Just The Caffeine Talking

Belloq's Obsession

Recently I was listening to the soundtrack for Raiders of the Lost Ark and talking about the movie with my kids when I had a thought.

Just after Indy's epic fistfight with the Giant Bald Guy at the airplane, the movie cuts away to a reaction by Indiana Jones's villainous rival Belloq. Belloq sees something explode in the distance and says "Jones!" in exasperation.

Now bear in mind, the last time Belloq saw Dr. Jones in the movie he was sealing him up alive inside an underground tomb full of snakes. Yet when something blows up in the neighborhood, his first thought is "Jones!"

That's more than just a rivalry. Belloq's sliding off the deep end into some kind of persecution mania. It must be a handicap in everyday life.

 "I'm sorry, Monsieur Belloq, but your table will not be ready for another ten minutes. Would you care to wait at the bar?"

"Jones!"

"The exterminator called, Rene, and he's going to be spraying your office tomorrow morning."

"Jones!"

"Monsieur Belloq, I'm afraid your account is overdrawn once again. There will be a surcharge."

"JOOONNES!!!"

 

 

The Perpetual Tourist

I recently got back from a trip, and of course there were lots of mundane errands to run as soon as I got home. The usual stuff -- buying things, dropping kids off, mailing things, banking, all the business of middle-class life. But I found myself experiencing a sort of psychic jet-lag, as though my mind was still on vacation, viewing my mundane errands as some new form of tourism.

The feeling passed, but it made me think. Would it be so bad to go through life as a perpetual tourist? We always love to mock tourists -- when we're tourists ourselves we search up and down for places to go which aren't "touristy," even though our very presence alters that state. It's easy to make fun of tourists with their funny clothes, their cluelessness about how we do things around here, their accents, and their air of entitlement. I grew up in a tourist-destination city. I know how irritating they can be. Getting stuck behind a tour bus when you're in a hurry to get somewhere is a sure way to crank up one's xenophobia to Tokugawa levels.

Now that I've established my credentials as one of the Cool People Who Hate Tourists, I'm going to write in their defense. I think tourists have the right attitude, and are worth emulating. Let's look at some of their virtues:

• Tourists Don't Waste Time: When you're on vacation, there's always the sense that the meter is running. There's so much to do and see, and only a few days to fit all of it in! Even if your goal on the vacation is relaxation, or savoring the atmosphere of quaint villages, you've got to budget your time. "Okay this afternoon we'll hang out on the beach, and then tomorrow we'll go to the museum and the Cathedral." This means that tourists aren't sitting in the hotel room doing Sudoku puzzles or watching television. When every minute is costing you money (my last trip came in at about 20 cents per minute, not counting meals) you don't want to fritter them away. Even idleness has to be quality idleness. 

• Tourists Think Everything Is Charming: Who hasn't seen travelers raving about the most mundane things in other countries? My wife and I have a ball visiting grocery stores abroad -- not specialty shops but ordinary supermarkets. It's fascinating to see what standard items back home are missing, and what rarities are ordinary groceries. So why not bring that attitude to your hometown? I'm writing this in Greenfield, looking out on the tiny Town Common and the church beyond. Instead of seeing a glorified traffic island and a building in need of repair, I can see them as a tiny spot of much-needed greenery in the heart of town, and a charmingly dilapidated old structure. It makes Greenfield a lot easier to take. 

• Tourists Seek Out the Best: This goes along with not wasting time. When you have to save time and money, you want the best you can get. Tourists try to find the most interesting museums, the best restaurants, the most charming villages, the prettiest beaches, and so on. So why do natives settle for lesser atractions? If your town has a legendary pizza parlor or a particularly good playground, make use of them! 

• Tourists Document Everything: We mock tourists for obsessively photographing everything they see. Just two weeks ago I watched a Japanese gentleman taking a picture of the floor in the Frankfurt airport. I myself write pages and pages in my journal while I'm traveling, describing all the places I visit, the meals I eat, and my impressions. Whereas at home, weeks can go by with nothing but a few "to do" lists. Why not try to remember at least one thing from each day? And if your life is that un-memorable, why not try to do something worth remembering? 

