrain change from gentle Mediterranean seaside to harsh endless desert. A few green fields pop up, fed by irrigation, the only green for miles in any direction. A misquotation of My Fair Lady floats through my head “the rain in Spain does NOT fall mainly on the plain”. In the rather early morning, Bear slumbers contently. After an hour or so, while he snores, olive trees dominate the landscape, grove after grove after grove of them. Leaving the olive trees and desert behind, we approach the Atlantic through the mountains of Basque country. The scenery becomes gentler and green, much greener. The train continues onward as the land rises, while the hills roll with pretty deciduous trees. After all of the hustle-bustle of Barcelona, we look forward to a quiet, relaxing weekend by the sea.

We arrive in San Sebastián around 1 PM. A very kind English-speaking RENFE employee escorts us from the train into a very small station. He tells us to arrive twenty minutes early for Monday’s trip down to Madrid. He then calls a handicap taxi cab for us. The cabbie, another Anglophone, delivers us near our Airbnb apartment.

Patricia, the Airbnb manager, meets us on the street. The taxi can’t park in front of the apartment because a huge street fair has monopolized all space in front of the flat.

Pushing our way through the fair, we gain and enter our temporary home. Wow! What a nice place! We have real wood, with everything easily large enough for a wheelchair, for good or for ill: smaller places often have more things for me to grab. Unfortunately, I then may encounter the problem of pulling things off of the walls. Details!

Patricia talks to us for about an hour, telling us all the good things in San Sebastián. I ask if the Basques plan to secede from Spain as the Catalans voted to. She sighs, replying, “All the money is up here or in Barcelona. Madrid will never let us go. Down south, they have 50% unemployment.” How do you run a country with 50% unemployment? (Fact checking, I find Spanish unemployment rates for all adults high, 25%, hovering around 50% for younger folk in the 15 to 25-year-old range, but pretty much the same throughout the country.) “The worst part is that we have to pay for the monarchy. No matter how badly they behave, they’re untouchable. We can’t even sue them.”

Patricia also gives us washing machine instructions in English! She, in fact, has a laminated sheet explaining each and every appliance in the apartment, in English. She claims that street fairs constantly occur, part of the price of living in a major tourist area. She strongly suggests we buy food and whatever else we want at the grocery store today, as she fears all will be closed for Monday’s huge, all-consuming holiday. Monday is Columbus Day in the States (no biggie here), but Spain’s National Day and very important to Spain.

Keith begins laundry, although annoyed that no one in Europe seems to have a dryer. Dryers may be considered major energy hogs and frowned upon. That’s my theory at least. Our multiple electric stoves denote a lack of natural gas.

Our apartment feels like something out of Romeo and Juliet. We open the large window doors, step onto the balcony and look at the people in the street below. Juliet could declaim her sorrow from this balcony. I’m not sure that Romeo would hear her over the noise of the crowd. Today, she would require amplification.

But we have let ourselves get too hungry, a major problem with MS. I must be fed, watered and nap regularly. Keith adds that he needs to change my nappy. Attempting to avoid feeding-time-at-the-zoo problems, we go out to find something to eat for lunch. Unfortunately, we encounter the entire population of Spain joining us here for the holiday. Forward! We find the grocery store and purchase supplies for the weekend. We take our prizes back to the apartment, where Bear puts them away.

Then we resume our search for lunch. Following Patricia’s recommendations, Keith walks back and forth between two equally stupid places to eat, neither of which has an open table. Forty-five minutes later, we wander farther down the street and find a spot selling some really bad wine and bad American food. We avoid the hamburgers and chicken wings. Gag me! We accept the wine, hoping the alcohol will mollify our desire to kill all the other tourists and/or each other.

Ravenous, we roll over to the old section of town hoping to find bars with good food. However, we find nothing even vaguely handicap accessible, as all places have very tall barstools. Homebound Sven, back in the States, has a motor that can lift him up in the air to barstool height, but Bird does not. Bird expresses her jealousy and disgust that we would even think of Sven when she has worked so diligently on this vacation, sacrificing even her wheels, which were fine before but now make scary noises. She’s become arthritic aiding us! When our appliances begin to bicker, we always lose.

We seek the famed pintxos, the local tapas-like delicacy, and special food of the region. We find only massive dough balls. Aside from the dough balls, most bars feature bad American food accompanied by bad American music. For some reason we have to listen to the shit hits of the past 60 years. So on top of being ridiculously hungry, I also have the joy of having “Proud Mary” earworming its way into my head. And unlike the Spaniards, we can’t avoid knowing every fucking word and its theoretical meaning.

So we wander and wander and wander in search of food, Bear finds nothing acceptable. One place has too many people. Another too much sunlight. Another too close to the road. We struggle mightily with hunger and spacing out. We finally find some mediocre food resembling tapas. (Pintxos perhaps?) These tapas seem to be either dough balls or mayonnaise balls. I down a couple of mayonnaise balls to keep me going.

From the second we arrive in San Sebastián, Bear begins to complain, “We don’t have enough time here,” although he personally approved every bit of our itinerary. Thus far, this place sucks so badly, I’m fiercely glad we’re leaving Monday. If I lived in Europe, I would probably like to come here for a holiday but as it is, we find only a horribly heavily overly-touristed spot with nothing really to recommend it.

The streets change names repeatedly. Keith gets lost so often that I ask if he has had a stroke. “No!” he responds vehemently. But I get a big star today, because I direct us home after Keith turns himself around for the 35^th time. My red letter day marks the first time in our relationship I know the way somewhere and Keith doesn’t. This has never happened before and will probably never happen again. Keith now denies that this happened at all.

Upon returning to the house, we look at recommended restaurants, which I printed out in Denver and brought with us. After complaining mightily about the crowds in San Sebastián, we decide to go out and have a nice dinner. We seek a place lacking Michelin stars. (I knew the woman who edited those books and am not impressed.) We choose a restaurant called Ikaitz on Paseo Colon. I look up directions on Google Maps, but type in the wrong street, which I nonetheless proudly direct Bear to. Whoops! I am a bit spaced, thanks to starvation.

Lost again due to my stellar map reading and navigational abilities, we search for the restaurant. Numerous very friendly, helpful people direct us to the eatery. As early diners, (8PM) our lack of a reservation doesn’t preclude a table and we’re invited in. (Mom told me of the lines of old people waiting in the Naples, Florida restaurants at 4PM. Are we becoming the same old people? Would we admit it? NO!)

Our first dish, a flower created from asparagus and red lettuce leaves, looks nearly too pretty to eat. But we are Neanderthals, starving Neanderthals, so I will report that we devour the beautiful flower, finding it absolutely delicious. We split a bottle of good wine, which also greatly soothes our spirits. For our main course, we divide an order of monkfish jaw, the best food of our entire vacation. We finish with a sumptuous dessert.

As we finish dinner, the hordes with reservations begin to arrive. Many appear to be older men with younger women. ¿Las otras? (The others, or mistresses) I wonder. Am I primed to see this by the intra-lesson gossip of my devoutly Catholic Spanish tutor? Is this the legacy of a country that was once so highly Catholic, with divorce forbidden? Per UN statistics, Spain’s current divorce rate of 61% exceeds ours of 53%. Or are las otras the cause of the high divorce rate? According to many observers, Spanish Catholicism encourages mistresses ─ with no sadness involved due to wide acceptance, even by wives.

Returning home after dinner, we find the really tacky street quasi-medieval fair continuing outside our windows. The massive throng of people prevents Bird and I from even seeing the fair. “It’s not that bad,” says Bear. We like the fair a lot better on Sunday when it features fewer people. On Saturday we find it merely really annoying. “Just too many fucking people.” We go to bed.

Friday, October 9, 2015 Tarragona

Today we have train tickets to travel down to Tarragona, an old Roman town lying about an hour southwest of Barcelona, along the Mediterranean. Now that we’ve been trained up right, we find the Sants train station without incident. We arrive in due time for RENFE workers, using their magic ramps, to help me onto the train.

Arriving in Tarragona, we disembark, then leave the train station. As Keith wheels me out, we’re greeted by two women from the local Barcelona TV news station. Hearing our speech, they believe they’ve found a couple of English people. We often find ourselves considered English as Spanish speakers can’t distinguish between an American accent and an English one. The English would be so insulted. The women ask us if the Spanish train service and disability assistance rival or outperform England’s. I respond that I don’t know as I could still walk when I visited England 15 years ago. We praise RENFE as people have been so incredibly kind and helpful. But we regretfully report that in America we have no trains (except Amtrak, which doesn’t really count). Also, as my compatriots know, we live in a country so vast that we fly over it, or drive our cars for shorter distances, leaving us no real comparison. Our country has invested in freeways, not trains. All in all, we provide little help to the reporters. Their quest continues.

