Friday, April 5, 2002 22:34
Weather: The sun´s gone down, but it was a beautiful day, cool and clear
Location: Internet café, on the edge of the university district of Barcelona

Well, it´s been a busy couple of days. I guess it´ll be best to pick it up where I last left off, at La Sagrada Familia. I see I didn´t actually spell out that it is a church under construction, but that was probably obvious.

When we left it, we first went for a late but necessary lunch. Afterwards, the priority was to confirm where we were going to sleep that night. This turned out to be pretty difficult. Hostal Goya was unable to confirm that we could stay there (and it looked doubtful), and the leads that they´d suggested were not working out either. Paul, who has the best Spanish of our group, went through my Lonely Planet and called every hostel and hotel on the list: not one of them had a room. Finally, we started working on the more expensive hotels in Kelly´s guide book. Here, we found one that had a single double room, so Paul and Kelly booked it. I was concerned about the prices, though, so Patrick and I decided we´d get our bags and go to the tourist office to get their help in finding somewhere. We agreed to meet Paul and Kelly there after they´d checked in.

The tourist office had an efficient system for finding the right hostals for their visitors, sorted by price. We got the last two rooms in a relatively cheap category, in a reasonable hotel that´s unfortunately in a rather seedy part of town. We met Paul and Kelly, set a time and place for dinner, and headed off to check in, our afternoon essentially gone.

The Hotel Coronado turned out to be much better than we had a right to hope, despite its uninspired location. I got a huge room, with three single beds and an attached full bathroom, for about €40 per night. Patrick´s was slightly smaller for his single night there, but was still quite reasonable. (He, along with Paul and Kelly, are heading back to Madrid today.)

Dinner was pizzas in a small restaurant tucked into the alley beside the Palau de la Músico Catalana. Then we went into this marvellous building. Again, we were struck by Barcelona´s striking architectural style, this time an art deco masterpiece with brightly coloured mosaics and stained glass windows everywhere. The hall itself had a fabulous stained glass chandalier, huge statues of pegasi and valkyries, and musicians whose bodies started as mosaics but ended as statuary sticking out of the walls with their instruments. The hall was relatively small, but had a wonderfully clear acoustic, so everything could be heard clearly, despite our poor sight lines to the stage.

The concert performance of Mozart´s opera was fine, but the libretto we were given was bilingual in Italian and Catalan, and none of us were good enough in either language to follow the plot. By the intermission, we were all tired and decided we´d seen and heard what needed to be seen and heard, and we headed out for a nightcap on the Rambla, the main largely pedestrian central street. As we arrived, one of the human statues lining the street (entertainers out to collect change from the crowds) suddenly came to life and roared at a passing group of girls, who screamed in surprise and pleasure, to everyone´s amusement. We sat in an outdoor cafe with small beers and watched the entertainers do their thing.

When we returned to the hotel, I said goodbye to Patrick. He´d decided to spend today (Friday) looking around more of Barcelona, which he seems to have frankly fallen in love with, while I was going to head out early to the Monestir de Montserrat with Paul and Kelly.

This morning I got up bright and early, had a shower, and went up to the main train station (Estació Sants), where I was to meet Paul and Kelly. Unfortunately, the trains to the Monestir turned out to be run by a separate regional train company from the Plaça d´Espanya station, not from Sants, so our first step was to walk the 15 minutes between the stations. At Plaça d´Espanya, we had no trouble finding the Monestir desk where we picked up a combined train and visit ticket, which included the cable car up the mountain to the monastery and unlimited use of the funiculars there.

We got off the little commuter train (three cars) at the Monastir´s station, next door to the cable car, and goggled at the mountain looming over us, the huge monastery a small but imposing block two thirds of the way up. The cable car whisked us up to the lower area of the monastery, and we walked up towards the main section. The monastery, now one of Spain´s most popular tourist sites, includes two hotels and several restaurants, and a new cog railway is being built to allow more visitors to leave their cars at the bottom and come up without them. While I applaud the ecological intent of this, I´m not sure the monastery really needs more visitors: it seemed to have quite enough school children in massive bused-in packs for any tourist site.

