Barcelona

Barcelona really is a beautiful city. It is definitely a place where you can get off the bus somewhere downtown and instantly feel calm and happy just absorbing what is going on around you. (That was a definite contrast to life in Prague.) My favorite part about being in Barcelona was walking through the narrow, winding stony pedestrian streets, and looking up to the sky and seeing the tiny balconies of the apartments drying out clothes out in the breeze.

I went to a bunch of tourist sites as well that really blew my mind, as they were all new to me, and I had never seen anything quite like them. But what became strange to me later is that whenever I looked at other peoples’ pictures of Barcelona, they take all the same pictures of the same parts, the same statues, the same churches, likely at the same points I was standing in holding my camera. It is like some shared surreal cliche experience of recycled perspective. I went to the Picasso museum while I was there, and though his artwork seems unique, you definitely feel like a being in a herded mass being in the museum, that is very crowded and arranged by numbered rooms where you can not stray from the given path.

I was with a group of friends when I came across this building, led blindly until I was met by the pleasantly warped architectural surprise:

Of course I’ve then seen others’ versions of my seemingly unique photography. But at least I got the sailors!

And I was so impressed by the mosaics at park Guell (above), and impressed at others’ capabilities to take such similar pictures to mine.

And of course I did the typical things one is to do in Barcelona: listen to live Flamenco, eat tapas, drink Sangria, stare off into the Mediterranean.

But the best times I had I couldn’t share when I was there. I’d often leave my group of friends to find my own adventures before everyone would wake up or after everyone would turn in for the night. I walked alone, to see colors either affected by the morning light or the nighttime city lights, find new streets of new structures and layouts, find the hidden home of stray cat colonies behind shrubs, get lost, try to ask people in Spanish how to get back, realize repeatedly that I hardly speak Spanish and that people in Barcelona speak Catalan and not Spanish, but then eventually find my way back to the hostel.