Green Education in a Green Country: A Barcelonia Adventure

Our trip to Barcelona for Christmas was interesting. It had its ups and downs, and in general was not quite what we were expecting. We mostly just walked around the city, as many of the museums were closed for the holidays. We did manage to get into the Gaudi museum, and La Sagrada Familia (Gaudi's unfinished church), both of which were fantastic. The weather was wonderful -- cool but warm enough to not need a jacket much of the time. One of the major perks in our view was that it was sunny. Properly sunny. Sunny where you don't have to squint your eyes from the sun never getting above the horizon. It was also really thrilling to try out our language skills, speaking Spanish for the first time to people who, um, actually expected you to. We didn't quite realize that Barcelona was one of those places where people don't just automatically speak English once they realize you're an American. Many of the people we came across didn't seem to know much English at all. This made it all the more rewarding when we were able to converse with them, and they apparently understood us! Aaron did most of the talking since I knew about 10 words in Spanish (I know more now -- maybe 20), but as my confidence grew I started ordering my own food, and asking for the check at the end of the meal. It really was quite a learning experience.

Now for the, um, rough spots of the vacation. So that you, too, may learn from our mistakes, here is a list of tips for visiting Barcelona:

1. Beware of pickpockets. Luckily we learned this lesson secondhand. We were on the train from the airport to the city center when the lady standing next to us started shrieking things in Spanish that we eventually interpreted to mean she had just been pickpocketed. We were paranoidly careful with our money and passports for the rest of the trip.

2. If something seems like it should be "complimentary" its probably not. The bread that is customarily served at the beginning of the meal kept showing up on the bill, despite us never having ordered it. The "complimentary" breakfast (you know, bad toast and cereal served buffet style) at the hotel ended up costing us 8 euros per person per day. We paid 8 euros to get into Gaudi's La Sagrada Familia, only to find out upon entering that it would cost another 2 euros to actually go upstairs in the church.

3. Don't order something on the menu if it doesn't have a price listed. At one restaurant I ended up getting charged about $7 for a diet coke.

4. La Sagrada Familia has 2 gift shops. So if you, say, make plans to split up and then meet back at the gift shop in 20 minutes, make sure you both know which gift shop you're talking about. Enough said.

5. Good food is expensive. We ate at middle-range restaurants, which typically cost about 15-20 euros per person for a meal. We tried to eat at the restaurants that were recommended in the guidebook. But in all honesty we were consistently disappointed. Our hunch is that really great food does exist in Barcelona...but that you need to be dining at the expensive places to find it -- or you need to just be lucky and find the random places with good food. Or maybe we were just there at the wrong time -- fresh produce seemed to be lacking, maybe because it was winter. Incidentally, some of the best food we had was at a fast-food vegetarian falafel place. That figures.

6. They don't speak Spanish in Barcelona. Yep, that's right. They speak Catalan, a kind of hybrid language between Spanish and French. They all also speak Castilian (normal Spanish), but the signs are all in Catalan, and by default people speak Catalan. Also good to know is that the Spanish you learned in school was most likely Latin-American Spanish, which is slightly different from Castilian Spanish.

Some pictures:

A marching band we inadvertently ran into while they were parading the streets playing Christmas music: