Spain (v): Barcelona

My train pulled in to Barcelona at around 9:30 in the evening. Thanks to the efficient and immediately comprehensible metro system, I was able to find my way into the city to join the others easily. When I arrived at the apartment, it had been over 24 hours since I'd been doused in Sangria in the madness that was Pamplona. I dropped my bags and ran for the shower to scrub away the now hard shell of sugar, sweat, and dirt that encased every inch of exposed skin. Afterward, I'd never felt so clean in my life.

Barcelona is the most normal city I visited in Spain. Certainly very different from any city I've been to in America, but it seemed the most real. There was still beautiful architecture and sun-soaked beaches, but it also had contrast. It had dirt. There was poverty. There were areas that weren't absurdly pristine. It felt more lived in.

That evening, the group decided to go to a club. Having traveled all day and not having had any real rest for two days, I opted to roam the city on my own for a while and get some sleep. I walked to a street known as La Rambla, which is a major tourist area. It extends into the city from the harbor and is lined with tourist shops, street vendors, and restaurants. It was brightly lit and even at 1am it was densely packed. As I headed back to the apartment around 2am, all the cafes and restaurants I passed were still filled with customers. Nothing showed any signs of slowing down.



After a few hours of sleep, I woke up to go catch the sunrise at the beach while everyone else was recovering from their adventures that evening. I left the apartment at around 5:30am and, as I made my way to the beach, the clubs and bars were just emptying out. Young people stumbled out of dark, now silent halls of soon to be forgotten bacchanalian revelry. They emerged in various states of disarray and disheveled-ness and hobbled haltingly, supported by each other, down sidewalks in the half-light of predawn. When I arrived at the beach, a 20 minute walk away, I discovered a mass of spent and happily exhausted partiers sprawled on the sand. I overheard multiple guys breathlessly and emphatically avowing to their friends that that was, in fact, the best night of his life.

On my way back from the beach, the city had almost emptied of its evening denizens. Streets and squares I had just passed through that were crowded and filled with slurred speech and uninhibited laughter were deserted and blanketed in silence. It was almost unsettling - I felt almost like I was the victim of some kind of reverse flashmob.



After returning to the apartment and waiting for the others to wake up, we took the metro to the Gaudi cathedral. I don't know enough about it to say anything meaningful about its history or Antoni Gaudi himself, you can look that up easily yourself, but it was a pretty imposing structure. Still unfinished, it kind of reminded me of the undersea palace in "The Little Mermaid's" Atlantis. The exterior has an organic mass of figures and details. The interior was cavernous and extravagant. It was teeming with tourists and hardly felt like it could ever serve as a place of worship.



After some other general sightseeing, that evening we went to Montjuïc - translated in medieval Catalan as "Hill of the Jews." It's a large hill on the south side of Barcelona with gardens and a large castle at its summit. Unfortunately, I had only brought my 50mm because I was tired of carrying around my camera bag. I was not expecting the spectacular views from the top of the hill, but I did what I could. I was also so focused on the panorama from there and the sun setting (as seen in the shot at the top of the post) that I neglected to take any picture of the castle. 



After we finished being awed by the view of Barcelona, we set out to find the cafe that someone had read was supposed to be located behind the castle on the opposite side of the hill. We walked along a dirt path that stretched out along the eastern hill face overlooking the Mediterranean. Not really knowing what we were looking for and with the light fading quickly, the walk around the hill seemed to stretch on. When we finally made it there, we were relieved and pleasantly surprised to find a charming open air cafe with another fantastic view, this time of the Mediterranean. It's called "La Caseta del Migdia" and I definitely recommend trying to make your way out here if you're in Barcelona. It's off the beaten path and it was a refreshing change from the tourist heavy sites we'd been to that day. We sat in canvas chairs at wooden picnic tables sipping whiskey, wine, Coke, and vodka Fantas.



Soon after we arrived and began enjoying drinks and plates of meat, cheese, and bread (which seemed to be all we ate in Spain), a Flamenco band and dancers began performing. I went to take some shots of the small stage where the dancers spun and stomped along with a guitarist and an older woman who sang/spoke rhythmic phrases and shouts (like a caller at a square dance...?). I moved around to the rear of the stage to get some shots with a rim light, but the older woman turned around, pointed at me, and yelled "El paparazzi!" She pulled me on stage and made me take pictures of all of them. It was pretty awesome and only reinforced the theory that everyone in Spain loves me. After that incident, they continued to perform. The main pair, if I had to describe them, were probably as stereotypically Spanish and sexy as you could be. I don't really know how else to say it. The rest of the time there I sat sipping whiskey out of a plastic cup, watching the dancers move hypnotically, and just soaking in the warmth and other-ness of that experience. It was a great evening.



