Barcelona Day 4

Today is the last solo day of my trip. Tomorrow I get up early, put on my cleanest T-shirt, and pick Martha up at the airport.

I go for a run almost every morning. Today I ran through Ciutadella Park. As I gracefully loped by
the beautiful European women having their morning cafe con leche, I couldn’t help but notice them coyly eyeing me up and down, looking at my distinguished graying hair and form-fitting running shirt, thinking “That guy looks older than my grandfather. I hope he doesn’t have a heart attack right here in front of me.”

And then off to Placa España. Why build four replica Greek columns and plop them in downtown Barcelona holding nothing up? “Wrong question” says Barcelona. "Why not build four replica Greek columns?" So that’s what they did, but then just before the 1929 world’s fair in Barcelona the Spanish prime minister had them torn down because they could be interpreted as demonstrating support for Catalonian independence (there are four red stripes on the Catalonian flag and four columns. Perhaps people overthought things back then). And to make some kind of masculine point, he had two even bigger brick towers built in roughly the same place. After many decades of effort, the Catalonians finally persuaded the Spanish government to rebuild replicas of the columns, so now the columns and the towers are there together serving what the literature politely calls an “ornamental function”.




You can see the towers here behind the columns. If someone over here could only be half that passionate about figuring out a way not to have all the stores close between 2 and 6 everyday . . .

But none of that matters; what matters is that stages are going up all over town and that can only mean the Mercé is starting soon.















Not counting music, my must-see list now includes the Procession of Dragons and Fire Beasts, 3D digital face manipulation and the acrobatic basketball players. And don’t even get me started on the video mapping on the wall of City Hall – I’ll post a video of that; it’s pretty amazing. There really is something for everyone here.

Wait . . . what? A last-minute three-day street-food festival on our block! Is this real life?