Barcelona: le petit voyage, d’ou beaucoup de choses a passé

A few weeks ago (April 30-May 2), my friend Kim (a grad student at the LPC) and I took an amazing two-day trip to Barcelona. We arrived Friday night and left Sunday night, but managed to do pretty much every typically Spanish and Barcelonian thing out there. We went to a dance club and partied until 6am, where we met some really cool Barcelonian students and hung out with them on a bench outside our hostel till nearly sunrise; we ate tapas in the the middle of the day and got drunk off sangria; we saw Sagrada Familia, the enormous, (still) unfinished Gaudí cathedral, along with Park Güell and all of its very funky Gaudí-designed houses; we got lost on a bus by first taking it in the wrong direction and even ultimately being on the wrong bus thanks to the tourist information person sending us to the wrong park; we went to a jazz club (where we got free entrance thanks to our student IDs); and, of course, we took siestas in the sunshine in the middle of a park by the port and on the steps of the MNAC art museum.

We took the bus over from Marseille, and we arrived late Friday night just as it was getting to be party o’clock. We wandered around La Rambla and chose a danceclub solely because we were given a flyer about it and there was no cover charge. It was… somewhere – I actually have no idea where. (My already extremely poor sense of direction was entirely demolished during our wanderings on this trip.) We entered the bar, which was a really snazzy dance club, and danced the night away. Inside, we met the three Spanish guys who were all masters students at the University of Barcelona, and made friends with them amidst the frenetic dancing going on all around. When talking to them afterwards, they could barely contain their excitement when they heard I was from New Jersey. (Take that, New Jersey haters!) It turns out one of them was going to start an internship in New Jersey in February. Where? you might, and I did, ask. The answer – at Bell Labs, namely, WHERE MY PARENTS WORK, albeit at the offices about half an hour away. Ridiculous. As the say, it’s a small world.

The next morning, we found ourselves with relatively little difficulty once again on La Rambla, the main drag of Barcelona that, by night was filled with revelers but by day was filled with tourists, street vendors, and people pretending to be statues. (Particular favorities seemed to be headless gentlemen in various states of blood and agony.) After some determined wandering, we made it to a tapas bar for lunch, and, determined to be fully indoctrinated, ordered lots of delicious items, including sangria – which turned out to have something shockingly strong in it, which, of course, made us even more enthusiastic about the Barcelona tour.

At night, we found a rather classy jazz club with a live band – one of those clubs I’ve always wanted to go to, that are dark and elegant and the group of people sitting at the table next to you is clearly a very rich English family here on holiday, just popping over for the weekend from their summer home in the south of France. (The first half of that sentence was likely true of our actual table-neighbors; the second half was in fact true of us…)

Walking home from the jazz club, we stumbled across the Obama Bar on Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes. Quite obviously, I insisted we go in. It had absolutely nothing to do with El Presidente himself; far more amusingly, the theme was “British Africa” – the walls were covered with paintings of medallioned, sword-cupping, very British-looking army men, maps of the continent, and Big Game spears, with a gigantic paper-maché elephant up on the second level. It was truly the strangest bar I’d ever seen.  And with a live band, too!

Sunday was the Gaudí tour day. (Antoni Gaudí, celebrated Barcelonian architect, known for constructing super-weird but super-cool buildings that never quite get finished and look like they were drenched and then just left standing up to dry – a wavy, cardboardy look about them.)

• Sagrada Familia, Barcelona’s enormous, imposing, architechturally mind-boggling cathedral, topped with rocket-ship turrets and baskets of fruit.
• The bullfighting arena (obviously not designed by Gaudí as it was composed of a single 3-dimensional shape).
• Several houses that looked like Dalí paintings hoisted up to the vertical plane and stuffed with styrofoam backing.
• Park Güell, a village of Gaudí houses up on the edge of town painted like gingerbread and bubblegum (fun French word! chewing gum = chewing-gum).

Overall, an amazing trip. I’d love to go back sometime, maybe when I can actually remember how to speak Spanish.

(More photos on facebook.)

Inside the Obama Bar: British Africa.

I like my men like I like my beer.... headless.