• Tourists Dress Funny: Okay, don't do that. Have some self-respect. Seriously. Put away the cargo shorts.

• Tourists See the Sights: It's almost a cliche that people never visit the best-known attractions where they live. There are New Yorkers who've seen the Taj Mahal and the Sydney Opera House but have never gone to the top of the Empire State Building. I'm as guilty of this as anyone: I've lived in Massachusetts for more than a decade but I've never been to Cape Cod. This is particularly odd in an age when people move around a lot. There really are things you haven't seen, and you don't have infinite time to see them. Why wait?

• Tourists Try to Befriend the Natives: One of the annoying traits of tourists is how they assume everyone is going to want to talk to them. And yet, isn't that kind of outgoing self-assurance the definition of charisma? Why don't people strike up conversations with the folks at home? There's no language barrier, and you have a reasonable chance of seeing them again. 

If you live life as a perpetual tourist, the vacation never ends.  

 

 

Deep Thoughts on Stupid Movies

Being a bunch of science fiction geeks, my family went to see the big-budget giant monster movie Pacific Rim this past weekend. Much fun was had. 

But, as so often happens, I got to thinking afterward. Pacific Rim is a very stupid movie. The monsters are nonsensical, the giant robots are nonsensical, and the entire plot of the film is completely nonsensical.

Did I mention that we all enjoyed it a great deal?

So I'm faced with a question: why are some stupid movies just irritating, while others are enormously entertaining? I wrote three blog posts about how annoyed Battleship made me. But, viewed objectively, Battleship wasn't any more stupid than Pacific Rim. It certainly did less violence to the laws of nature, and the motives and methods of the bad guys were, if anything, slightly less nonsensical than those of the villains in Pacific Rim.

And yet I liked Pacific Rim a lot more. Why?

It certainly wasn't the acting. The meatball Everyman hero played by Charlie Hunnam is about the same as the meatball Everyman hero played by Taylor Kitsch. The visual effects in Pacific Rim (including monsters designed by one of my favorite artists, Wayne D. Barlowe) were better -- but Battleship compensates with real-life warship cheesecake shots courtesy of the United States Navy, so that's not it. 

Ultimately I think it comes down to two factors.

Richness: Pacific Rim doesn't just show us the heroes fighting the monsters, and their personal soap opera plots getting in the way. It also gives us bizarre minor characters like Ron Perlman's black-market monster-parts dealer, bizarre background locations like a slum in Hong Kong built into the skeleton of a fallen monster, and some entertaining glimpses of a world in which the main political issue is giant monster attacks. Battleship doesn't do much of that, and when it does, it tends to double back on the boring meatball protagonist instead of turning loose some character actors to chew on the scenery.

Enthusiasm: I think this is the key. Battleship was made, ultimately, because executives at Hasbro decided to build their board game into a "media property." Pacific Rim was made, ultimately, because Guillermo del Toro's inner ten-year-old decided to make the bestest monster movie ever. 

Note that I'm not being disdainful of mere commerce here. Obviously Pacific Rim was made in order to make a lot of money. And I'm sure the production team on Battleship did their damnedest to make it a good movie. But the difference in enthusiasm is palpable. One movie has the by-the-numbers feel of a homework assignment, the other is a love letter.

Contrast the original Pirates of the Caribbean film, which was also born from the desire to "build a media property" but which somehow also managed to spark the enthusiasm of the moviemakers. They tried to make the bestest pirate movie ever, and it was that enthusiasm which gave the series enough momentum to carry through two lackluster sequels.

Moviemaking isn't something a lone auteur can do in an attic. Even a "small" film costs a large fortune, which means that commercial concerns will always be paramount. But that doesn't mean movies have to be crap. No matter who's paying the bills, any movie can still try to be the bestest ever.   

  

 

 

The Barcelona Operation: Day 7 (and Afterthoughts)

How long does it take to get a cab in Barcelona at 4:45 a.m. on a Sunday morning?