We made our way back down the hill in the dark and back to the apartment. After a short rest, we went to a club by the beach for a little while. There wasn't anything particularly memorable about that. I left early to shower, pack, and go to the airport to catch my 8am flight. I successfully navigated more trains, shuttles, and confusing Spanish airports and made it back to America (not without spending the rest of my euros to buy crispy M&Ms at Duty Free) after eight great, mostly memorable days.

As good a time as I had in Spain, the first thing I did when I landed in Philly for a short layover was eat Chik-fil-a and it was glorious.

"The world was not wheeling any more. It was just very clear and bright, and inclined to blur at the edges."

The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

Spain (iv): Pamplona

"Then we crossed a wide plain, and there was a big river off on the right shining in the sun from between the line of trees, and away off you could see the plateau of Pamplona rising out of the plain, and the walls of the city, and the great brown cathedral, and the broken skyline of the other churches. In back of the plateau were the mountains, and every way you looked there were other mountains, and ahead the road stretched out white across the plain going toward Pamplona."

Of course, modern day Pamplona bears little resemblance to the one described in "The Sun Also Rises" (few things do resemble their Hemingway counterpart). As we arrived in Pamplona after the hour-long bus ride from San Sebastian, we passed first through a modern downtown urban center. High rises, office buildings, a modern bus station. If not for the sea of white clothes dotted by red bandanas like flecks of blood, Pamplona seemed terribly ordinary (that is, for Spain). As we made our way out of the bus station and to the historic district, the crowds grew thicker and the tall, utilitarian architecture gave way to the elaborate and detailed. Throughout the town, I noticed that a blue cartoon bull cutout watched down from certain balconies. This is the mascot of the company kukuxmusu, ostensibly the official souvenir purveyor for the Festival of San Fermin. Their t-shirts and other paraphernalia depict cartoon bulls (with giant balls) in the running, often in surprisingly violent circumstances. I somehow neglected to pick anything up at one of their kiosks. I also wonder how their sales do the other 51 weeks in the year.



We weren't planning on finding lodging for the night (nor could we have given how many people were there), instead we checked our bags at a municipal luggage storage service, targeted at tourists like us, and gave ourselves into the mercy of the festival crowd. The Festival of San Fermin is a week long celebration of Spanish folklore and centers around the running of the bulls and bullfights. It attracts over a million people a year and it is absolutely ridiculous. Partying begins in the late afternoon and lasts until the bull run at 8am the next day. The city cleans the apocalypse of a mess each day until it happens again. When we first began wandering the town it was pleasant and seemed well maintained. Little did we know of the disaster that would befall this place in a matter of hours.



Like I mentioned before, every where I went in Spain, people would grab me and talk to me and then ask me to take their picture. You'll notice the guys in the second picture from the bottom and how they are casually lugging around bottles of sangria. That would come into play in a big way at the bullfight.

We made our way to the arena and did a lap getting a feel for how much the scalpers were asking for tickets to that afternoon's bullfight. We found an old man seated under a tree that offered a reasonable price and bought our tickets. We headed inside while the air hummed with anticipation as before a college football game between rivals. We found our seats among the concrete steps that filled the circular tiers above the dirt stage at the center and waited for the fight to begin, happily oblivious to what we had just gotten ourselves into.



As people steadily packed themselves into the arena, the stands turned albino with chicken pox. I started to feel something dripping on me. My first thought was to look up to see if it were raining or if there were a leak. It was sunny and there was no roof over me. The dripping continued sporadically, but more and more frequently. Having given up trying to locate the source of the drip, I ignored it. That is, until a group took their seats in the row above ours carrying a giant bucket with its lid taped on with clear masking tape. My curiosity was promptly satisfied when the tape was ripped off and the reservoir of sangria inside began filling the plastic cups that were dunked vigorously into its murky, purple depths. It was then that I recalled the pink and purple stained people we saw in San Sebastian. I finally located the source of the dripping. It was a squirt gun. Filled with sangria. A portly bearded man several rows back in the adjacent section was joyously spraying his fruity, fuchsia payload indiscriminately around his general area. As revelers filed in, so too did the number of similar sangria buckets increase. More squirt guns appeared. Spray bottles, toilet brushes (dipped in buckets and waved), or just hurled cups fueled a sustained deluge of sangria for the entire two-hour duration of the bullfight. Needless to say, I have almost no pictures of this lest my camera get a cup of sangria in the face.