In any case, it was now late morning and we had things to see and walks to do. After a quick look around the main grounds and a peek into the basilica (which we couldn´t enter due to a service in progress) we hiked down to a little chapel perched on an elbow of the rock below the monastery. The path was wide and paved, but we found few other people, and it was pleasant to leave behind the construction site for a while. On the way back up, we passed several statues including one of Christ bearing the cross, donated by the Christian communities of the Bisbat of Barcelona. We had no idea what a Bisbat is, so we imagined a big, benevolent monster. A funicular took us up the last couple of hundred metres of the climb in quiet comfort.

We had an excellent lunch at the Hotel Abat Cisneros, pulling out the stops a bit as this was to be the last time I ate with my friends before they headed south and I head north. After yummy appetizers (olives, cheese, and little breaded cream cheese sticks) I had a delicious lamb dish with mixed mushrooms (amusingly translated as ¨scrambled mushrooms¨ on the menu). Dessert was creme brulé, apparently called ¨Crema Catalana¨ in the local tongue.

After lunch we had a quick visit to the Black Virgin, a black stone statue of the Virgin and Child which is one of the Monastir´s main attractions. It was getting to late afternoon, but the mountain called. We took the Funicular de Sant Joan up 250m from the monastery and set out on the Sant Jerom hike, listed as 1 hour. On the way up, we stopped in several places to admire the increasingly amazing views. The monastery is set on a mountain with a bewildering number of steep rounded peaks (hence the name Montserrat), and the walk gave us some marvellous views down into the valley, and then, over the lower hills on either side towards the Mediterannean, the Pyrenees, and finally, in all directions. The views were simply fantastic, and the path itself also had some wonderful highlights, including the little chapel of Sant Jerom, closed but visible through the barred windows, the precipitous drop over some of the cliff edges, and a few solidly constructed viewing platforms, including one right at the top. There, we ran into a group of rambling Germans, who seemed fearless about the heights, walking right up to the edges of the cliffs. One was kind enough to take a group shot of us.

Then we noticed the time. The sun was starting its descent, and we had only an hour and 40 minutes to descend to the monastery to catch the last cable car down into the valley. It had taken us that long to walk up to the top from the top of the funicular... We set off briskly. Going down was much faster than going up, but somehow we missed the (signposted) intersection where the path that would have taken us straight back down to the monastery, instead of back to the funicular, branched off. That meant we ended up back at the funicular at 6:05, with 35 minutes before the cable car... but since the last funicular stopped at 6:00 (it was still on its way down when we arrived) we thought we were out of options. The only clearly marked walk down to the monastery was listed as 50 minutes!

Then we noticed that the gate to the stairs down the side of the funicular building was not locked. We went down it, and peered around the corner. A metal catwalk led to a steep metal staircase attached to the side of the funicular track. This was clearly for emergency purposes, or maintenance, but since the funicular was no longer running for the day it might be ok. We started down, but soon came upon a ¨no passage¨ sign that confirmed we weren´t supposed to be here. We set back up. Near the top again, we ran into the funicular operator, who was just starting his walk down. Paul asked him if we could go down, and to our surprise, he said it was ok, since the funicular was indeed not running any more.

We had a hair-raising walk down the stairs, which started out metal but were uneven stone in the middle. The stairs were very steep, and we certainly didn´t want to slip and fall, so we kept hold of the guard rail on our right hand the whole way down. It was quite dirty and thoroughly blackened our hands. When we reached the bottom and looked up it seemed impossible that we had made it down, but we had, and with 10 minutes to spare, we stopped for a washroom break, picked up ice creams, and were at the cable car station in plenty of time.

At the bottom, we had some time before our train back to Barcelona, so we had a quick stop in the station´s ¨bar¨: actually, the back garden of an enterprising neighbour of the station who had set up tables, a covered area, and a bar counter to make some easy money off the trains running by the end of her garden.

In Barcelona, I said goodbye to Paul and Kelly. It´s been wonderful travelling with them again, but they´re off back to Madrid with Patrick on an overnight train tonight. Kelly goes back to Canada on Tuesday (and, being Kelly, straight into TWO choir rehearsals Tuesday night), and Paul´s spending the rest of the week in Spain before heading back to New York. For me, I´m off to Geneva tomorrow, but had some catching up on my emails to do. I headed downtown, grabbed a quick dinner, and dropped in to the nearest Internet café to get to work...

And now, I believe my legs have earned a quick trip to bed.
posted by Tom at 4:24 PM | link |