SPAIN DAY 6 – Paella and the Park

We wake excited to be here.  Barcelona does that to you.  Designed with tons of parks and squares and playgrounds and outdoor cafes, all integrated into the arts and connected by wide, welcoming, safe walkways, this place exudes the feeling that life is for living.  And we’re going to live it some today.  And we start living it with breakfast in the Cotton House’s lovely outdoor courtyard. 

The early June weather is, again, perfect.  We cab it (Uber is banned in Barcelona) to Park Guell, one of the city’s most celebrated attractions.   The site on Carmel Hill originally started as a luxury housing development, the 60 triangular lots intended to offer the lucky owners a sweeping view of the city well away from the smoky factories.  Only 2 homes were built on the impossibly rocky terrain before the project went bust in 1904.  One of the houses was eventually purchased by Antoni Gaudi, the fabled artist / architect who designed the massive Segrada Familia basilica we visited yesterday.  Gaudi eventually reimagined the housing site into Park Guell (pronounced par-GOUL by the locals), a botanical garden dripping with the city’s flair for art and high design.  We spend a few hours wandering the grounds, the structures and gardens ranging from whimsical to lush to religious to fantasy.

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Fortunately, we got to the park early, because by the time we left, it’s packed with tourists and school trips and families.  In need of caffeine, we wander out into La Salut, the residential neighborhood surrounding the park and find a little local café with a fantastic coffee machine. 

Thanks to Mandy’s fine planning, we’re just a few short blocks from our next stop, the Secret Garden Paella Cooking Class we found on Airbnb experiences.  Our host Clara greets us at the door with a wide smile and that effortless European panache she doesn’t even know she has.  Two other groups join us, a couple and their three kids from Arizona and couple from Florida on vacation with their adult daughter from D.C.  Clara starts by explaining that today we will be learning her family paella recipe, but the recipe, and the dish itself is only a backdrop.  The frame story around leisurely weekend afternoons with family and friends that turn into leisurely weekend nights with family and friends and wine.  This is cooking I can get behind.  We are making two versions today, one “mixta” with seafood, and one traditional with chicken and rabbit and pork.  I’ve made paella before, and although it was well received by my guests, I did absolutely everything wrong.  The most important take-away is that the dish isn’t about the proteins, rather it’s a rice dish with the proteins just there to flavor the rice.  Well coached, we spend the early afternoon cooking and drinking wine and talking and drinking wine, so when the paellas are done, we dive in with exuberance.

It’s a 45 minute walk back to the hotel, but the city just yearns to be walked.  We take a semi direct route so we can check out the Gracia section of the city, a much better representation of how the locals live.  Still buzzy, and now sleepy, we retreat once again to the rooftop hotel pool.

Jay and Judy, our favorite dining partners, have made it into town even more improbably than we did.  So tonight we’ll celebrate that victory in our favorite style… at dinner.  Tonight it’s Babula Bar 1937.  Babula is a Catalan phrase that loosely translates to “grandma’s food”, and we are welcomed just like we would be at grandma’s house.  The food is based on traditional home recipes, but with the chef’s updated takes on these classics.  We start with some well crafted original cocktails and order a bottle of local red to let that start breathing.  Spanish wines are easy opening in just a few minutes, so it’s ready by the time the first tapas comes.  Food is family style, everything meant for sharing, to induce conversation and togetherness.  Second bottle of red and dessert is an event – tableside made ice cream served over silky pound cake.  We’ve been joking with Victor, our server, all night and now he starts bringing us drinks gratis for us to try, one tastier then the next.  Always conscious of offending our host, we make sure to finish each drink to the last drop.

Maybe we didn’t have enough togetherness, maybe it was the exuberation of connecting with friends in a foreign land, or maybe it was that second bottle of wine, or probably it was Victor’s very successful attempt to get us all sozzled, but we’re just not ready to call it a night.  Jay suggests a rooftop bar at the Hotel Barcelona Princess where we close the night with last drinks, great views and lotsa laughs.

