We got to the Nou Camp at 2.30 pm.
We were on the Orange Bus tour, where you can hop off at any of the 18 stops, stay as long as you like, then jump on another bus.
As we arrived, hundreds of people came streaming out of a gate. I thought they had just done the stadium tour but a basketball match had just ended. A parking attendant told me that on Sundays the stadium tour is from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m.
We’d blown it. We’d lost half an hour when a Caja Madrid ATM swallowed my card, and we’d lingered far too long in the sculpture garden cafe of the Miro Museum.
Still, I wasn’t that disappointed, as I was in holiday mode by then, going with the flow. Frankly, I’ve never done a stadium tour or wanted to do one, but I’d been told that the Nou Camp tour is well-run. Monday was our last full day of a five-night city break and I was not about to come back up the hill on Monday morning. I was philosophical: you win some, you lose some.
On Thursday, after our easyJet touched down with a landing Mrs Palmer marked as a 2/10, a train took us to Sants station and the taxi to the hotel seemed to reveal a city of avenues, cafes, scooters and scaffolding, like, I suppose, many cities round the Mediterranean.
On Friday morning in the Picasso museum, the portrait of his mother (1896) was lovely. Pablo Picasso lived in Malaga, La Coruna and Barcelona when he was growing up. We saw some paintings on wood that he did when he was eleven, and many “studies,” some fantastic pen and ink drawings, some naughty drawings, witty cartoons of his friend and secretary Jaume Sabartes, depicted as a lecherous old man kissing pin-up models, his Blue Period (one of his best), and some Cubist stuff.
A video-cameraman was shooting low-angle footage of punters looking at the exhibits and his two associates were thirtysomethings, a man and a woman. I spoke to the woman.
“This building, before it was a museum, what was it?”
“The house of rich people in the fifteenth century.”
Looking at his early work for an hour and a half, my snap judgement on Picasso was : a restless genius who had a marvellous sense of balance in everything he drew, painted or shaped.
In the Drac Cafe we had a toasted bacon/brie/tomato sandwich and then strolled down to the city beach and along to the marina. Not many swimmers in the sea, some British hen parties, young African men selling handbags and sunglasses from tablecloths spread on the ground. A trio of buskers had a guitarist who sat on his kick-drum, a second lad playing a double bass imaginatively with a bow, and a slim brunette playing the flute. Their music suited the scene, the ambience.
As we walked down towards the end of a sea wall, the tinny squeak of a harmonica carried on the breeze and we came upon a deeply-tanned youth singing It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue. Then we saw the African traders suddenly leave their pitches. Their tablecloths had drawstrings which allowed them to pick up their merchandise in two seconds and swing the sacks over their shoulders. They moved as one, choreographed by a signal we did not see or hear. A minute later two policemen appeared at the top of the path we had just walked down.
That night we sat on solid stools at a classy tapas bar and had squid, salmon, ham, a steak skewer cooked in port wine, white wine, sangria. Watching our Moroccan barman Sahid create seven perfect Irish coffees with consummate skill, I realised that I could not make one Irish coffee in seven attempts.
“I’m a nicer person when I’m sozzled,” I said to Jan.
“You’re funnier,” she replied.
Barcelona had been cool and grey as the city waited for Spring and on Saturday it arrived at last, a beautiful warm day with blue skies, and hundreds of people spread out in the park near the Arc de Triomf. On the bandstand on Friday three chunky ten-year-old boys were kicking a ball rapidly to each other but on Saturday on the same bandstand three couples practiced the tango and one of the couples was two girls. Some older people sat watching the dancers. I’m not mad about the tango but I like the flick of a flimsy skirt when the hips rotate.
We encountered mass tourism at the Sagrada Familia, Gaudi’s unfinished temple, whose construction began in 1882.
He worked on it for 40 years until his death in 1926. I liked the basement museum with the original drawings, models, and renovated models, and the especially those with strings and lead weights hanging down in perfect loops. Gaudi inverted those hanging-chain shapes to create his spires reaching up to heaven .
At Park Guell, we walked up a steep road past a beige-painted wall with the graffiti : Welcome to Vailona a very nice police state. You get gratis torture. The park was mobbed, mass tourism again. Mass tourism is bodies, cameras, queues, bodies, bodies and more bodies.
On Saturday evening we strolled to the Arc De Triomf again and found a crowd of Brazilians in white trousers and white T-shirts clapping their hands and chanting in a circle and this soon evolved into the best capoeira demonstration I’ve ever seen, with girls mixing it with boys and not even blinking as flying feet skimmed their eyelashes. I stood on a grassy ledge a yard above the circle for a better view, along with a gaggle of young, dark-haired women, who seemed to be the girlfriends.
One blonde came and stood next to me.
“Are you Brazilian?” I asked.
“American.”
“What part are you from?”
“Connecticut.”
“Have you seen capoeira before?”
“No, but my boyfriend’s really into it.”
“I bet you don’t fancy somebody’s foot missing your face by two inches.”
“It’s alright. I’m in the military as well. I like athletics, competition.”
