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Barcelona, Spain
We have no past, we won't reach back
I went to Barcelona as a day trip from Paris, taking overnight trains both ways over the drab Pyrenees. My first class Eurail Pass covers most of the cost, although I’ll happily pay an upcharge for a couchette, a flat flip down bed to sleep in.
The big reason for me to go to Barcelona was to see the architecture, specifically the Gaudi buildings like this one (Casa Mila) and, more significantly, the next one.
This is Gaudi's Temple la Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. This building was amazing and, a word usually not associated with a catholic cathedral, fun. It might be finished in another 50 years or so, probably not.
What was finished was some of the stair cluster towers, with their tight (1m?) passageways and interconnecting paths leading to precipitous little balconies where you could see the mess of the construction as well as the mess of the finished, gorgeous, mosaic and concrete towers. I was impressed.
The rest of Barcelona was good. It was nice to see the Mediterranean, nice to see other Gaudi buildings, as well as some Isozaki and Meier and Foster stuff. And of course there’s Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, which is technically a reconstruction but one that looks just like a colorized version of all of those black and white photos I remembered from architecture school.
I went to England for transportation-fun reasons alone. Example: after waking up early in Paris from the overnight train, I took an amazingly fast TGV train to Calais Ville, only to take a really cool hovercraft across the channel to here. There's nothing really to see in Dover if you don't count the cliffs and the knowledge of a catchy Eric Johnson instrumental single from a few years back.
I did not spend more than a night and early morning in London, staying at an ok hostel off Oxford Street, near the Virgin store. Eurail does not include England, although it gave me discounts on my train out of London. I did manage to get to see the Tate Gallery (I had wanted to see it last time), but the British Museum (Rosetta Stone- Elgin Marbles) was already closed by the time I got there.
As for the picture, you should be able to figure out what's what. As you could imagine, it was a lot more pleasant in September than it was the last time I was here in early December.
I was in London on the last day before they started cleaning up after the Princess Diana funeral. There was lots of bad poetry and flowers everywhere. I had already been exposed to it a bit of it in Paris near the entrance to that (yes, that) tunnel, but obviously there was a lot more of it in London than in Paris.
I consider myself fortunate to have been selfishly out of touch for the balance of this opera, even when I learned about it a week and a half ago in Bar Harbor I didn't really pay too much attention. I was too concerned in Maine with sleeping, muffin quests and appreciating the fog, and too concerned in Europe with train schedule, finding hostels and seeing as much as I could. I am one of the few on the planet who has yet to hear that Elton John tribute song. For that I consider myself fortunate.
