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.