Fifteen seconds. It's that kind of a town.

Of course, that meant that we got to the airport absurdly early, giving us time to drink one last bottle of European Fanta (it's not as sweet, which actually makes it more refreshing) and watch the sun rise over the runway. Our Lufthansa flight (the tickets said United, the plane said Lufthansa) to Frankfurt got us there on time, and we even managed to have a pretty good lunch of weisswurst and (of course) frankfurters with sauerkraut and mashed potatoes in the Frankfurt airport.

Then aboard a big Airbus 350 (not the supergiant, but the one with the bathrooms downstairs) for the long ride to Boston. Rented a car to replace the one in the shop and drove home. As it was Sunday evening we had to settle for burgers along the way. Collapsed into bed around 8 p.m. Trip over.

What I have learned about Barcelona:

• I know that I've learned very little. It's a huge city, full of things to see and do, and we only got to hit some of the highlights.

• Next time I think I'll stay in a less hip part of town. The Barrio Gotic is lovely, but nobody there ever goes to bed.

• I also want to figure out how to make some day-trips outside of the city. I'm not sure I want to tackle driving in Barcelona (though I've handled Boston). Maybe check out regional rail, or possibly bike rental.

• Someone is going to make a fortune as soon as they figure out how to properly market tapas in America. Right now tapas restaurants all get shoehorned into the "continental cuisine" ghetto. As soon as someone realizes it's really bar food they'll be everywhere.

• Communication wasn't a problem . . . much. Everyone we dealt with in Barcelona spoke English, although it became obvious that they didn't speak as much English as they thought they did. Any conversation beyond the basics of shop or restaurant transactions brought forth the smile-with-panicked-eyes of someone who doesn't understand what you're saying but is too polite to say so.

• On the other hand, Catalan was a lot easier to understand than I'd feared. The odd spelling makes it look very intimidating, like Basque or something, but once you work out the phonetics it's actually closer to French than Spanish. Essentially (and here I'm probably pissing off a lot of Catalan nationalists) it's French that has been put through some sort of George Bernard Shaw "simplified spelling" process. All the swallowed final consonants are simply dropped, all the complex French vowel strings are boiled down to single letters, and there are some Xs doing unfamiliar duty (it's "sh" as in "Chicago" rather than "kh" as in "Ximenes"). Given that I know more French than Spanish, I found the Catalan signage in the museums easier to understand.

• Cats sighted: 2. Apparently the only cats in Barcelona are around La Font Del Gat on Montjuic.

• Overall: the impressive thing about Barcelona was that it delivered on its promises. I didn't come away from anything feeling disappointed. The museums were all better than expected, I never got a meal or a glass of wine that wasn't at least decent in quality (though I still want a really good paella), and I found the city quite pleasant. I left wanting to stay longer. 

The Barcelona Operation, Day 6

Over the years we've learned a useful trick for trip planning: leave an extra day. Having a free day means you have some time for overflow — if something's closed on the day you planned to see it, you can go in on the extra day; or if you find something you hadn't known about, you've got time. An overflow day relaxes the entire trip. There isn't quite as much of the frantic hustle to keep up with your planned schedule. You can stop to have dessert, or chuck it all and go home for a nap.

The final day of our trip was the overflow day, and we did a number of things which we had overlooked. Since it was Saturday, the usual bakery was closed, so the youngest member of our Crack Team and I went over to the Santa Caterina market to buy some pastries. The market, by the way, incorporates its own archaeological site, another outpost of the mighty MUHBA.

On the way back from the market, we stumbled across a nice little bakery less than two blocks from our flat, open for business with what looked like a great selection. Keep this in mind: all of my descriptions of Barcelona are incredibly superficial and incomplete. We didn't really visit Barcelona, we visited perhaps a dozen streets there. I think one would need weeks or months to really learn the place properly.

Properly dressed and breakfasted, we took the Crack Team to the Museu de la Xocolata. That's right, Barcelona has a Chocolate Museum. Your entry ticket is a bar of chocolate. (No, there is no terrifying boat ride.) The Museu de la Xocolata has some barely-educational displays about the history of Chocolate and How They Get Chocolate, but the really astounding things to see there are the sculptures. The Museu is filled with enormous, fantastically intricate chocolate sculptures. A chocolate Sagrada Familia, a chocolate Pieta, chocolate Smurfs and Lucky Luke, a chocolate albino gorilla, a chocolate Barcelona FC player, a life-size chocolate Komodo Dragon, and (weirdly) a life-size chocolate ape with Charles Darwin's face.

A little boggled from these displays of candymaking art, we did stop in the museum shop for some chocolate. As it was a hot day we decided to get cups of chocolate to drink (rather than carry melting bars around with us). Being Americans we were expecting chocolate-flavored milk, but what we got was chocolate. Basically cups of bittersweet fudge sauce. Wow.

Energized by a giant theobromine fix, we strolled over to the oldest part of the old quarter to see the satellite MUHBA museum in the old El Call section. That was the Jewish quarter of Barcelona in the early medieval days, and it finally got big enough to be a literal quarter of the city. Apparently the Counts of Barcelona and early Kings of Aragon loved their Jews because they paid their taxes directly into the Royal treasury, without any feudal or ecclesiastical middlemen skimming the take. But after the Reconquista the Spanish weren't very keen on religious diversity and kicked them out.

There are still some Jewish remnants in Barcelona, including the old Synagogue Major, which was used for the past six centuries as a workshop or storage space, but now is a museum. The space itself is a simple basement room with a low, vaulted ceiling, but the guide gave a very informative talk about the history of the place. It is apparently one of the oldest synagogues in Europe, second only to the one in Prague. I was amused to note that at the gift counter one could purchase yarmulkes in the Barcelona Football Club colors.

We searched for a place to have lunch and finally settled, rather resignedly, on a cafe called "Venus" which looked a little dodgy (freaky R. Crumb-knockoff nudes on the walls) — but which turned out to be quite good. I had a sort of codfish ceviche salad and a glass of wine. From there we made our way back to the flat with a stop to look at the flea market in the square by the cathedral.

In the afternoon we napped, then the youngest member and I went out to sit in the square before Santa Maria del Mar. I gave him money for gelato and got myself a glass of wine and some salty stuff. While we sat a wedding party emerged from the church, accompanied by showers of rice and an amazing cluster-bomb confetti launcher.

For our final dinner as a family we decided to return to the excellent Basque joint nearby. Instead of tapas we got a table and ordered the prix fixe menu. It was excellent — fish with a bell pepper puree, entrecote of beef, a sardine salad, and a Basque dessert which turned out to be a sort of hybrid of creme brulee and tiramisu.

And so to bed for a few hours before leaving. Did not sleep at all.

Cats sighted: 0

Tomorrow: How Long Does it Take to Get a Taxi at 4:45 A.M. on a Sunday in Barcelona? (And final thoughts.)  

 

The Barcelona Operation, Day 5

Again we breakfasted in our flat on croissants from the local bakery, accompanied by what I thougt was orange juice but turned out to be an orange-soy "health" blend with the chalky taste of Tang. 

Once all of us were dressed and ready, we sortied toward the Museum of the History of Barcelona, located just a few blocks away next to the main Cathedral. Once again I managed to underestimate one of Barcelona's attractions. I figured the MUHBA would be a collection of mostly local interest — a few antiquities, some portraits of 19th-century politicians, maybe the jersey of a particularly beloved Barcelona F.C. player.

Once again, Barcelona sneered at me. The mighty MUHBA is much bigger, and considerably more interesting than I ever expected. Among other things it contains a chunk of an ancient Roman town. One descends to the basement level, where archaeologists have been digging like moles under the area around the Cathedral, exposing the foundations and basements of the original Roman settlement of Barcino. 

Nor is the MUHBA content merely to show: there are portable audio guides which tell about everything in great detail. One can select helpful little supplementary lectures on Roman laundry detergents, the production of garum, and wine-making. 