Then Jan and I wandered down towards the sound of live music. About 150 people sat and stood around a stage where a sixpiece Afro-funk band played, supplemented by eight percussionists who sat in chairs at right angles to the stage. Three lads who seemed to be from the Congo were fronting the band. The rhythm guitarist’s chords were sparse and metallic but also, somehow, juicy, and he had a brilliant smile. An interval of “trente minutes” was announced and we walked on down by the lake and the woolly mammoth sculpture before coming back for the second set. A girl gave away white promo T-shirts with Africa Vivre printed in lime green and I got one.
The Orange Bus tour was the most touristy thing we’ve ever done.
I liked it but dispensed with the headphones after five minutes. Zooming along grand avenues in an open-top bus with fantastic architecture all round us was exhilarating, so much so that at one point I stood up to stretch and get a better view, and the girl guide came rocketing up the stairs to bawl me out and make me sit down. Standing up was sheer stupidity and could have put me in hospital.
In a shady square with 27 palm trees, over 70 people queued for a popular restaurant. A dude with dreadlocks sang Sam Cooke and Bob Marley and a juggler skipped around to a light, soulful disco tune, throwing three clubs, then five clubs, then seven. Costumed like a Roman gladiator, in a gold helmet with a crimson plume, he is a compact five foot ten, darkly handsome, very fit, strong and nimble. He says he’s “only 48 years old” and asks for a volunteer from the crowd and the guy who comes forward is about 22 and six foot four, rangy but heavy-looking. The juggler asks him to kick off his clogs. After a few slips and a couple of alarming wobbles, he balances this giant on his shoulders to warm applause. .
As the juggler came round with a hat, he told two girls near us that, “I was in the army of the Soviet Union 26 years ago.”
I quietly said, “Soviet army? I didn’t know they had a juggling regiment.”
On Monday morning we did La Pedrera, an apartment complex that Gaudi designed, and it was far more interesting than I expected. Inside, when you see the arched brickwork, you begin to realise that when an architect is an innovative as Gaudi, the structural becomes the ornamental. Glass cabinets hold a fascinating exhibition, explaining some of his source ideas, many taken from the natural world, since nature is the original architect. You can see why he studied compacted surfaces like tortoiseshells, the bark of a palm tree, a conch shell, why he would examine the skeleton of a python, a honeycomb, scallops, sponges, pine cones, corn on the cob, and a chimpanzee’s pelvis.
The roof of La Pedrera has the best-designed chimney pots in the world and you can look north and see the huge spires of the Sagrada Familia. We chatted to Conan, a mathematician from San Antonio who was talking photos patiently with a big camera. He was 25ish and had been supervising producer on a film about honour killings in Iraq which had premiered at the Sundance Festival in January.
In La Boqueria, the famous market two-thirds of the way down La Rambla, we saw stunning displays of fruit, vegetables, meat, fish, sweets, chocolates. We bought mango drinks with a straw, and fruit salads which we ate on the way home.
In the Casa Del Llibre I bought a book about Muhammad Ali and saw a yellow-covered paperback by Ferran Soriano
“I’ve met this guy,” I said, taking the book down from a shelf where it was prominently displayed.
“How?” said Jan.
“He gave a presentation at Birkbeck about the marketing of modern football clubs. He was a director of Barcelona until recently. Nice guy, educated, bourgeois, technocrat.”
If the book had been in English I’d have bought it.
So that was our city break. After Picasso, Miro seemed a bit flippant, Gaudi was one helluva architect, Jan took a photo of me standing under the George Orwell plaque, the tapas and paella are very tasty, the locals are nice and friendly, the taxi drivers honest. We didn’t get pickpocketed but we met a Belfast couple who had two youths on a scooter drive straight at them in a narrow alley. The wife held onto her small handbag, even though the wing-mirror hit her in the ribs.
Not much else to say. Barcelona was bigger than I expected and I would go again. You can only do so much in a few days. You go to a new place and get a superficial impression of it. You don’t expect the city to reveal its soul to you in that time. Later on you may go back for a few more days and get a second superficial impression.
Overall, I liked the city. We only scratched the surface but at least we got there. In 2005 we had bought the Time Out Barcelona Guide but then we went to Lisbon again, and after that we went to Split, and the book’s been on the living room shelf for four years, accusing us, saying, “What about me? When are you coming to me?”
When our son Michael was in the sixth form at Hampstead School, a flagship comprehensive, he did DT and his class went on a trip to Barcelona. One evening the school had a small exhibition of sketches, paintings and photographs that the sixth formers had done there. As an Eagle Eye Cherry tune played softly in the background, I found myself drinking plonk from a paper cup and chatting to Dame Tamsyn, the wise and wonderful head teacher.
“These kids are lucky, ” I said. “I’ve never been to Barcelona.”
“Neither have I, ” said Tamysn, laughing.
Yes, I like a city break from time to time. We’ve done Helsinki and Amsterdam and we don’t want to go to Paris or Brussels. I’ve been to Prague but Jan hasn’t, so we might go there next. My brother Paddy says, “If you like Barcelona, you’ll like Valencia. It’s warmer, less expensive, and the food’s better.”