Sant Feliu de Guixols

From Sunday midday until Thursday morning, we were in Sant Feliu de Guixols on the Costa Brava. Despite spending nearly four days there and hearing native speakers say it multiple times, we still don't understand how to pronounce the name of the town. Sam fay-LOU day GWEE-shoals? Sant FAY-lee-you day ghee-SHOALS? Fail-YOU day ghee-SHOAL? Catalan and Spanish are related but independent languages. The Catalan x is pronounced sh after i, but that's about as far as we were able to match phonemes with spelling. Our knowledge of French kept intruding too, in our effort to process that x, so our de kept sounding like deux instead of day, which didn't help.

Sant Feliu de Guixols saw major development post-WWII, when Germans started flocking to the Spanish coast and the Spanish coast responded by building great swaths of hotels and high rises. One hears as much German as English in Sant Feliu (sam fay-LOU day GWEE-shoal?), when one isn't hearing Catalan or Spanish.

Stefan left Elias and me on our own while he attended a European Science Foundation conference. What to do, what to do? Elias was in heaven after all the boring hiking we had done: the hotel had a swimming pool, we could walk to the beach down the hill, and our room had a TV with a channel broadcasting FIFA Women's World Cup games. Because I am about as far from being a "beach person" as is humanly possible, I was grateful that there were two soccer games to watch every afternoon, as they were the only thing that could compel Elias (a beach person if there ever was one) to abandon the sand and pebbles.

On Wednesday, conference participants had the afternoon off, so we drove to Figueres to see the Teatre-Museu Dalí (Dalí Theatre-Museum), the third most visited museum in Spain. Adding to the bizarre art was the industriousness and determination with which most of the huge crowd took photos of the collection. Say "patata," Galatea of the Spheres!

Núria

Last Friday, Stefan engaged in one of his favorite vacation activities: minor home repairs for nice people. After crossing back over the Pyrenees to Spain from Niaux (yes, more curvy mountain roads, but only for a brief while), we happened into a sweet rural pension, made all the more cozy by the leisurely outdoor evening chat that quadrilingual Stefan enjoyed in Spanish and a little Catalan with the owners and other guests. So when one of the ceiling lights in our room didn’t work, instead of letting the proprietors know, Stefan got out his trusty Swiss Army knife (always be prepared), dismantled the fixture, and rewired the circuit. The next morning, he rebalanced the washing machine in the common kitchen.

We were staying in Ribes de Freser to take one last mountain hike, from Núria (a somewhat over-developed ski resort that we reached via cog train from Queralbs) to the Coll de Noucreus.

The mountainsides were covered with fuchsia azaleas:
Above the trees and into the scree, we saw numerous grazing chamoises:
The trail became significantly steeper toward the end,
which was OK going up but had the acrophobe (me) wanting to clutch the hillside on the way down. It was a quick walk from the saddle
to the top.
The ridge line is the border between Spain
and France.
We paused both ascending and descending so Elias could play with snow.
No hike in the Pyrenees would be complete, of course, without numerous waterfalls,
wildflowers,
and cows.
We spent so much time admiring the gorgeous late afternoon light on our descent that we almost missed the last cog train from Núria back down to Queralbs. Which reminds me to mention: the early summer sun doesn't set here until ~9:30pm--and June is still the "off season." It's brilliantly light at 6:30pm, so if you're a foreigner, you might not recognize that evening is upon you and you need to hurry up to catch your train. (Tourist trains and the sun both run later during high summer). Many businesses shut down for the afternoon, then open again for the evening; if you show up in a restaurant before 8:30 or 9:00pm, you might be the only person dining.

Barcelona*

Stefan is giving a paper next week in Sant Feliu de Guixols on the Catalan coast, and his nephew is getting married the following week in Germany, so we're taking a pre-conference, pre-wedding family vacation in northeast Spain.

Our trip began last Wednesday in Barcelona. We stayed four nights in a little apartment at the northern end of the Eixample and walked miles and miles through Eixample, Old Town, and Montjuïc.

Although one can happily cover great distances by foot in Barcelona, cars clearly have first dibs on the roads. Drivers are remarkably good about going from 60 to 0 kph when pedestrians have the right of way, in exchange for which the pedestrians wisely stay within the crosswalks. Crosswalks are located an eighth of the way around the corner of every block to give cars room to decelerate, to make room for parking, and to give walkers 25% more exercise. At the busiest intersections, stenciled paint in the crosswalks reminds walkers that one out of every three traffic related deaths in Barcelona is a pedestrian, so atencio!, pay attention.

Like most large international cities, Barcelona boasts impressive architecture. Its most beloved architect was Antoni Gaudi, whose Catalan modernism featured undulating waves and spirals and biologically-inspired appendages. Had hobbits ever abandoned the shire for urban condominiums, Gaudi would have been their guy.

The Casa Batlló (1906): condos for the hobbit elite on fashionable Passeig de Gracia:


After designing houses and parks for the wealthy, Gaudi turned his attention to a massive church--La Sagrada Familia--a giant sand-drizzly religious effusion.

Nearly a century after Gaudi's death, Barcelona remains committed to completing the church, which means hiring other designers to work on it. Like Gaudi's east entrance, the west entrance also has four huge towers, though less drizzly, with a facade in a completely different style and designed by a completely different architect (Josep Maria Subirachs).


In elegant and austere contrast to the Sagrada Familia (1883+) and Barcelona's Catedral de la Santa Creu i Santa Eulàlia (built primarily in the 13th-15th centuries), the gothic Basilica Santa Maria del Mar was constructed in a mere 54 years, between 1329 and 1383, which makes it the only church built entirely in the Catalan gothic style:


No such unity for La Sagrada Familia, which, for better or worse, could swallow the Basilica whole. Gaudi's megalith towers over the rest of Barcelona despite still missing its gargantuan central dome. The only other building in Barcelona that comes anywhere near La Sagrada Familia's height is a giant sparkly phallus (below, to the left), owned by the water works:


The lines to get into La Sagrada Familia were longer than our patience, so we decided to visit the Museu de la Xocolata instead. There we saw La Sagrada Familia, the organ from Montserrat abbey, Asterix and Obelix, and Michaelangelo's Pietà lovingly rendered in chocolate.


Other Barcelona highlights included a brief trip to the beach and a leisurely amble through the Joan Miró museum (Fundació Joan Miró) on Montjuïc. Mixed in were the more mundane aspects of being a tourist: learning some of the differences between Catalan and Spanish, avoiding copious puddles of dog pee on the sidewalks, recovering lost luggage, and disentangling the complexities of internet and cell phone access (the difficulty of which, according to one Vodafone employee, supposedly has to do with government vigilance against terrorism).

*Not in Southern Germany, but closer to Southern Germany than to North Carolina.