 

SPAIN DAY 5 - Hanging With The Familia

I wake up, disoriented. Hmmmmmm. Pretty room, lotsa sunshine streaming in through the sheers. Bit foggy. Oh, yea, lotta wine. Spanish wine. Ooooh, I just woke up in Barcelona. That’s nice. Let’s sleep 5 more.

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An hour later, we wake up and it sticks this time. Pad downstairs to the very lovely patio for caffeine and the Continental. We’ll call yogurt and a Croissant a healthy breakfast, especially if we grab some of those fresh cheeses.

This morning’s adventure is taking us to the Segrada Familia, the huge basilica most famous for perpetually under construction. We have been in dozens and dozens of ancient European churches - every village has one that comes up as “must do” - and of late we’ve taken to avoiding them as they are all running together at this point. We’re making an exception for the Segrada Familia today for two reasons. First, we’re exploring the Eixample neighborhood today and it’s smack dab in the middle of it. And B) it’s nine enormous towers look like giant drip sandcastles visible from virtually everywhere in the city.

Before we go in, our guide explains that since they broke ground in 1882, they have completed 9 towers and have gone through countless contractors, budget busts and papal regimes with each leaving its mark on the project. Not to worry though, as the current contractor says that they will get the final 9 towers done in 4 years. I told Mandy that if I worked for the GC, I’d keep my resume very, very fresh.

Barcelona, and all of Spain for that matter, celebrates their art and artists unlike anywhere we have been. Art is woven into the fabric of everyday life, and the larger-then-life artists are wholly reviled. The Segrada Familia was designed by Antoni Gaudi, a favorite son of Barcelona who combined architecture and art to spearhead the Catalan Modernism movement. Gaudi’s creations dot the city, with the giant church in front of us as the massive exclamation point. We spend time admiring the exterior details before passing through the 30-foot-high doors. The inside was captivating, more airy and brighter (both lighting-wise and less dark-gothic) then traditional European cathedrals.  The ceiling of the main sanctuary is an homage to nature, the massive columns appearing as tree trunks and the highest windows all clear so the net effect when you look up is light filtering through the forest canopy.  The stained glass windows – reds and oranges on one side, blues and greens on the other – suggested sunrise and sunset and flooded the space with color.  If the point of a big church is to suggest the presence of God, the point is well taken. We finish our tour by going to the top of the one of the towers for some birds-eye pix of the city.

We get our bearings out front and head towards Parc de la Ciutadell to check out the Arc de Triomf.  Instead of honoring some epic battle victory, this Arch of Triumph was built as the showy entryway to the 1888 Barcelona Worlds Fair in Ciutadella Park, the fair celebrating the city’s triumphs in art and architecture and building and technology.  Like in Philadelphia’s Fairmont Park, several remnants of the the World’s Fair are well preserved and just as impressive today as they were 130 years ago.  Wandering through the park, we stumble across Castillo do los Tres Dragones (Three Dragons Castle) with one of the most spectacular fountains we have ever seen.  After exploring the castle, we enjoy the perfect weather and wander the park, but our stomachs are starting to grumble.

We head to Mercat Santa Carina, one of the city’s famous markets, this one near the university and more geared towards locals then tourists.  The market was renovated in 2005 and received a wildy undulating roof finished in equally wild colors, another example of fine art being woven into everyday life.  We wander past the rows of fish mongers, spice merchants and farm stands and take seats at Barestaurant L’Univers.  Big glasses of Sangria and we pick some raw veggies and very fresh sardines, a local seafood specialty.  The provisions are put on a very hot flat top grill, doused with copious amounts of the legendary Spanish olive oil and sprinkled with course salt and five minutes later lunch is served.  We enjoy our lunch slowly, taking in the scene and enjoying the afternoon. 

After lunch, we explore El Born, a funky, fashionable neighborhood with offbeat shops and bars in traditionally European historic setting.  We stop in a few shops, our favorite being Soul Lady, a luxury leather shop selling only locally designed and manufactured goods.  We connect with the store and Mandy falls in love with a few pieces, perfect mementos of the trip.  We finish back at the hotel for a leisurely lounge by the rooftop pool, where we are expertly cared for by our Sicilian bartender, Francisco.

Well rested, we head to dinner at Eldiset Wine Bar, a café back in El Born featuring creative takes on classic Catalan tapas plus an excellent selection of craft drinks and vino.  Our server makes excellent recommendations and we continue our study of Spanish wines well into the night.

 

SPAIN DAY 4: THE ROAD TO BARCELONA

The old On The Road movies hold a special place in my heart.  Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour car tripping to exotic locations with adventures and songs along the way.  Seth MacFarlane has updated the genre, sending Stewie and Brian to places like Europe and the Multiverse.  Today we are producing a hybrid film, Road To Barcelona, Staring Mandy as Dorothy Lamour (the pretty one) and me as Brian Griffin (the happy-go-lucky one, usually found with a drink in hand).

(scene: morning sunrise over the Pyrenees mountains in Cantallops, Spain, Brian and Dorothy sipping strong café con leche outside a quaint country inn.  As their car bumps down the long driveway, the first musical number begins to the rolling of the opening credits.  Appropriately, the open number is Softcell’s Tainted Love, as 1980s American pop and rock music is the only music that is heard in this part of the Spain in every shop, restaurant, gas station and hotel lobby.)

(Some-times I feel I’ve got to BUMP BUMP run a-way…)

(Driving montage covering 90 minutes.  At the end of the opening number our pair rollick into Girona, Spain, an ancient city founded in 79 BC)

We walk the busy streets from the underground car park into the old city.  It’s movie set old Europe, narrow streets lined with modern shops on the ground floors and small apartments above.  We make our way to the ruins of the Turkish baths and do the 15 minute tour, marveling at the ingenuity and engineering.  It’s really not all that different from a modern gym, part health club and part social club, with hot therapy rooms, cold therapy rooms, steam chambers, locker rooms and places to hang out and relax.

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Walking the wall here is a must-do attraction, so we do.  The wall we walk is 80 meters high in places and surrounds the entirety of the old city, built for protection against the constant barrage of various invading hordes.  Walking the path along the top of the wall provides nice views of the ancient homes and gardens of the former socialites.  Today, the invading hordes are reduced to me, Mandy and a few other tourists courageous enough to brave the hot sunshine.  After just a mile or so, the wall (and hot sun) proves victorious yet again, and we descend back towards the river. 

We let ourselves get lost in the tiny passageways and finally emerge on the bridge designed by Gustave Eifel of the Paris Tower fame.  It’s earlier in Monsour Eifel’s career, but the similarities in design are apparent when you look.  We have fun framing pictures through the diagonals of the steel, the shots reminiscent of Amsterdam.  The water is very shallow, and we see dozens of huge fish swimming among the dense green sea grass.  It takes us a bit to realize the flaw in our logic – to actually take a picture of the bridge, we can’t be standing on it, so we bop over to the next bridge to do so.   

After yesterday’s episode of Extreme Wine Tasting, this morning’s breakfast wasn’t much more than a few sips of café con leche, so we seek out a sidewalk café for some lunch (or whatever they call the 3^nd of 7 daily meals here) and a hair of the grape that bit us.  In proper Spanish style, we order a bunch of sharing plates  – sausages in a little black cast iron pan, fresh white asparagus grilled with olive oil and salt, local olives and rustic bread toasted with tomato and garlic.   Add some sangria and two hours and you get the perfect Catalonian lunch.

We finish the drive to Barcelona and check into the Cotton House, a romantic five star, six story hotel built in the former Cotton Exchange building.  The hotel is an event in and of itself, but we drop our bags and split, excited to get into the famed Gothic Quarter, just a short walk from here.  You may have guessed that Gothic here doesn’t refer to 23 year olds with pale skin in all black, but rather to Goths from the fourteen hundreds.  The Quarter is a shock of nonsensical diagonal lines, crazy angles splitting off other crazy angles, coming together at oddly shaped squares.  The effect is charming, drawing crowds for thousands of years.  The shops are busy fueled by this summer’s wave of post-pandemic travelers, and Mandy and I walk hand-in-hand taking it all in.

Back at the hotel, we stop to get some recommendations from the concierge, Javier.  Javier unfolds a city map and takes us on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood paper tour, marking it up as he goes.  The last neighborhood he tells us about is El Poble-Sec, the place where he typically meets friends for a bite and a drink after work.  He tells us it’s not so polished as some parts of the city, so we should go other places first to get comfortable with the city before we visit there.  We’re not even on the elevator when we decide we’re going to Poble-Sec right now.

It's about a 20 minute walk, mostly through the workaday streets where most Barcelonians live.  We like this walk, one that you would take if you lived here, and we pass the blocks talking about just that.  We end up on Carrer de Blai (Blai Street, or simply Blai to locals like us), the Pinchos capitol of Barcelona, making it the Pinchos capitol of the world.  Pinchos (or Pintxo to Catalonian speakers unlike us) is the 6^th or seven (yes seven!) meals on the daily Spanish eating schedule, typically around 7:30, a snack before dinner at 10.  Blai features nine full blocks lined on both sides with cafes, every one with a ludicrous display of two bite tapas, each with a colored skewer sticking out of the top.  Go in, point-point-point, add a beer or glass of wine, and find a table.  The skewer is color coded to the price of the bite, and we remember Javier’s advice that the 2€ tapas are well worth the premium over their 1€ counterparts.  A well spent Euro every time indeed, upping the game from battered and fried to fresh and creative.  We stopped at three, our favorite being Blai 9, where we sat at the counter and enjoyed talking to the servers and fellow patrons as much as the food.

(As our travelers are American, a two hour, 3 stop, 5 drink meal constitutes dinner.  Cut to fade out of Brian and Dorothy walking away from the camera, and in hand, taking a different route on the way back to the hotel.)

(Roll credits)

 

SPAIN DAY 3:  HIKING(ISH) BY THE SEA

Did I mention we went off-roading last night?  I probably forgot to mention it because it was very, very brief, my front passenger tire slipping off the edge of the narrow, curvy pavement for just a brief second with a big THUNK.  But I’m reminded of the trip this morning by the very same tire having mysteriously given up all its air pressure.  I’m sure it’s just a coincidence, but it requires my attention just the same.  The Audi doesn’t come with a full size spare, or even one of those temporary doughnuts, that space being home to a subwoofer.  Because deep, rich bass from the stereo won’t get you home in the event of a flat, tucked beside the speaker is a portable air pump and bottle of tire goo.  Skeptical, I follow the pictogram and the tire blows up just as Mandy walks outside with the picnic lunch our hotel has prepared us for todays hike in the Pyrenees.

We drive to Roses, a fashionable seaside town on the Mediterranean Sea.  The trailhead is here, but so is the Mediterranean, and it doesn’t take much to decide among the two.  We didn’t even bring our hiking boots, so our motivation was questionable anyway.  As the sidewalk winds along the coast, shops and cafes become houses and Mandy and I chat about what it would be like to own one, a favorite conversation on these walks.  We decide on the balcony from this one, the location of that one, the color of that one over there.  Two bedrooms with a big open plan kitchen, please.  The weather is lovely, and we literally walk for miles, up the mountain to until we run out of sloped sidewalk, the back down and just keep going.  We sit on the sea wall, unwrap the baguette cheese sandwiches and munchy chips provided by our innkeepers and watch as a v-shaped storm cloud assembles itself, the business end pointed right to us.  We duck into a shoe shop and by the time Mandy settles on pair of buttery soft leather sandals, the storm and its four minutes of rain have become a memory.  Ahhh, lazy days at the beach.