Above the Roman city there's a layer of Gothic Barcelona, and one can trace the expansion of the original bishop's house from a standard Roman town house to the huge pile he lives in nowadays. 

At the surface level is the old palace of the Counts of Barcelona, with a display of High Medieval history explaining how the Counts went from rulers of the city to Kings of Aragon and finally to the throne of Spain and masters of three continents. 

Overall, I give the mighty MUHBA an enthusiastic thumbs-up, especially since the museum has other facilities scattered about the city and we only got to visit one of them. It also has a pretty impressive bookstore, focusing (naturally) on the history of Barcelona and Catalonia. (Note: bookshops are scarce in the old section of Barcelona. I only saw one other, on La Rambla. I expect there are more near the Universities, and for all I know there's a whole street of them we never stumbled across.) 

We picked up some Xorico for dinner and had lunch at a different Basque tapas joint (whose name escapes me). It wasn't as awesome as the one near our flat, but it was certainly good. Then home for a nap. 

In the afternoon we slathered ourselves in sunscreen and headed for the beach — along with several thousand other tourists and Barcelonese with the same idea. Like all public beaches, the one in Barcelona makes one feel very slender and attractive. It also made us feel exceedingly pale. I'm sure passengers on airplanes coming in for a landing must have wondered what those white flashes were from the seashore.

The water itself was warm and very dirty. Floating-condom dirty. When we were done we all went back to the flat for a serious scrubdown. (I expect the water is cleaner at the public beaches located further away from the city's core, but I didn't get to find out. If I go back it would be nice to arrange a day-trip or overnight expedition up the coast.)

We had planned to go to a choral concert that evening at Santa Maria del Mar, but at the last moment it was canceled. Maybe the choir got drunk. So we improvised: a stroll through the Ciutadella park (located on the site of the other huge fort built to control the city) and then a very high-end dessert at the nearby pastry shop called "Bubo." It's worth a stop if you're in BCN. By then our active day began to catch up with us, so we went off to bed tired and content.

Cats sighted: 0 

Next time: Xocolata! 

The Barcelona Operation, Day 4

By Thursday we were getting into the rhythms of the neighborhood. I got up at 7 and went out to buy breakfast. Seven o'clock on a weekday in Barcelona (at least in the old section) is like 6 a.m. in an American city: a handful of early workers are going to their jobs, delivery trucks and streetcleaners are blocking the roads, and the only things open are coffee places and a couple of groceries. 

We rode the Metro in the opposite direction to the stop at the Church of La Sagrada Familia. It's far and away Barcelona's biggest single tourist attraction, and the neighborhood was full of souvenir vendors, guys peddling bottled water, and a vast swarm of visitors like ourselves.

We stood under a broiling sun in a line that stretched more than a city block, for the privilege of paying 50 Euros for the whole family to get in. And when we finally did get inside . . . 

Our jaws dropped. It was worth it. Antoni Gaudi designed the most amazing church in all of Christendom. It's the only Modernist church building I've ever seen which isn't a petty adolescent rebellion against all previous architectural tradition. None of that at Sagrada Familia. It's a culmination of two thousand years of ecclesiastic architecture, which understands and honors what has gone before without being bound by it. 

We spent at least a couple of hours in and around that church. It's nowhere near complete, and the construction crews are hard at work. Apparently a couple of million people a year paying 13 Euros a head can fund a blistering pace of construction. The place rang with the sound of power tools (no quaint medieval methods here). Supposedly they're set to complete it by the 2020s sometime, and it might well be worth a return visit.

The church visit left us tired and hungry, so we found our way to a paella restaurant nearby and had our first non-wonderful meal. It was pretty obviously reheated -- either microwaved or in a pan. Presumably came off a delivery truck like frozen hamburger patties at McDonald's. I don't mean the paella was bad -- we had a "mixed" and a "black" paella among the four of us and finished every grain -- but it was mediocre.

Protip for travelers: if the restaurant has a "Paellador" sign outside with photos of various types of paella, I think that's a brand of premade stuff and they're just reheating it. I saw a couple of those signs around town, all identical.

