Day 9: (Barcelona) Film! Grafitti! San Joan! BARCELONA!
Today we were blessed with a late start – YAY! It was so nice to be able to wake up without an alarm clock for once, so I felt super refreshed and ready to go, which I think is what we all needed. We ate our usual delicious breakfast next door at Cèntric and then met in the lobby of the hostal. We walked down Las Ramblas – the really busy main street in Barcelona over to the La Boquería. I can’t remember if I’ve said this before in a previous post, but Las Ramblas is the very large, very populated street which runs through a large part of Old Town in Barcelona. It’s filled with shops, gelato, vendors, and good people watching, but it is also the most pick-pocketed street in all of Spain – so be careful!
La Boquería is a fresh food market right off Las Ramblas if you go south from Placa Catalunya. It’s a massive place, filled with fresh fruits from all over the world, just-made fruit juices, local meats, spices, candy, nuts, fish – literally anything you can think of on the fresh food spectrum, La Boquería probably has it. So we weren’t just wandering around aimlessly, our tour guide Rick decided to give us a “task”: find something that you’ve never seen before, figure out what it is, and take a picture of it. Bonus points if you eat it. So off we went, like squirrels looking for an acorn they buried months before – none of us knew where we were going, half of us didn’t understand Spanish, and most of us were plainly overwhelmed. When I’m saying the market was huge, I mean HUGE. Like there has to be about 170 different stores all packed to the brim with food. Then, add about 2,000 people all trying to maneuver the narrow walkways and paths between the vendors. It’s insane, super packed, but not impossible so we moved forward.
Very soon we realized that being in a group when it was so crowded was just not going to work, so I broke off and started the hunt on my own. Lots of places had dragon fruit, which I had heard of before but have never seen. They were selling them cut in half with a spoon so you could eat its bright pink flesh on the go – some even had white dragon fruit, which looked like Italian ice packed into a shell of a fruit. Figuring that this wasn’t the most exotic thing I could find, I went onward in search of something weirder being tempted by fresh fruit juices along the way. (So. Many. fruit juices.)
I eventually came across a small stand selling fruit from all over the world. I barely recognized any of them, so I took a bunch of pictures figured out what they were, but sadly didn’t have the time to try one. I went back to my group and we judged the entries. First place went to Dani, who had found a kind of barnacle that only grows in particular places in the world and are incredibly dangerous to harvest… I’ll figure out the name later as it’s escaped me now, but they were RARE. 1 kilo, which is about 2.2 lbs, cost 68 euros… yikes! Runner up was Francesca with an anonymous sheep’s head and in third place was a tie between me with a Mangostan from Thailand and Marissa with dragon fruit. The winners all got this Spanish sugar candy called Marzipan. Sadly, Marissa couldn’t eat it because she was allergic, so I got the third place candy which was shaped like a cute little frog. It had a consistency similar to that of playdough and was SUPER sugary, plus it was only like 11am at this point so I couldn’t finish it.
During the debating and the judging of the exotic foods we found at the market, we walked to our next cinema activity visiting the Fílmoteca Catalunya. This is the same organization that we met while we were in Madrid, but the Barcelona branch, which was a little different. This branch housed 400,000 films; 60,000 books; 17,000 DVDs; 30,000 posters; and a collection of film photography negative stills of films shot in Barcelona between 1930 and the 1980s. Plus, this location has two screening rooms where they screen about 27 movies every week, usually the classics. I’m sure you’re thinking: with movie tickets prices so dang high, how does a random film preservation operation that shows classic Spanish films get anyone to come? That’s what I thought at least, but the Fílmoteca thought about this and made their ticket prices super cheap – only 4 euros, which has proven to be very successful as they get around 100 people at every showing. Some of the showings also offer a round-table discussion after the film had ended which sometimes has people who were a part of the creation of the film come in and participate. It’s a really interesting and well-thought out way to make old, classic cinema engaging to a new audience.
After we had a long, interesting discussion with the director of the facility (Esteban), we took a tour through the building, which like the other, was filled with unmarked doors and white walls. I have no idea how Esteban knew his way around so well, because I felt like we were going in circles but popping up in new, random rooms. The storage of all the memorabilia, DVDs, posters, and photos from the films were housed in a large vault that resembled a library. But, instead of the rows of the library being spaced apart and accessible, these were electronic and compressed together to save space and would move when you wanted them to open at a certain section. It was futuristic and an interesting innovation which I thought was awesome because organization is awesome! We were all kind of playing with it and watching Esteban show us how it worked and it was all fun and games until someone almost smushed Rick between two shelves. He squeezed out just in the knick of time, and it was still funny. We finished the tour at an exhibit about the role of the photographer during the film shooting. It showed a bunch of still from Spanish cinema and described how the photographer could stop a frame and change the lighting, the position, and the face of the actors to get the perfect shot. Now, I don’t know how still photography in film works now, but I’d say that the photographers being exhibited had a lot of power in the depiction of the film and the characters in the film.
We ended the tour back upstairs and decided to go to the adjacent café, La Mon Roe for lunch. I was pretty set on just eating another ham and cheese sandwich for lunch, but then I saw el Menu del Día, which is the Menu of the Day. El Menu del Día is really popular in Spain and usually consists of two dishes - a larger appetizer and an entrée, a drink (alcoholic or non) and a dessert or coffee. The standard price for one of these is around 12 euro, which is a super good deal when you’re usually spending 5-7 on just an entrée. So, most of the time we were in Spain I noticed a lot of seafood on el Menu del Día at various restaurants, which I’m not a fan of. Here though, oh my goodness, I was so ready. I chose el Menu del Día with only one entrée – Meatballs and mashed potatoes. They were some of the best meatballs I’ve ever had, only to be surpassed by my Aunt Jackie’s pineapple meatballs on Christmas. They were so good and the mashed potatoes were done so right, with a little bit of garlic butter and having some texture of the actual potato still in there. Yummm-my. It was nice to have a little taste of comfort food amidst the sea of healthy, delicious Spanish food we’ve been eating. For dessert I had a yogurt with wild berry sauce… I took a huge bite into it before remembering that they don’t put sugar in their yogurt… It was super bitter and had a slight sour cream taste, so I put it aside and nibbled on an extra fruit dessert someone had ordered.
After lunch we had some free time, so me and a few other girls walked around, trying to find our way back to Cathedral Barcelona to find the market we saw there as well as a small shop filled with homemade jams, pastries, and soaps which was run by the nuns. Our navigation skills proved us well and although the market wasn’t there, we did find the small shop called Caelum where the others bought homemade marmalade to bring back to their family members.
Since none of the other girls really knew any Spanish, I worked as best as I could to be the translator, for both them regarding the flavors and how to pay and for the little old nun who was working at the counter. After we left the shop and everyone had gotten what they wanted without much fuss, I took a second to think about what I just did. I just communicated and translated Spanish from/to a native Spaniard to a group of people and then translated the English back to Spanish.. If you would have told me to do that 2 months ago, I would have looked at you like you just told me you were going to chop off my right pinky… it wasn’t going to happen. But now, even though I haven’t even been here quite two weeks, my Spanish is coming back very strongly and I’m super impressed with myself regarding how much I’ve been using it. I remember much more than I thought and the nervousness I used to get when speaking in Spanish has slowly been deteriorating the more I speak it here in Spain. I guess I was always nervous that the Spanish would scoff at me if I screwed something up, but most everybody has been thankful for me at least trying to speak to them in their native tongue as well as impressed by my knowledge of the language. It felt good to have the affirmation that my Spanish is good enough that I can have conversations where people understand what I’m saying… It’s great and definitely helps me feel more at home and in place here.
After our free time was up, we met back up as a group to go on a Barcelona graffiti tour. I was super stoked about this, and made sure I brought my nice camera and a place to take notes. As some of you know, I really appreciate street art and the different styles and actually went on a graffiti tour in a subsection of Chicago called Pilsen this past year with a class I was co-teaching. That tour was absolutely incredible and insightful, so I was excited to check this one out!
We met at Arc de Triomf, where we met our tour guide, Mike who hails proudly from California which he didn’t even have to tell us due to his super thick accent. The tour took about two hours and we walked all throughout the area until we came across a small gallery which was selling some artwork by a few of the artist’s work we had seen on the route. I won’t write about all the artists in this post, but perhaps I will in the future, since there are some incredible ones out there, I took detailed notes of their information and I have some great pictures! So stay tuned for that!
After our tour ended, we stopped to get a drink at a small plaza. Pooped, I sat down next to a fence and waited for everyone to return when two small twin girls started talking to me and testing my Spanish. It was nerve-wracking talking to two little girls, cause they seemed so much smarter than me – blurting out quick long sentences in Spanish while I worked a little slower to understand their process. It took me a little bit, but we warmed up to each other’s style and ended up talking for quite a while. When everyone was done with their drinks, we left to head to the beach where we would eat dinner and celebrate Noche de San Joan.
Noche de San Joan is a Spanish public holiday where everyone celebrates the beginning of summer, the solstice, and of course, Saint John. It doesn’t sound like that big of a deal, but it is. Pretty much every building and every store is closed and everybody spends the day getting ready for the party that night. It was best described to us as “the 4th of July on steroids.” But, nothing that any Spaniard or tour guide could have said would have prepared me for this night. People were lighting off fireworks and firecrackers in the street all day long, keeping you on high alert with the loud bangs that would go off every few minutes. On this day, everyone goes out to the beaches to celebrate, and I mean everyone. When we arrived, there were thousands upon thousands of people on the beach – all hanging out, most setting off fireworks and some lighting huge beach bonfires. There were so many people and they all had such freedom it was crazy.
We posted up at a restaurant called Santa Marta where I ate the best calzone I’ve ever tasted in my entire life while listening to house music sound from the bars on the beach and watching people set up for the festivities. Fast forward to after dinner and after the sun had set. We were all sitting on the beach, enjoying ourselves – being a part of the culture, taking pictures, listening to the Mediterranean Sea and the beats of house music being spun by Nichola Italiano next to us. It was perfect, it was insane, it was wonderful and it was a little scary. People were lighting off fireworks left and right and in a moment of thought, I wondered where the police officers were. I looked around and there were none in sight (which was kind of a bummer because I think “must be good-looking” is in the Spanish Police Job Requirements…). It shocked me that activities like this were being so widely accepted and unquestioned here, where there would be a hundred police on the beaches during this event (if it didn’t get shut down first) if it were in America.
I stopped my questioning and just enjoyed the freedom and happiness that was so vibrant in the air. It was a great night filled with meeting new people, jumping over fires, dancing to good house music, enjoying the beach, becoming numb to the sound of fireworks and so much more. We were definitely lucky that this trip coincided with San Joan, because WOW was that something to experience. I wish there was a way to better describe it, but I don’t think there is. Come experience it next year! J