A long weekend in Barcelona, part 1

Following the advice of countless friends, we spent last weekend in sunny Barcelona.  After the gray gloom of the London winter, it was lovely to feel the sun’s rays for a few days.  Here’s a rundown of how we spent our time there.

Day 1

Compared to some of other early departures, this one was relatively leisurely.  An 8:45 flight out of Luton might sound bad, but there’s a train from Kentish Town which makes it a snap.

By the time we arrived in Barcelona, met the Australian-Catalan hotel manager who used to live in Coolidge Corner, and settled into our room, it was the traditional Spanish lunchtime, i.e. 2 PM.  As you might know, Spanish cuisine is heavy on… pig.  So we were slightly anxious about how we’d fare.  Fortunately, we had some vegetarian restaurant recommendations, including L’Hortet.  My Spanish is decent, but my Catalan is non-existent, so we were very appreciative of the waitress who patiently translated the menú del día into English for us.

Fideos!  Or ‘fideus’ in Catalan.  They were different from the crunchier fideos they serve at Oleana, but that’s a garlic sauce you see on top, so this was delicious.  As was the kefir (a thick, fermented yogurt) and crème catalan we had for dessert.

Our standard practice on arriving in a new city is to wander, somewhat aimlessly, to get a sense of how it all fits together.  So it was down La Rambla to the Monument a Colom (Columbus returned to Barcelona after his first voyage).  Then we walked along the waterfront for a bit, which provided the perfect opportunity for the obligatory photo in front of boats.

Next up was working our way through La Ribera towards Santa Maria del Mar.  Our guidebook said it was built about 60 years ago, but when you step inside, you quickly realize that the guidebook is wrong.  Twentieth-century churches rarely look like this:

Looks a lot like a Gothic church to me.  Here’s the actual story: the church was built in the 14th century (though an earthquake in the 15th century made reconstruction necessary).  In 1936, during the Spanish civil war, anti-clericalists set fire to the church and destroyed much of the interior decoration.  As a result, the interior these days is rather stark.

For what it’s worth, now seems as good a time as any to comment on the almost complete exclusion of Spanish (and Portuguese, for that matter) history from ‘mainstream’ historical scholarship on modern Europe.  I’m trained as a modern Europeanist, but I’m fairly certain that at no point in that training did I read a single book or article on Spain, and I have a feeling I’m not alone in that.  I haven’t thought too much about why this should be the case, but I’ve always been struck by this rather strange collective ignorance of a rather significant chunk of Europe.

“Enough of the historiographical critique!” you say.  Very well.  How about some photos of hot chocolate, then?

That’s more like it!  In Spain, people don’t have dinner until late in the evening, so we needed to tide ourselves over with something a little sweet.  It’s hard to get much better than hot chocolate and churros at Granja Viader, which has been serving them up (along with other milk-based goodies) since 1870.  Spanish hot chocolate is famous for being so thick that it’s almost a pudding – that spoon you see on the saucer is as much for eating the chocolate as it is for stirring in sugar to cut the bitterness.  I was still getting into the swing of things in terms of actually communicating in Spanish, so the giant dollop of whipped cream was a bit of a surprise, though by no means an unwelcome one.  As for the churros, let’s just say I have another weapon in my arsenal to break down Becca’s defense against us getting a deep-fryer someday.

Between the walking, the chocolate, and the churros, we were pretty exhausted by this point, so we went back to our room to take a nap before dinner.  After walking around L’Eixample a bit, we settled on Úbeda, in large part because their menu had 1) English translations and 2) lots of tasty-looking vegetarian tapas.  We weren’t expecting to have to make many actual choices at restaurants in Spain, but Úbeda provided the opportunity.  We settled on baby leeks gently cooked in rosemary oil, little (fava?) beans in an oil and mint sauce, a mixed salad with walnuts, fig jelly (which I studiously avoided), and goat cheese and, the pièce de resistance, melted provolone and oregano.  It was all so good that I forgot to take a photo until we were halfway through.  Note how the provolone is still glistening on the left.

Then it was off to bed to get as much sleep as possible for a busy Saturday, which Becca will tell you all about in the next post.