Statuesque

La coupe du monde

The World Cup is raging away in South Africa, and Europe rages along with it. Especially in France, where most of the rage is directed at the moronicity of the national team, which is doing all sorts of silly things like refusing to practice and losing to Mexico. Given that France is sucking up a storm and also apparently that football is a sport for the unwashed masses, it seems the French intellectual elite (of which I have taken a wholly representative sample by talking to some people in the lab) is totally uninterested.

Luckily for me and my newfound football enthusiasm, however, Marseille is a city of immigrants and the Algerian team is doing significantly better. I went down to Vieux Port with my (American) friend Kate on Friday to watch the England-Algeria game. While the pub crowd was rather noncommittal, walking back home after the 1-1 draw was a party (read: near riot) in the streets. Lots of jumping and screaming and flare-wielding and one-wheeled motorcycle-riding by people draped in Algerian flags. There’s this huge street that runs along the bottom of the port; three lanes in each direction and a rather major thoroughfare. The celebrations were entirely unmindful of this and decided – traffic flow be damned! – just carousing away in the middle of the avenue.

Algerian soccer celebrations down at Vieux Port

French police hiding in a side street, getting ready to jump on the partying fans

As far as I know, nothing got too out of hand like they did at the parade after the Marseille soccer team won the French Cup title (when the police decided to add to the celebration by throwing gas pellets into a surprisingly calm crowd). We’ll see what happens tomorrow, though, when Algeria plays the US in the final Group C playoff game, where the loser is sure to be eliminated.

DUM DUM DUM…..

In The Navy

While walking home from work yesterday evening, I was rather surprised to, out of nowhere, suddenly hear, “Holy crap, Bob Dylan!” This is an American voice, think I.

Eavesdropping on the (very English) conversation going on behind me, I hear some mutterings about the “palace” and walking for ages. A clear cry for directional help, I turn around and point the four guys towards Palais Longchamp. They’re a bit shocked at this rather aprupt English appearance, but as I walk them down the street, we get to talking. Turns out they’re enlisted sailors on the USS Truman, a Navy aircraft carrier that just docked in Marseille. (The best answer I could find as to the difference between enlisted men and officers was only (a) a difference in pay and (b) officers wear Service Khaki while enlisted  personnel wear either Winter Blue or Summer White, depending on the season, of course. Why the Navy has such flouncy uniform names is a bit beyond me.)

Fun facts I learned about the Navy (and your, and my, tax dollars at work):
They don’t seem to teach you much. These guys were very nice but, frankly, didn’t seem to know about anything in particular. Granted, our conversations weren’t about launching aircraft (which they told me only 1/3 of the sailors know how to do) or techniques for firefighters (which one of them was). One of them did tell me about putting chains on the engines when there’s a storm going on, to holds them onto the ship. For the most part, though, these guys were box-carriers. Literally. Their jobs were to carry boxes of cow legs and similar delicacies from below to above. Now, I realize that in any efficiently-run organization, there’s a need for hierarchy. But somehow I just had the picture that joining the armed services got you a swell education in return for your years of duty. Seems not.

Also, they’re all taught to sing Anchors Aweigh, but In The Navy is strictly forbidden. (“Unauthorized” was the official terminology.) Now where’s the fun in that?

One of them asked me, “Did you vote?” followed by such a long pause I thought it was the entire question. However, he followed it up, in a rather hushed voice, “…for Obama?” with a bit of a gasp in the asking. I said, “Well, sure” – though as I looked around at them it was clear this was not a sure thing in their books. So I asked, “Does this mean that you’re all Republicans?”

Well sure it did.

I would have been interested to find out what being in the military does to one’s politics, but it wasn’t really the tone of the conversation, so I settled for asking why they were so affiliated. The unanimous response was that under Republican regimes, they get paid more, and the first thing Obama did upon election (really? the very first thing?) was to get rid of a big miliary signing bonus.

Just for the record, they all are paid substantially more than I am – whether that’s reasonable is a topic for an economic analysis of the tradeoff between risk and replaceability.

They’d also only sailed one sea, that being the Mediterannean, so I hope they get working on the other six.

Palais Longchamp

Sailed Sea #1