Barcelona Never Fails Me

1 August 2026 – Our Second Sea Day 

J went up to the sports deck to learn how to play pickle ball, which we thought was something like tennis but really isn’t.  She went for the ball, her new sneaker somehow got caught on the deck, and she went down.  Full face plant on the deck.  Some men helped her up, the instructor helped her down the stairs, and our wonderful room stewards set her up with an ice bag.  I knew nothing about this until I returned from breakfast in the dining room and found her icing the leg.  (She’s fine, she was mostly shaken and just had some residual bruising, but between our injuries we did take things easy for a few days.)

Anyway, she had made arrangements for a birthday celebration lunch at one of the specialty restaurants on the ship.  It was a wonderful treat, and we shared a delicious meals.  (I had mafaldine, a pasta shaped like skinny lasagne sheets – wider than fettuccine, maybe 1/3 to half the width of lasagne, and with that same curly edge.)

She didn’t feel up to dinner in the dining room, so had something from room service – one of the perks of cruising!  I went off to dinner, and shared a table with two Australian couples.  And in the quirky way of the world, the two men turned out to be the two men who helped J up that morning after her fall!  They were so relieved to hear she was mostly shaken up and bruised, and nothing is broken – but what a crazy coincidence!

 

2 August 2026 – Barcelona, España 

Barcelona is one of my favorite cities, so walkable and full of interesting things to see and do.  But we arrived on Sunday, when the fun market on Las Ramblas is closed.  I also was told that parts of Las Ramblas are torn up for road construction work, so it isn’t as walkable as usual.  Plus between my  tweaked ankle and J’s fall, we agreed we’d be smart and do another hop-on-and-off bus.  Well, more of a limp-on-and-off bus.

Quick note: Some people call the long walking boulevard La Rambla, because it's one continuous pedestrian boulevard.  Other people call it Las Ramblas, the plural, because in reality the one boulevard is comprised of five different sections, all of which have their own names.  So, either the singular or plural form is considered correct.

It turned out that the bus had two routes, an orange and a green.  On the map, it looked vaguely like two circles that overlapped a bit, and crossed at two places.  (For the mathematically inclined, it was a Venn diagram with two intersecting points.)  So that was our plan – ride the bus, see what we could see, have lunch somewhere, do a little bit of shopping. 

We managed to complete the orange route, and got off to catch the green bus.  Then off and back on the orange for another complete circuit.  This turned out to be the best way to get views of Antoni Gaudi’s almost-completed La Sagrada Familia, newly designated a basilica and also one of the the tallest religious buildings in the world.  From the upper deck of the bus, we could see the soaring spires topped with ceramic and glass mosaics, minus the ever-present crowds of people marvelling at Gaudi’s artistic vision.

We also passed Gaudi’s Casa Batlló, as well as Casa Míla (more commonly known as La Pedrera, The Rock Quarry).  We had lunch at a café in Casa Míla, and I bought Richard some chocolate at a nearby shop.  It’s our tradition, I always buy specialty chocolate bars for him when we’re in Barcelona. 

Some buildings, turrets, and the gargoyles leering at the tourists seemed to be covered in some sort of mesh or chain link fencing sheets.  I have no idea if there was restoration work going on, or if this was some sort of protection to keep birds or bats off and out of the structures.  It did make the gargoyles even more ominous-looking, and some turrets or towers looked like amorphous structures instead of normal buildings.  Just rather weird!

At any rate, as we rode around the city and I looked at all the architecture, I could see how Gaudi developed his style of mixing tile, concrete, mosaic, and swirls.  It’s all there in the traditional architecture of Barcelona, and he somehow put together all those disparate parts into something unique and inspiring.

All over the city, I could see church spires and house turrets covered in shiny tiles, sometimes all one color, sometimes varicolored or patterned.  Other buildings had panels of painted tiles in the traditional blue on white that is so common on the Iberian Peninsula, especially in Portugal. 

The city is also full of Art Nouveau architecture, with basic rectangular buildings covered with swirling flourishes in concrete or on wrought iron balconies.  I also saw building after building with concrete patterned walls – no idea how this is done, possibly a rolled pattern over a section of wet concrete?  Or patterned concrete tiles covering the surface?

Barcelona seems to have been the center of Art Nouveau architecture, which flourished here between the late 1800s and early 1900s.  And Antoni Gaudi somehow took those new swirling embellishments and traditional tiled structures, and combined them to create architecture that seems impossible – building exteriors that roll and undulate like waves, metal balconies that look like masses of kelp (Casa Míla) or shark jaws and teeth (Casa Batlló).  Or the pillars of La Sagrada Familia that look like tree trunks forming the arches that rise into the spires touching the sky.

We didn’t make it to Gaudi’s Parc Güell this trip, but his serpentine walls, benches, and paths covered in mosaics are all part of his signature style, architecture in motion and color.

Somehow while riding on the buses, all the influences of Barcelona’s cultural and architectural heritage made sense as Gaudi’s inspiration.  I never really thought about it before, but it was one of those light bulb moments when it all came together in my head.  And I suddenly could imagine all of it coming together in Gaudi’s head, and then becoming his designs and architectural plans.

It was one of those illuminating and humbling moments – illuminating because I could better understand his vision.  Humbling because I could never have come up with such magnificent designs myself.  But as an art teacher, sometimes understand and sharing that comprehension is more important than the actual doing or creating.  (Plus my physics class never quite made sense to me, so I knew I should never pursue architecture as a career.)

Anyway, such were my thoughts in Barcelona.