My seat neighbors, two guys named Innaki and Innaru, knew we were tourists and as an apology for pouring cups of sangria down my back, offered us cups of it out of their own personal bucket. I passed the first batch of it down the line to the group, but throughout the rest of the fight I think I consumed enough sangria to last me a lifetime.

"Outside the ring, after the bull-fight was over, you could not move in the crowd. We could not make our way through but had to be moved with the whole thing, slowly, as a glacier, back to town. We had that disturbed emotional feeling that always comes after a bull-fight, and the feeling of elation that comes after a good bull-fight. The fiesta was going on."

As memorable as it was to endure the storm of sangria and celebrate with my newfound Spanish friends, the bullfight itself was a little upsetting. Like the city itself, the fight conveyed little of the bravery or romance I envisioned. It was not the spectacle of honor or physical artistry I had hoped for, instead I felt repulsed by the slow, ritualistic slaughter of a strong, proud animal by the small, fearful men in flamboyant outfits. Each bull (of six) reduced to fatigued, confused shells of themselves until they are put out of their misery by the matador and unceremoniously dragged out of the arena by a pair of yoked horses.

"There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people."

The remainder of the evening passed in a happy, sangria induced haze among the crowds in the now riot of a city that bore little resemblance to itself only hours before. We passed the night in a quiet corner of the town away from the still raging festivities and rested for a few hours before attempting to find somewhere to watch the running of the bulls. As we made our way there, we waded through throngs of still energetic partiers at 6am. I should note that every open cup of sangria I saw made me flinch as if it were about to be emptied over my head. We arrived at the route for the run, but underestimated how early to arrive. Without any clear vantage points, I pushed and squeezed my way to the barrier. I waited there the remaining hour while being pressed against the wooden planks of the fence by the undulating tides of the ocean of the now drunk and dingy, pink stained whites, all wanting to catch a glimpse of the bulls.



When it actually happened, it was silent and over before I knew it started. If you look closely in the last shot you can see the black coat of the bull, but that's as much as I saw. It was somewhat anticlimactic, but damned if the preceding 16 hours weren't some of the most memorable of my life.

"In the morning it was all over. The fiesta was finished... The square was empty and there were no people on the streets. A few children were picking up rocket-sticks in the square. The cafes were just opening and the waiters were carrying out the comfortable white wicker chairs and arranging them around the marble-topped tables in the shade of the arcade. They were sweeping the streets and sprinkling them with a hose."

The streets weren't so much being sprinkled with a hose that morning as being pressure blasted by fire hoses mounted on street sweepers. We had to jump over literal rivers of runoff and garbage. We retrieved our luggage and the rest of the group made their way to the Avis to take a car to Barcelona. Having joined the trip later in the planning process, I was to take a train. Delirious from the chaos of the festival and lack of sleep, I tried to hail a cab to the train station that lay just outside the town. Failing to do so, I decided to walk the two miles there. Not exactly sure how to get there, I blearily followed signs and walkways in what I hoped was the general direction of the Renfe station. Thankfully I found myself there after an hour or so. It was small and quaint. There was a little cafe and a sunbathed courtyard. I regret not taking any pictures of it, but I spent the following 4-5 hours passed out in a chair until my train to Barcelona arrived.

Spain (iii): San Sebastian

"Even on a hot day San Sebastian has a certain early-morning quality. The trees seem as though their leaves had just been sprinkled. It is always cool and shady on certain streets on the hottest day."

When we arrived in San Sebastian, it was overcast and much cooler than it had been in Madrid. We wore light jackets as we crossed the town to our hostel by the beach. San Sebastian, like Madrid, is almost unbelievably picturesque. The streets are lined with Parisian apartments dotted with intricate wrought iron balconies. The atmosphere had the tranquility of a place perpetually on holiday. As we emerged on the other side of the town from the train station the street opened up to the small, crescent shaped enclosed beach. An inlet from the Bay of Biscay bottlenecked by two large hills, one topped by a castle and the other by a large statue of Jesus. Even under the clouds, the beauty of this place was almost hypnotic in its ability to make the outside world seem very far away.

"I looked around at the bay, the old town, the casino, the line of trees along the promenade, and the big hotels with their white porches and gold-lettered names. Off on the right, almost closing the harbor, was a green hill with a castle... On the other side of the narrow gap that led into the open sea was another high headland."