We walked along Diagonal Avenue (which in Barcelona, as opposed to J.K. Rowling's London, is a huge wide boulevard lined with buildings from the late 19th century), and then turned down Passeig de Gracia to continue our Gaudi tour. We saw (but didn't enter) his Casa Mila apartment house and the Casa Batllo mansion. Astonishingly, those two are even more costly to visit than Sagrada Familia. I had to balance my desire to see the interior against a tired family, a hot day, and my own sore feet, and decided to keep moving toward our flat.

Rather uncharacteristically, the ladies decided to do some shopping, so eventually we split into male and female teams so that I could get some gelato into our very patient youngest member as a reward for tramping around town looking at buildings. Then we all siesta-ed for more than an hour.

That evening was Grownup Date Night. We left the kids with bread and salami for sandwiches (and 10 Euros for more gelato), got into our nicer clothes, and walked over to the Barceloneta neighborhood to have dinner by the sea. It was only 8 o'clock so we were unfashionably early; some of the restaurants were just opening up. After walking down the seaside a fair distance we eventually decided to have our date dinner at a place called Salamanca. I get the impression it's a local institution -- the kind of restaurant locals would roll their eyes at, but probably also have some fond memories of. The menu in Ingles was charmingly garbled.

I had my first raw clams as an hors-d'oeuvre, and for the main event the two of us shared the Ginormous Grilled Seafood Platter. We accompanied it with a demi-bottle of Vina del Sol, a white from the vicinity. Since that day was July 4, we could see a group of young American tourists having a beach party on the sand.

Made our way home to find the kids had not caused any international incidents, and so to bed.

Cats sighted: 0

Tomorrow: going underground! 

The Barcelona Operation, Day 3

We ventured into Barcelona's Metro system for a trip to the park complex at Montjuic, at the southwest corner of the city. The subway is modern and efficient (though of course my sample size is very small).

From the Metro we transferred to a cable car which runs up the side of Montjuic (it's actually part of the subway system), and then to a telephérique which carried us all the way up to the fortress at the top of the mountain. That wasn't cheap, but we did get great views of the city.

The fortress of Montjuic is an 18th-century star fort, built to defend the harbor below — and command the city. The Bourbon kings knew that Barcelona wasn't exactly a hotbed of support for their rule, and watched it like prison wardens. There was an even bigger fortress right down in the city itself, which was leveled in the 19th century and became the modern Ciutadella park.

But Montjuic obviously remained an active fort until well into the 20th century. It has some World War I-era cannon commanding the harbor, and some World War II-era guns to control the sea approaches. I don't know if any of the fort's weapons ever fired a shot in anger.

The fort does provide a wonderful view of the modern harbor section below. Barcelona's a big port, and looks quite busy. There were half a dozen ships anchored off shore, presumably waiting to get in. I could see a large container terminal, grain elevators, a huge oil terminal, a cruise ship terminal, and a busy dock where scrap metal was being unloaded. Again, Barcelona's a large industrial city, not just a tourist town.

After walking all over the fort we made our way through the botanical gardens which stretch along the northeast side of Montjuic. I'm not much of a botanist, but I could spot a few familiar plants, including a stand of Magnolia grandiflora, presumably imported from America. I wondered if the forebears of those trees were brought over back when Spain controlled Florida and Louisiana. From what I've read, the Spanish empire-builders were very interested in finding useful plants from their new domains, and planted some of the first botanical gardens in Europe.

By this point we were all feeling hungry and a little footsore. Just past the Joan Miro Institute (which we didn't go into) the park map showed a little knife-and-fork icon, so I figured we might as well stop at some crummy snack bar and pay way too much for sandwiches and bottled water.

Instead we found La Font Del Gat, a charming little restaurant with a nice 15-Euro prix fixe lunch which was one of the best meals we had in Barcelona. I had "cherry gazpaxo" (which I think meant cherry tomato gazpaxo as I tasted no fruit) and grilled cod. Robert had rabbit. I don't recall what the ladies had.