We begin our Tarragona visit by exploring an old Roman stadium. During Roman times, the authorities would fill the stadium with water from the Mediterranean and stage mock sea battles. The Bear happily wanders all over the ruins. Finding no berries, he returns.

Bear pushes me uphill to the top of town. Up, up, up we go, very hard on Mr. Bear. Although perhaps he could stand to lose a few kilos, poor Bear has already shed all additional weight he needs to relinquish by pushing me about.

After gaining the top of the hill, we stop to visit the Archaeological Museum of Tarragona. The story of an English ship named Deltebre I consumes much of the first floor. In 1813, during the Napoleonic wars, the British wanted to cut the Peninsula in half, eliminating Napoleon’s supply routes. To do so, they laid siege to Tarragona, but failed. After lifting siege, before sailing away, the Brits beached or deliberately sank any unneeded vessels, denying Napoleon their use. The museum has salvaged part of one convoy ship and placed it on display, along with its story.

Museum Outside

Going upstairs we find very cool busts of nearly every Roman Emperor. We stop and say hi to Claudius, my favorite Roman Emperor, due of course to the I Claudius television series. Next, we see some great Roman mosaics, including two of Medusa, and a peacock.  We find a stairwell enveloped by the mosaic of a hunting scene.

Leaving the museum, we seek our lunch. We find a stellar spot right across the Plaza. Using incredibly fresh seafood, the restaurant crafts one of the best meals we have in Spain. We order an amazing lobster dish. We watch the table next to us devour enough food to feed someone for three days. And they aren’t fat. Do they just have their big meal at noon? Or perhaps, given the cost, do they only eat once every three days?

After our memorable lunch, we visit the cathedral. Various peoples erected holy edifices in the same spot, the church merely the latest incarnation. Initially the Romans constructed a temple either to Jupiter or Augustus, supplanted by a Moorish mosque. Following the 1492 Reconquista, locals built a basilica. As I had promised, I say a prayer and light a candle for my Spanish teacher Irma, who back in the States prays for me. The cathedral has numerous chapels dedicated to various saints with the Virgin enshrined as the best saint ever. We wander through the church enjoying the various chapels and the architecture. 

Near the cloister, we find a museum of the Diocese, all descriptions in Spanish, that I can’t honestly say we understand, but a door from there opens onto a most delicious courtyard filled with fountains and trees. What in the world is a diocese anyway?

Following our cathedral visit, Bear wants to explore the city further before returning to the train station. He hands me the map of Tarragona. Stopping for a minute, I orient to the map, pointing out our whereabouts, and putative path, based upon his desires. Bear says, “This way looks interesting.” With that, he charges off in the opposite direction to the one I indicated. While still pushing me about, he continues to ask our location. I quickly give up, having no idea whatsoever. Eventually, we find ourselves lost on the main drag, another Ramblas, turned around going exactly the opposite way from what we intended. Nice helpful people explain our location, and how to get down to the train station. We attempt to heed their advice, but everywhere we go we encounter more “fucking steps.”

Admitting defeat, we follow the car route to the station, neatly avoiding the “fucking steps,” as we know cars can’t take stairs either. We reach the train station in the nick of time and return to Barcelona.

With bittersweet nostalgia we acknowledge our last night in Barcelona. After 10 days, the city feels like home. We grab a late bite to eat one more time at the Gent del Barri. Turning in, we reflect on how much we like this place but realize our age precludes moving here. With aging, comes a respect for, or at least a grudging acceptance of, the necessity of big spaces that accommodate power wheelchairs, grocery stores, and cars.

Thursday, October 8, 2015 Barcelona History Museum, Parc Guell & La Pedrera

The washing machine runs yet today. Boy, those towels must be clean! Keith manages to stop it by pushing some other buttons, different from the ones he mashed yesterday. The door remains locked with the contents inside, sopping wet.

Today we will find the Barcelona History Museum. Armed with the correct address, the correct directions and the strength of our obsession, this should be a breeze. The museum’s website lists our desired museum as one of ten city museums, causing mass confusion, but today, we head to the indisputably exact location. Onward!

We also feel we have mastered the Metro. Exiting the Metro at the absolutely correct location, we ascend to the street without encountering any “fucking steps.”

We begin our search for the museum. It should be right here, but no! We follow signs directing us to the museum. Before we reach our quarry, the signs disappear.