We strolled along the harbor for a while admiring the place until dinner. We made our way to the back alleys at the east end of town for our first pintxos crawl (pronounced pinchos - the Basque variation of Spanish uses a lot of X's). Pintxos is tapas, more or less. The main difference is that, unlike tapas, pintxos are traditionally skewered to a piece of bread. The cultural intricacies are beyond me, but pinxtos bars are a lot of fun. Both nights there we made our way to several different pintxos bars and procured a smattering of small dishes accompanied by wine. If you ask me, I couldn't tell you the name of any of the dishes, but most ranged from very good to delicious. Everything is very casual and the crowd usually spills out into the street. The quarters are close and conversations blend into one another. The nightlife ends much earlier than it did in Madrid (12-1am as opposed to 3-4am), but it's a thoroughly enjoyable way to spend an evening.



We began the following day by hiking up the eastern hill to the Jesus statue. It didn't take as long as I had thought it would, but the view from the summit was breathtaking. After taking in the view and taking pictures, we made our way down and stopped at a small hillside cafe overlooking the bay. It was run out of a small hut by a middle aged man and his 3 or 4 dogs. The dogs were calm and socially aloof in the way that only dogs that aren't doted upon and are simply treated as members of a social group can be. Not pleading or unctuous, they regarded us indifferently as we maneuvered about them. As I stopped to take a few shots of them, the owner of the cafe handed me a strip of paper with his email address. He motioned to my camera and then his dogs and, through one of the spanish speaking members of our group, asked me to email him some of the pictures of them. I nodded vigorously, happy to oblige such a genuine request for a simple service that I hope will brighten his day.

While we were enjoying some ice-cold Cokes and Fantas (made with real sugar, as I mentioned before - I drank so much soda on this trip to take advantage of this as much as possible) enjoying another fantastic view of the town and bay, the sun made its first appearance. As the clouds burned off and pillars of light filtered through, color slowly began to creep back into San Sebastian. The sky and water regained their azure clarity. The green in the hills grew lush and verdant. The clay tiled rooftops burned fire red. As we watched the sun warm the town, we grew eager to return to the beach that was so lukewarm the day before. We rushed down the rest of the way and back to the hostel to change. The next few hours were spent sunbathing out on the sand and getting pummeled by powerful, 10 foot waves.



One thing I always hope for is to catch the edge of a weather system during sunrise/sunset. This results in solid cloud cover or empty, featureless skies more often than not, but with the clouds rolling out of San Sebastian, I knew that the sunset would be spectacular. That evening after the beach, we walked around the town for a bit. We found ourselves at a church atop a small hill overlooking the rooftops. From there I could see the water and the clouds that had parted just enough to provide room for the light to play off of them at different elevations producing a wide range of reds and oranges. We made our way down back to the beach, admittedly at my insistence so I could capture the sunset over the water, and I spent the hour there taking it in while the others went to a shop and returned just as the sun dipped below the horizon.



The following morning we caught a bus to Pamplona, this time making sure to leave enough room so as not to repeat the harrowing dash to the train in Madrid. I was sad to leave San Sebastian. It was tranquil and rejuvenating. I don't think I could stay there for longer than a brief time, but it's certainly a place where I'd like to vacation again. At the bus station, we encountered numerous groups of people arriving from Pamplona. Many wore the all-white garb of San Fermin and many of those were covered in splashes of red and pink - an ominous signal of what we could expect in Pamplona. I fully expected Pamplona to be a very different experience than it was in San Sebastian - not relaxing so much as frenetic and chaotic. It turned out to be a bit crazier than I had imagined, for reasons that will become clear in the next installment.

"We drove out along the coast road. There was the green of the headlands, the white, red-roofed villas, patches of forest, and the ocean very blue with the tide out and the water curling far out along the beach... Back of the rolling country we were going through we saw the mountains we had come over from Pamplona."

Spain (ii): Madrid

The first city of the trip was Madrid. I'll begin this by saying that Madrid was the least interesting of the four cities. Not that it was unenjoyable, but Madrid is surreally pristine and uniformly beautiful as to render it almost boring. Of course, it wasn't boring. Walking around the city was like a crash course in European architecture. A good portion of my pictures is comprised of bottom-up, street level views of stunning buildings and monuments that were littered generously across the city.

Our first meal was lunch in an open air courtyard at the Plaza de Santa Ana. We sat under a canvas shade and I had a pork shoulder and chorizo sandwich while we drank wine and basked in the warmth of the Spanish afternoon. As we lingered there, my mind couldn't help but find itself envisioning Hemingway's characters idling their days away in the same manner. While the setting may have evoked the imagery, I knew in my heart that there's no real connection with the tragic-romance of Hemingway's tortured protagonists. I was a tourist, not only in place but in literary spirit. My generation's listlessness holds little of the gravity of his. And I knew it. In the same way that my friends will sometimes debate which "Friend" we are (am I Ross, Chandler, or Joey?), our conversation turned to facetiously determining which of us was Jake Barnes or Robert Cohn or Lady Ashley. I don't think I honestly want to identify with a wounded, impotent bullfighting aficionado, but the allure of the romance of that era still instills a subtle ache of nostalgia, but, being there, it was enough to exist in the vestigial illusion of common experience, if but for a moment - slumming in the footsteps and suffering of a lonely Jake Barnes.



