Cacophony of Yap

Short Version:
Barcelona on bike, and buses, and feets. Xmas poop.

Long Version:
Barcelona has a robust and mature public hire-bicycle system, named bicing. It's widely-available and widely-used, by all manner of Barcelonans.
Unfortunately, it's only available to locals*.
Fortunately, we were able to borrow not only bicycles, but also a bicyclist, Senor Brettus, for riding around guidance.

The sun was out, and many people were out and about enjoying its rays. Including us. We didn't swim, but we were loving the warmth as we rode along the beach towards the pier and casino. Then we turned uphill, away from the coast, towards the building for which Barcelona is best-known; the Sagrada Familia, which is an enormous, distinctively-styled church, still under construction 130 years after it was begun and 60 years after the death of its primary architect, Antoni Gaudi. If you haven't been to or seen photos of it, you probably should do one or both those things now.

~~~~~~~~(wavy lines to indicate the passage of time)~~~~~

Done?

Good.

That should make it easier to describe the indescribable.

Towers topped with flowers; sculptures, vultures, sepulchres**... the place is nuts. And that was just the outside.

We ate eggy, cheesy goodness then set off again, further up the hill. We passed water spouts carved as monstrous heads, and the dog pound with its cacophony of yap, and eventually reached the base of the hilltop access funicular, which we avoided in favor of beer and panoramic views in the sun at a cafe before setting off back down the road, much, much faster than we'd come up. Past the now-silent pound, past a dry-docked submarine named Tiburon I*** outside one of the Science Museums****, through parks and narrow streets, past decommissioned bullfighting arenas and through enormous and busy roundabouts, and on to Montjuic, which is a hill near the port that houses a number of sports stadia, sculptural wonders galore, and several once-castles that now house art.

And then beer, and a bar, and bed...

...then up to do it all again, but without Senor Guido, who had job/life/etc to attend to. This time we explored the interior of the Sagrada Familia, which is even crazier than the outside. Having said that, the sculptures on the western facade, of the so-called "Passion" of someone's messiah, were pretty amazing. Hats off to sculptor Josep Maria Subirachs! In short, the building certainly highlighted the banality of other buildings... but 130 years of construction and still nowhere near done isn't necessarily the best evidence in favor of widespread adoption of the styles and/or techniques in use.

On to Parc Guell, which is another Gaudi-designed Barcelona attraction. Awesome stuff everywhere, much of it curved and mosaic-clad, and most of which you can read about on the intertubes. One highlight not prominent in official guide material was the busker near the park peak. Leopardskin tights and shoes, billowing shirt, shitty sunglasses, incoherent yelling, swearing, occasional singing... he was great. Especially when he asked Nene:
Are you ready for me, babe? Cos I'm ready for you!
Nene blushed fetchingly.

Gaudi buildings are scattered throughout Barcelona, and we peeped at their faces as we rode past. Didn't stop though. Nor did we pause at the several under-construction cathedral-looking buildings we passed. We DID stop at the Xmas market though; largely because the sign that said "XMAS MARKET" featured an enormous cartoon picture of a man pooping. The market was full of more-and-less-cheesy xmas crap... and had a number of stalls selling figurines of pooping men. And women. And non-human entities, like Satan, Michael Jackson, the Pope... you name him/her/it, he/she/it is there, assuming a reasonable level of celebrity. And they're all pooping; snapped mid-poop, trousers down, skirt/habit up, pile of poop on the ground beneath their bare buttockses. Welcome, friends, to the wonderful world of xmas, a la Catalunya.

These caganers do not constitute the only poop-related Catalan xmas tradition, though; there is also the Tio de Nadal, or "xmas log." Also known as caga tio or "shit log," this is, believe it or not, a log.

Of wood.

With a face on one end and two little arms.

From December 8, this log is fed a little bit each night, and covered with a little blanket so it doesn't get cold. Then, on either xmas day or xmas eve, the family gather round and beat the log with sticks while singing songs that exhort it to shit:

"Caga tió,
caga torró, avellanes i mató,
si no cagues bé
et daré un cop de bastó.
caga tió!"

(Shit log,
shit nougat, hazelnuts and cottage cheese,
if you don't shit well,
I'll hit you with a stick,
shit log!)

or:
"Caga tió, tió de Nadal,
no caguis arengades, que són massa salades
caga torrons, que són més bons!"

(Shit log, log of Christmas,
don't shit herrings, which are too salty,
shit nougat, which is much better!)



And lo, the log shits, and the shit is candy!



Barcelona rules.









* = Just tried to validate this fact, but the bicing website is in Catalan or Castellan (Spanish), with no English option. I'm guessing they only have Castellan because the law requires it. More examples of Catalonian independence:
- The bicing website is at bicing.cat rather than bicing.es
- Just after we left there was to be a football match between Catalonia and Morocco.

** = No vultures, really.

*** = Not the only dryland-mounted submarine in Barcelona; a replica of the Ictineo II, which was the world's first real, functional submarine, can be found near the waterfront

**** = Multiple Science Museums must surely be one of the most indisputable signs of a truly civilized civilization

Asparagus Wees

Short Version:
Beer from above and below ground, plague sores, birthdays and boat people

Long Version:
Our first experience of Barcelona was an attempted Catalan-language GPS navigation.
We visited the port, were told off by a policeman, and eventually made it to Brett y Sylvia y Miquel's apartment overlooking the water in Barceloneta. One of us had never met Brett before, and it was first meeting for both of us with Sylvia and 2 year-old Miquel, so we parked ourselves in the sun and drank beer pre-siesta, then drank more beer post-siesta while eating ceviche and guacamole/salsa nachos, and then we set off out into the night to celebrate Brett's birthday at a bar called Bubo, named after the grotesque black sores that characterize the Black Plague.

Looming massively above the bar was one of Barcelona's many historic churches; Santa Maria Del Mar (Saint Maria by the sea), and we sat and drank sangria with the boat-people and were impressed. Also impressive was the fact that one of the boat-people was incapable of rolling his Rs, rolling his tongue into a tube, or of smelling (or, he believed, generating) asparagus wees, thereby proving the Puppet hypothesis that these traits are interrelated.

Barcelona is the main city of Catalunya; an area which is currently - and often grudgingly - part of Espana. We saw our first evidence of this separateness near the church, as we made our way deeper into the el Born district in search of more bars; an eternal flame in a memorial plaza dedicated to the Catalan dead of the War of the Spanish Succession. Admittedly, that war took place in the early 18th century, but the grudge, and the desire for a separate and autonomous Catalan state remain strong, and strongly evident throughout Barcelona.

For the record, we ended up buying beer from a street vendor and drinking in one of the wide pedestrian plazas. Apparently these guys buy beer (six-packs of cans) from the supermarket and hide it under manhole-covers, carrying just the one six-pack around with them so that police confiscation doesn't wipe out their whole inventory.