We can’t find this darned museum to save our souls. I ask passersby, “¿Donde está el Museo?” I have to learn to stop asking for directions in Spanish because I don’t understand the responses.

We begin to wander. We choose a direction and end up out on the Ramblas. Seeing some policemen, we decide to ask them for directions. They do know the museum’s location. They instruct us to return to the Plaza Jaume I and make a left. We obey, but to no avail! We still can’t find the museum and begin circling a church.

Ahoy mates! At long last we find the museum, back in the alleyway hidden behind the aforementioned church we’ve been circling, the museum’s location not even vaguely intuitively obvious. Should we blame Spain? Perhaps if you have to go through a church on your way to an infidel museum, you’ll stop and pray, which will help your soul’s journey through purgatory. Barcelona does us a favor for the future.

This hidden history museum proves well worth the effort. Augustus (as in Roman Emperor Augustus) conquered the area as a breadbasket and winemaking region for Rome.  We ride an elevator down 65 feet to end up at the level of the Roman city called Barcino. Barco means boat in Latin and Spanish so perhaps the early name of the city was little boat. Catalonia has changed hands and rulers innumerable times, but the Roman time feels happy and prosperous.

The museum preserves a working-class part of town where we explore Roman streets, walls and a laundry. The laundry had several different buildings, one for washing, a second for bleaching and a third for dyeing. We find the ancient ruins far more intuitively obvious, albeit in action undoubtedly smellier, than our flat’s washing machine.

Aside from the laundry, we see the remains of a factory that produced garum, a fish sauce big in ancient Roman cooking, actually a high status item. The manufacture of garum begins with fish blood and guts, salted then fermented. The entire process looks pretty gross to me. Can you imagine the stench? Between the rotten fish and the urine collected for the ammonia content (used to bleach the fabrics) the odor would have bowled you over! Not a fan of heavily salted rotten fish in any permutation (especially including lutefisk), I’m grateful to not have lived during the Roman Empire.

We leave Rome to the Romans and we find an inaccessible medieval church that naturally I can’t see. Keith ventures into the church to work on his soul. Fortunately I’m not expected to pray for him, or the poor boy would be in eternal deep doo-doo.

The museum has more rooms upstairs. A guard working a lift invites us to venture through them. Unfortunately, we’ve once again run out of time. We leave the museum.

We walk out to the Ramblas, descend into the Metro, and reemerge up by Gaudί’s Parc Guell. From the subway we have a fifteen-minute walk uphill to the Park. Keith labors, pushing me. Huffing and puffing we arrive at the park just before our allotted time of 4 PM. (Keith huffs and puffs. Sitting in Bird, I merely look strained.)

Parc Guell, Gaudί’s failed attempt at a high-end gated community, feels rather like Disneyworld as no one ever lived here. Our 4PM timed tickets grant us entry, and like Disney’s tourists, by this time we find ourselves overwhelmingly famished.

Immediately inside the park, we find a small restaurant filled to the brim with pigeons, far more pigeons than tourists. I easily find a seat under an umbrella on the outdoor patio. I see only a few other diners, not a good sign, but observe myriad pigeons lurking, perched on the umbrella tops.

Keith enters the restaurant seeking wine and something edible. In his absence, a family with a smallish child abandons their attempts at consuming the quasi-food, leaving the table strewn with French fries and bits of what may at one time have been a hamburger. Immediately, ten or so pigeons descend in mass, frantically gorging themselves on the discarded child’s lunch, providing a spectacular show. Other diners don’t share my pigeon tolerance or enthusiasm. A neighboring table full of Germans rouses themselves, shoes away the birds from the now vacant table and takes the offending tray indoors. So much for that entertainment!

Keith returns with two glasses of wine, having examined the food offerings. He finds the so-called food so bad that he dismisses the idea of any culinary purchase. As you know, bears will eat anything that doesn’t move faster than they do, so the food must truly be atrocious. We drink the questionable wine, not even vaguely tasty, but at this point we seek only the alcohol content.

Fortified by wine, we begin our exploration of Parc Guell. Up, up, up we walk. Poor Bear never gets a break. I just hope his wheelchair-pushing muscles prove useful for this upcoming year’s skiing. We enter a hall of columns. Gaudi intended this to be a market for his upscale development. Gaudί topped each of the eighty unique columns with a rainbow of broken crockery pieces. From the top of the hill, we can see the city of Barcelona in the distance.

