Barcelona

As we arrived in Spain (Barcelona to be more exact), Brandi’s voice decided to take its own vaca­tion, sim­i­lar to when it dis­a­peared before our wed­ding. It would not return until the end of the cruise. To say this was frus­trat­ing would be a huge under­state­ment. An inabil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate in any­thing but whis­pers – impos­si­ble in any crowded or pub­lic place. The other pas­sen­gers on the ship were vaguely sym­pa­thetic, but made lots of jokes about singing or talk­ing too much or Brian finally get­ting some peace and quiet for the first time in our mar­riage. Really it was just an annoy­ance, until get­ting out into the city.

In the city it was a lit­tle fright­en­ing. Barcelona is crowded, with peo­ple in every direc­tion, tourists and those look­ing to make money off them – legally or not. Push­ing and jostling and yelling, every­one try­ing to get our atten­tion, just a moment of it – in every direc­tion. If we were sep­a­rated in the crowd, Brandi had no way of get­ting Brian’s atten­tion. Not even the abil­ity to scream… But thank­fully it never came to that. We held hands or each other’s back­packs, and Brian was con­scious of not wan­der­ing off like he some­times is apt to do.

On our first day in Barcelona, we trav­elled the his­toric Ram­blas street; checked out La Boquería and strolled across the Plaça de Catalunya where sev­eral demon­stra­tors were camped out and even­tu­ally we arrived at the Block of Dis­cord as well as Casa Milà.

• La Boquería is a lively pro­duce mar­ket that is an explo­sion of chicken legs, bags of live snails, stiff fish, deli­cious oranges, odd odours, and sleep­ing dogs.

• Plaça de Catalunya is dot­ted with foun­tains, stat­ues, and pigeons, and is ringed by grand art deco build­ings. This plaza is Barcelona’s cen­ter. It’s the hub for the Metro, bus, air­port shut­tle, and tourist bus.

• The Block of Dis­cord is where sev­eral col­or­ful mod­ernist facades com­pete for atten­tion along this sin­gle stretch of road. All were built by well-known archi­tects at the end of the 19th cen­tury. Because the man­sions look as though they are try­ing to outdo each other in cre­ative twists, locals nick­named the noisy block the “Block of Discord.”

• Casa Milà – This Gaudí exte­rior laughs down on the crowds fill­ing Pas­seig de Grà­cia. Casa Milà, also called La Pedr­era (“The Quarry”), has a much-photographed roller coaster of melting-ice-cream eaves. This is Barcelona’s quin­tes­sen­tial mod­ernist build­ing and was Gaudí’s last major work (1906–1910) before ded­i­cat­ing his final years to the Sagrada Família

We wan­dered through Casa Milà with our cam­eras and the audio guide and learned all about Gaudí, his inspi­ra­tions behind the apart­ment build­ing he designed and how he devel­oped his tech­niques. His aes­thetic was very organic and way out­side the lines of the time. Even by today’s stan­dards his build­ings are strange – at the time, com­pletely groundbreaking

Between this fas­ci­nat­ing tour, a stop for some lunch at a street­side cafe, and a fight through the mar­kets to get back to our ship for the evening, it was a long day – but of course we were rewarded with lux­ury and com­fort back on board. Brandi vis­ited the spa for a facial before din­ner, which this evening was served on the top deck of the ship, open-air. Almost bar­beque style, but we still had cham­pagne and caviar, and servers car­ry­ing our plates back to our seats for us. The plan was for this to turn into a dancing-under-the-stars evening, but the wind picked up and every­one shiv­ered and headed back inside after din­ner. We per­son­ally didn’t find it too cold, but will admit we’re used to a dif­fer­ent level of cold than many of the oth­ers (lots of south­ern Cal­i­for­ni­ans and Texans).

The on boat enter­tain­ment this evening was a local fla­menco troupe, and they were truly impres­sive. One guy on gui­tar, one guy singing, two female dancers and one male dancer. Their body lan­guage, foot­work and emo­tion was amaz­ing. We are sure there was a story line to their per­for­mance, but of course we couldn’t really fol­low the language.

When we got back to our room there was a nice dis­play of swans, scat­tered rose petals, a bot­tle of wine and two notes, one from Maria our stew­ardess and another per­son­ally signed note from the Hotel Man­ager wish­ing us the best on our honeymoon!

For day 2 in Barcelona, we got up early and headed to Sagrada Familia, a cathe­dral that became Gaudí’s main pas­sion and where he devoted the last years of his life. At the time of his death in 1926, less than a quar­ter of the project was com­plete although he had been work­ing on it for over 30 years.

The slow­ness of con­struc­tion had never dis­turbed him, as when asked about the sub­ject of the extremely long con­struc­tion period, Gaudí is said to have remarked: “My client is not in a hurry.” (refer­ring to God). Cur­rently, one pro­jec­tion antic­i­pates con­struc­tion com­ple­tion around 2026, the cen­ten­nial of Gaudí’s death—while the project’s infor­ma­tion leaflet esti­mates a com­ple­tion date in 2028 or later.

Every­one had warned that the lineup to the cathe­dral would be very long (two hours, we were told), how­ever our arrival from the local metro sta­tion at 10am still only gave us a 10–15 minute wait in the the line before we were at the ticket window.

To say the cathe­dral is mas­sive is an under­state­ment, the com­ple­tion of the spires will make Sagrada Família the tallest church build­ing in the world. Gaudí’s orig­i­nal design calls for a total of eigh­teen spires, rep­re­sent­ing in ascend­ing order of height the twelve Apos­tles, the four Evan­ge­lists, the Vir­gin Mary and, tallest of all, Jesus Christ. Eight spires have been built, cor­re­spond­ing to four apos­tles at the Nativ­ity façade and four apos­tles at the Pas­sion façade.

We spent 4 or so hours walk­ing around Sagrada Família tak­ing pic­tures and learn­ing more about the life of Gaudí. We returned to the metro and saw that there was a funic­u­lar at the end of the line. Know­ing how much fun we had with the funic­u­lar in Aus­tria, we took it to the top of mon­juïc. This funic­u­lar was much less impres­sive as it was entirely under­ground. For­tu­nately, there was a much more scenic gon­dola from the funic­u­lar to the very top of the hill, to an old Span­ish fort.

We wan­dered around the fort, feed­ing the local fortress cats (we miss ours) and tak­ing pic­tures of the view and just relax­ing and mak­ing com­par­isons about urban sprawl. We returned via gon­dola and funic­u­lar to the metro and walked to the boat in time for depar­ture, and on to Mahón!