Visiting Barcelona (Spain) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Barcelona (Spain) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 

The next day, Laurent and I took the train from Puigcerda to the capital of Spanish Catalonia – Barcelona.  I enjoyed looking at the Catalan countryside, especially the farmhouses and the churches with arches in their bell towers.

Barcelona was a pleasant surprise.  The city was clean and full of chic apartment buildings and wealthy enough that tourists did not feel conspicuously rich.

We arrived at the station at 11 am and bought a map.  We took Avenue Provença to the Eixample neighborhood, which houses all the Art Nouveau architecture from the 1890s.  The curving metalwork on the balconies made you feel like you were under water.

Antoní Gaudi’s Casa Mila or La Perdrera as the Catalans call it, especially gave me this feeling.  I remembered being intrigued by this building the first time I saw it in a small photo in an art history book at the University of Chicago; the photo was small, but Gaudi’s genius was huge even in the small photo.

We hustled down the street to see Gaudí’s major work – the still unfinished Sagrada Familia Cathedral.  The Cathedral looks like sand that has been dripped from a fist to make a sandcastle.

The entrance to the Cathedral looked like a dragon’s mouth to me at first view.  After looking at other works by Gaudi in art history books, I think that interpretation is not too far fetched.  Laurent climbed the stairs to the top of the Sagrada Familia Cathedral while I sat on a park bench below and did people watching.

When Laurent came back down from the heights, we walked down Sardenya Street and found a small restaurant to eat at while we were waiting for the Picasso Museum to open.

For my sea-level Catalan meal by the Mediterranean Ocean, I ordered fried calamari as a starter.  I expected fried pieces of tentacles, but instead received whole, fried mini squid.

I squirted lemon juice on the fried calamari and drank them with the Estrella beer we ordered.  Then, we ate fried cod with oven-baked potatoes and ratatouille as our main dish.  I ordered flan made with condensed, milk, egg, and sugar and a caramel sauce for dessert. 

Just as a side note, the elite class of Cuba is mostly Catalan and eats this type of food along with the elite class of Mexico.  Catalan food is like French food for Ivy League graduates or wannabe Ivy.

We walked through the Parc de Ciutadella to find a statue attributed to Antoní Gaudi.  We enjoyed looking at the architecture of the Modern Art Museum in the park and smelled the flowers.  We found the fountain of Gaudi’s woman holding a parasol as we wandered around the park.

After visiting the park, we went to the Picasso Museum.  There were so many paintings in this museum that I was overwhelmed.

Picasso experimented with many styles, but the room that moved me the most was the room with his Blue Period paintings, especially his painting of a tired guitar player bent over his guitar and sleeping. 

We spent several hours in this museum, which is interesting in itself; the museum is made up of two palaces – the Castellet and the Berenguer.

The Berenguer family seems to have done quite well for itself in Barcelona, if you judge by the tomb that is in the Cathedral.  The gothic Barcelona Cathedral was the next stop on our whirlwind tour of Barcelona.

I liked the Cathedral’s cloister with ducks and palm trees best.  There were many chapels around the Cathedral with big iron bars in front of them.

The intricate lacework and polychrome statues were typically Spanish and brought back memories of my art history classes with four slides flashing across the wall of our art history classroom with Professor Rosenthal presiding.

His syllabus readings were huge with chapters from many books.  I stayed in Chicago over semester breaks and read all the art history books on the syllabus and would buy a library pass for summer semester and do the same thing.

When I read books about Goya’s paintings I thought that Spanish peasants were just as exploited as shtetl Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia.  I wanted to see the Prado Museum in Madrid one day. 

Time was flying, and we had a train to catch.  We were thirsty when we boarded the train and did not have any water.  Our thirst just increased over the next three hours back to Puigcerda due to the heat, but we survived.

We had a great visit to Barcelona thanks to our sturdy legs.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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