Now we descend back down to the bottom of the park ending up below the outdoor room with the columns. Looking up the grand staircase leading back to the proposed market, we see Gaudί’s iconic Dragon statue perched in the middle of the staircase. Guards chase away any children and/or tourists who attempt to touch the dragon, preserving it for both us and future generations to enjoy.

We also see Gaudί’s wonderful ironwork and fences, stuffed here and there. He copied his dad the ironworker, never losing his delight in the medium. We wander up, down and around ending up by the porter’s house near the entrance. Gaudί built the porter’s house for working people, his only design for people of lower classes. The guard there welcomes us inside but we want to finish yesterday’s interrupted La Pedrera tour, so we politely decline.

Leaving, we take the Metro again, exiting on Passeig de Gracia near La Pedrera. Approaching the entryway, we note that our tickets from yesterday are still good. The La Pedrera employees didn’t lie. Once again, the employees open the big door allowing me to enter the building. We love Gaudi’s apartment building. The original locals didn’t, naming it “La Pedrera” or “the quarry” as an insult. The movers and shakers of the day felt it looked like a strip-mine and didn’t hesitate to voice their disdain.

Keith snaps a photo of me in front of the big door. He claims to have added an “intelligence program” to his camera. Purportedly, the software helps me to not look quite so imbecilic in every photo. I’ve never been photogenic; we still have to delete a lot, grateful that the film era has passed.

Inside the apartment, Gaudί created a very nice courtyard. I scoot around the room gazing at the pretty steps leading upstairs and into the building that, of course, I can’t negotiate. Little palm fronds and a beautiful decorative bannister grace the stairs.

I roll over to the elevator, ascending to the attic. We begin our tour where we left off, having been evicted during the yesterday’s evacuation. Today from the guards we discover that unrelated construction yesterday required eliminating electricity to the block. Mystery solved!

Currently the attic houses a museum mostly about Gaudί. Gaudί designed many of his buildings by hanging string between different features upside down. The string would of course find the resting place of least resistance, draping itself where it should fall. Gaudί would then turn his models over and know exactly where to place each support as well as how it would look.

We discover that there really wasn’t much of the attic we hadn’t seen the previous day. We finish up the museum, taking the elevator back down to floor zero. From the first floor we will take a separate elevator up to the apartments set up for the tourists.

But oh no! Bird won’t fit in the elevator. We’re confronted with yet another minute elevator and our wheelchair, while small for America, apparently isn’t for Europe. The staff kindly lends me their wheelchair which does fit into the elevator. We ascend.

Upstairs, we tour two apartments set up as they would’ve been in the 1910s for wealthy residents. We see a maid’s room, a kitchen, a dining room, living room, bedrooms and a bathroom with all the modern accoutrements of the day. This means a bathtub and running water.

After ruminating about how people lived with ridiculous amounts of money in the 1910s, we wander back downstairs. We collect Bird and roll over to the gift shop. I’m no longer allowed to buy magnets or coffee cups, so I buy a pillow cover designed by Mucha for €50. The cover we buy features a woman named Amethyst, a beautiful Art Nouveau diva. She now adorns our living room, providing a wonderful memory of our trip.

In the La Pedrera gift shop, Keith asks an obliging guard for restaurant recommendation. He recommends El Almacen, a restaurant not too far from La Pedrera, on our way home.

Leaving La Pedrera, we stumble out into the darkness. We consider visiting the block of discord (Casa Batilo), another Gaudί highlight, but it’s dark. We plan instead to see Casa Batilo in the daylight of another day.

Also, our bodies complain loudly. We had no lunch. We ran halfway around the city subsisting only on our standard hearty breakfast. We opt for the recommended restaurant. At El Almacen, we enjoy some wine and some food, good but not stellar.

Leaving the restaurant, we head back toward our flat. Keith decides that we will walk, not take the subway. We get lost or “turned around” as he says. (Bears never, ever lose their way. Or at least, they never admit directional defeat.) Suddenly Sagrada Familia jumps into view. We now know our location! Keith snaps a few photos of the famed church at night, seeing it in a whole new light or perhaps more accurately, a lack of light.

Today has been another mega-touring day. Although I repeatedly promise that the next day will be easier, somehow this never comes to pass, and we will become more and more tired over the course of this trip. But for tonight, we find our flat and turn in for the night, grateful for our comfy bed.