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We wind our way back and chill by the pool.  We have a 4 pm wine tasting scheduled at Vinyes dels Aspres, a winery in the tiny village closest to our hotel.  The drive down the hotel driveway is longer than the rest of the trip.  The village is what we now know to be common in this part of Spain, tight, neat rows of townhouse and apartments, all with balconies, most balconies adorned with flowers or laundry or both.  Maybe a dozen charmingly narrow streets, and at the end of one, our host is waiting outside.  With a big smile and a wave he calls out a heartfelt “welcome my visitors from America!”  He introduces himself as Ricard when we get out of the car, and walks us through the closest fields telling us about the history of the winery and how the rocky land, sweeping winds and dry clime conspire to produce grapes so willing to be fermented for our pleasure.  Ricard goes on to tell us that besides wine, they make their own olive oil and even their own corks.  I admit that until this moment I thought cork was its own plant.  Or maybe a nocturnal animal.  It took me just 55 short years to learned that cork is not its own species, rather it is made from thick slabs or bark removed from oak trees, dried, then punched out.  It also explains why so many trees around here are naked from the waist down.

In some of the windows in the town we noticed 5 gallon glass carboys of fermenting wine, and there are dozens more along the railings of the winery.  I always assumed that wines were happier fermenting in the dark, cool of a cellar, so I ask for the story.  He explained that this was their regional sweet raisin wine.  To make a sweet wine that is not gooey syrupy, they dry the black Grenache grapes (which are red) into raisins (which are black) then press the raisins into juice (which is red).  The yeast is added then the juice is put into the glass bottles which will sit outside in the weather for 54 months.  Ricard explains the yeast’s job “is to eat sugar and shit alcohol”, but like humans, too hot, too cold or too drunk, the works stops.  So in the winter, it’s too cold and the yeast doesn’t create alcohol.  Today in the hot direct sun, no working.  And when the alcohol level in the jugs gets too high, the yeast “gets drunk and won’t work either”.  And so goes this ferment-a-little, age-a-little process for four and a half years.

 

We tour the winery, Ricard proudly telling us about the recent renovations which involved the design collaboration of an architect and an artist, combining the old with the modern, all through the lens of Spain’s national respect for the arts.  The spaces are fully functional for the work of making wine, but beautiful enough to host high end events.  The tour ends on the elevated courtyard at the huge aged wood table so common to wineries around the globe.  Ricard pulls out three glasses and four bottles, pouring and talking, telling us about each wine, telling stories of his life and generally hosting us to a leisurely Spanish afternoon.  Four more bottles, and I’m pretty sure Ricard stopped using his spittoon somewhere along the way.  Stores about food and drink and travel comes to a discussion about the American craft bar scene.  He asks Mandy about her go-to cocktail, and when she mentions an Extra Dirty Martini, he had not heard of one.  We spent the next 10 minutes explaining how to make one and wondering how, in the middle of the olive capitol of the world, no one here thought to use the olive juice.

Around bottle ten, a calico cat wanders onto the scene, figures that we’ve been there so long we’re now part of the furniture, and jumps onto my lap.  Ricard saved the best bottles for last, and they were great as far as we can remember numbers 11 and 12.  Oh yea, as a closer, number 13 was the raisin wine, Bac di Ginesteres.  As we make our purchases (they wouldn’t sell me the cat, but I tried…) Richard asks us our plans for the rest of the trip.  When we mention Barcelona, he invites to meet him at his home on the upcoming Saturday and drive to some wineries together.  In vino amicitia est!

We’re leaving early tomorrow, so dinner is schedules at the hotel.  We’re starting to understand the late dinner thing here – you need a little time to sober up.  We’re not sure what to expect in this lower level breakfast room.  The table is beautifully set, the waiter brings a wine list and tells us to pick any bottle gratis.  With his help find something nice from the neighborhood and order off the creative menu.  We split the salad with roasted veggies and lots of white asparagus, a real treat this time of year that we learned about from our friends in the Netherlands.  Mandy orders the mixed seafood plate (which apparently included everything from the boat that day) and I get the lamb ribs.  Both were exquisitely prepared with very fresh provisions.  We were shocked when our bill came to under 75 euros, a meal of this caliber easily being triple that at home.