Barcelona

Now to recap last month's visit to Barcelona.  It was interesting, to say the least.  An inauspicious beginning at Estacion Sants gave creedence to all the "pickpocket" warnings we'd received.  Is, her son Russell, his girlfriend Zarah, son Orrin (in stroller) and I were clustered around, discussing which metro line to take to our rented apartment, when we were approached by an excited young man waving a map and blustering in Spanish.  As I turned my attention to him, trying to decipher what he was raving about, his unseen companion snatched my shoulder bag and laptop case which I had carelessly laid at my feet by my suitcase.  Is spotted him and blurted, "your bag!".  I turned to see the thief about six feet from me, calmly walking away with my bag on his shoulder.  I grabbed him around the neck and pulled my bag away, then let him go.  As he ran off, I regretted not choking him out or breaking his fingers, or at least dropping him, but then it was in public...

The next day we covered a few galleries, had a great, though expensive lunch at Cal Pep, a jam-packed restaurant that specializes in seafood.  We arrived half an hour before they opened and were the second party in queue.  More sight-seeing for the others, while I went to a color lab to get some prints made of one of my paintings.  It took three visits, and cost lots of Euros, but I got some fine reproductions of  Banago River 7. I'll put it on display once I figure out how to do a watermark.

Day three found Is and me wandering around Barceloneta and crime-fighting again.  While we were seated on a park bench, I noticed a man on a bike approaching us and studying us more than casually. He realized I was watching him, and switched his attention to a fellow dozing on a bench to our right.  As we watched, he glided up behind the guy and reached over the back of the bench and was about to lift the dozer's pack, when I shouted, "Hey!", waking the intended victim.  The thief made a lame excuse about looking for a light for his cigarette.  No mention of the fact that it was someone else's pack and he didn't know the guy or have permission.  Thief cycled over to us and started cussing me out, insulting my mother and asking if I spoke Spanish.  I said I did, called him a thief and told him to  do bad things to his own mother.

This is a street scene I shot while sitting on a different bench, waiting (again) for another one of Nick's recommended restaurants to open.  We weren't disappointed and left fat and happy again.  We had wandered around much of the port area, and saw just about everything the average tourist sees.  The Picasso Museum was anti-climactic.  I had no interest in Sagrada Familia and found the Gaudi-designed park to be less than stimulating.  His style does nothing for me-go ahead, call me a Philistine.

My favorite piece of sculpture is the one that says, "Madrid?  That way!"

Our overall impression was that Barcelona is over-crowded with tourists, noisy and busy and not a place for the inattentive.  Not a relaxing city, though the metro/transit system is super and the cuisine very good, priced accordingly.  We were happy to head back to Comunidad Valenciana.