I say that Madrid was the least interesting because most of our time there was spent doing conventionally tourist activities. Walking around, looking at things, eating and drinking. While this is ostensibly what we did in the other cities, there were moments that definitely stood out as unique to those places that Madrid seemed to lack. Nevertheless, Madrid is still beautiful. The Plaza Mayor was unlike any place I've been to before (which isn't saying a whole hell of a lot). The Main Post Office was the coolest post office I've ever seen. We also caught a cable car to the outskirts of the city. This took us across an arid plains that resembled something you'd find in Africa. It was interesting to see how concentrated Madrid really is and how empty the surrounding area is. We visited the Prado Museum. It's collection was impressive, especially the Goya exhibit. Not a whole lot of pictures from inside this place, what with the old Spanish lady guards running and throwing themselves bodily infront of my camera to prevent me from taking a picture of Goya's "The Drowning Dog." Which is just as well, since I've never really understood the purpose of taking pictures of art. Like pretending to be a Hemingway character, it's a facsimile simply representing a further decay in meaning.



Our last night there we got drinks at a rooftop penthouse back at the Plaza de Santa Ana. We were there at about sunset (which is at around 10pm in Spain) and there was a cool breeze. I stood leaning on the railing with a glass of Macallan and watched as the city lights blinked on one by one and the evening glow enveloped the square below. Conversations, laughter, and soft music from the restaurants drifted upwards unintelligibly cutting through the quiet on the roof. We lingered there for a while enjoying the calm and warmth of wine and the evening.



The following morning consisted of a mad rush to the train station and just barely making the Renfe to San Sebastian. We made it, literally, with seconds to spare. And, as I've mentioned, with Madrid being my least favorite city of the week, I'm looking forward to revisiting the rest of the week. San Sebastian is next and among the most beautiful places I've ever been.

Spain (i): the fiesta was finished

"In the morning it was all over. The fiesta was finished."

I'm back from Spain. Seven days, 1900 pictures, a ruined pair of shoes and hat, and four cities later and I'm home. It was a whirlwind week and I don't think I'll be making a dent in any of the pictures or thoughts I have about it tonight. I have to preempt the jetlag and get some sleep so I can go into the internship tomorrow and not die. Spain was great, but I'm always happy to come back to America. I'll be following this up in the coming week with more stories and images (including a copious use of Hemingway quotes), but I'll leave this off with some general anecdotes and observations:

When I try to speak Spanish it comes out French and in an Italian accent. If you're Asian and have a big camera, everyone wants to talk to you or have you take their picture. The Spanish metro system is reliable and consistent, but their airports suck. Spanish cities are drastically different at night than during the day. One of my favorite travel accessories is my Washington Nationals hat - a great conversation starter for other Americans. For the locals, I find it much easier to be friendly when I don't speak their language. I can also get away with things by pretending to be a dumb, monolingual tourist (which is what I am). The vending machines in Spain are refrigerated and their Kit-Kat bars are amazing. Soda with real sugar available everywhere is amazing. Nobody drinks water in Spain. Pamplona is insane.

Spain!: A Prelude

In a bit of a spontaneous decision, I decided to accompany a group of friends on their trip to Spain. I'll be there from July 3rd to the 11th (they're going on to France and the Netherlands afterward, but I can't swing that much time off of the internship). We will be hitting Madrid, San Sebastian, Pamplona, and Barcelona. We will be in Pamplona during the Running of the Bulls and I'm going to do my best to participate without getting gored or trampled. The dilemma, though, is: how will I take pictures if I'm busy trying not to die?

Anyway, here is a look at what I'll have on my person at all times during the trip:



Of note: Of course "The Sun Also Rises" and a Moleskine so I can do my best Hemingway impression. A spare camera for places that aren't ultra-tourist friendly. Perhaps most importantly, chemical-free zinc-oxide based sunscreen because I am allergic to everything else.

This is also the first time I'll be leaving the country that's not going to Korea with my family. I'm very happy to finally have something stamped in my passport. Hopefully this will be the first of many. If you want a souvenir, shoot me an email!