Much later, feeling very refreshed, we got on our feet again and went to the National Museum of Catalan Art nearby. It's a vast old Beaux-Arts pile built for Barcelona's World's Fair back in 1929. (I believe the theme of the fair was: "Disaster's Just Around The Corner!")

We also saw our first cat! Now we know why the restaurant bears its name.

The Museum was a lot bigger, and a lot more interesting, than I'd expected. Quite frankly, I had more or less assumed it would be a mostly lame display of local crafts and whatnot, with perhaps a few paintings by obscure local artists. Nope. The old Kingdom of Aragon and the County of Barcelona before it were major cultural wellsprings all through the Middle Ages, and that didn't change when they merged with Castile. Barcelona's museum has a fantastic collection of church interiors from before the Muslim conquest, then a lot of far more elaborate altarpieces from the days of the Reconquista. (Interesting note: the older stuff all puts Jesus as Redeemer front and center, while the High Medieval altars are all Mary with infant Jesus.)

The Renaissance and Baroque era collections are a little thinner (all the good stuff was going off to Madrid, I expect), but then there's a superb assortment of Impressionist and Modernist artwork from Barcelona's time as an art center in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I was particularly taken by some of the works by the Masreira clan, a family of artists and jewelers in Barcelona during that period. Surprisingly, their firm is still around, and I may put that on the list for a future visit.

Completely arted-out, we hiked back to our flat, rested and showered, then had Basque tapas for dinner at a restaurant called "Euskal Etxea." The system worked like this: one takes as many dishes as one likes from a long display along the bar. Each tapa (tapo? tap?) has a decorative toothpick in it. When you're done eating and drinking, you present your toothpicks to the cashier and pay about 2 Euros for each.

As a way to encourage wild over-indulgence, it rivals Japanese conveyor-belt sushi restaurants. After all, each one is pretty cheap. You can always have one more. Just one. Maybe another . . . I am at a loss to explain why restaurants in America which call themselves "Tapas bars" don't follow the same system. I'm pretty sure we have toothpicks over here. I've seen them.

We killed a bottle of Rioja with our tapas, topped off with gelato, and then the ladies went upstairs while Robert and I lingered in the square. I had a glass of sangria at the bar below our window while he tried to get acquainted with some of the neighborhood kids. We called it a night around 11, just as the locals were starting to go out.

A Good Day. Cats sighted: 2 (near La Font Del Gat).

Tomorrow: Gaudi! 

The Barcelona Operation, Day 2

When we woke the air in the square below was full of swallows. Apparently they nest in the walls of the church and come out at dawn to snag bugs out of the air. We watched some of the neighbors playing with dogs down below. Barcelona has a lot of dogs, but no cats. I offered a bounty of a candy bar to whoever spotted a cat first.

Our first tourist destination was Barcelona Cathedral -- the Cathedral of Saint Eulalia, a huge Gothic pile with a wonderful lacy stonework spire. Off to one side is a charming cloister, with geese for some reason. The interior of the cathedral is very dark and solemn, with the usual side-chapels dedicated to various saints. 

After that we headed for the main drag of Barcelona -- La Rambla, the tree-lined avenue which runs from the seashore deep into the interior. It was packed with visitors just like us (but not so nicely dressed). We made our way to the old central market, La Boqueria, an acre of food stalls under a big metal roof (but around the edges there's what looks like and 18th-century colonnade). I was pleased to see that the market hasn't become just another tourist attraction, the way Philadelphia's Reading Station market or the French Market in New Orleans have. From the look of it, people still buy groceries at La Boqueria.

In fact, that was one of the most charming things about Barcelona. It's a living city, not a museum. People lived in the flats around the square below our flat. There were a lot of kids in evidence. If all the Americans, Englishmen, Germans, and Australians quit coming to Barcelona tomorrow, there would be some grumbling from souvenir vendors and tour guides, but the city would go on much as it does.

After a two-hour nap and a lunch of bread and cheese, we went over to the Picasso Museum, which was only two blocks from our flat. It was very good. They have a very impressive display of Picasso's younger work, and you can see the point at about age 14 where Pablo went from "a kid drawing pictures" to "a genius in the making."

Some observations:

• The first picture from when he moved to Paris is called "The Carnival Stall" and it is entirely done in shades of brown, gray, and dark green. Looks like a little culture shock for young Pablo, leaving Spain's sun for the rainier climate of northern Europe.

• One female nude from his Blue Period suggests that Picasso may not have been quite the satyr his reputation paints (at least, not yet). Breasts don't work that way, Pablo.

• The Museum had a special exhibit of self-portraits by Picasso, and I have to say he made them almost absurdly flattering -- his paintings of himself all have a much stronger jaw and a lot more hair than the photos indicate.

We dined at a restaurant near our flat, called "Origen," an organic-food place which was good but not great. I had roast rabbit, Diane had duck, Emily had cod, and Robert had lamb meatballs in an eggplant sauce.

Cats sighted: 0

Tomorrow: The Mountain! 

The Barcelona Operation, Day 1

Dr. Kelly had a science conference in Barcelona this summer, so the rest of us invited ourselves along. The plan was for the four of us to fly over together, spend a week being tourists, then the three non-scientists would come home together leaving her to devote her time to papers and networking during the conference.

It almost didn't happen. We got money, we got a friend to feed the cat, we put the dog in Dog Camp, we packed our bags, and on Sunday we set out for a leisurely drive to Boston. Everything was fine . . . until around Gardner the clutch stopped working. The sensible thing would be to pull over right there, but I wanted to get closer to Boston before giving up -- our chances of finding transport to Logan Airport would be better the nearer we could get.

So I nursed the car along in fourth gear, and we were doing great until we reached the rotary at Concord and had to downshift. That killed the engine, and with no clutch I couldn't restart, or even coast. The car's remaining momentum carried it into a side street next to the penitentiary, and that was that.

Sunday afternoons are a bad time to need immediate towing or car repair. I finally found a nice gentleman with a lift truck who loaded up our car and let the four of us squeeze into the cab with him. We abandoned the car at Colonial Chevrolet in Acton, then begged SF writer and workshop poohbah Steve Popkes for a lift to Logan in time for our flight.

The flight itself, on SwissAir, was happily uneventful. They give you chocolate. I had to explain to my kids that once upon a time you didn't have a personal TV with a vast library of videos and movies to choose from, you had to watch the same movie as the rest of the passengers, on a screen not much bigger than the seatback ones. And it was always one of last year's movies that nobody really liked.

We entered the SCHENGEN ZONE in Zurich, and changed planes there for the hop to Barcelona. Then a long delay waiting for baggage, as there was a strike either going on, or just ended. Lots of sweaty clerks in yellow vests being yelled at by people unable to locate their bags, and long rows of unclaimed bags lined up. Fortunately ours eventually appeared on the carousel and we got a cab into the city.

Barcelona is built in layers. For the first part of the trip into town we might have been driving in Phoenix, Arizona. Lots of big new apartment blocks, highway interchanges, billboards, and supermarkets. Then we entered the city proper, which looks a lot like Paris: five- and six-story Beaux-Arts walkups on tree-lined avenues packed with traffic. The taxi driver got us to the old city, the "Barrio Gotic," where we had to proceed on foot because the streets are closed to traffic during the day.

Despite the name, the buildings in the "Gothic Quarter" all look to have been built in the 18th and early 19th Century. Still quite dense: even in the oldest parts everything is four or five floors, and the streets are barely wide enough for a delivery truck to pass through. (I think they are too winding for buses, because I never saw a tour bus even attempt the old section.)

We made it to the flat we'd rented, which had a lovely view of the square below, called "El Fossar de les Moreres," and of the church of Santa Maria Del Mar beyond. The four of us collapsed for a couple of hours, then went out for a dinner of tapas and half a liter of wine. If anyone's interested: the restaurant was called "Lonja de Tapas" and they have a very good 18-Euro tasting menu. The wine was a white from Penedes, a few miles away.

Next time: Picasso!