Twenty things I learned in Barcelona
(in no particular order)
Barcelona was settled in pre-Roman times. The Romans called it “Barca”, and some of the original roads and aqueducts are still standing.
To take the metro from the airport you need to buy a multi-day pass or buy a special airport metro ticket that costs about €5.50. Taking the metro to town took about an hour. If I had it to do again, I’d take the airport bus for about €8.50, which is (I think?) faster and includes a free transfer into the metro system. I was able to buy an eight pack of tickets for about €10.50 (about half the price of an ordinary fare) that were a great deal for daily travel.
Rick Steves has some free audio tours that are a great low-impact way to explore an unfamiliar city. We did two of these in Barcelona.
Locals spell the region around Barcelona as “Catalunya”, not “Catalonia” - and the Catalunian independence movement is much older than I’d realized. There’s been some recent news about compromises the Spanish government has made to Catalunya, but it turns out Catalunians have been brokering complicated alliances for centuries, including during the Napoleonic wars and the Spanish Civil War.
The divide between Republicans and Fascists during the Spanish Civil War wasn’t entirelyalong the same idealogical axis as in Germany, Italy, or Japan. All three were totalitarian nationalist conservative movements - but in Spain, the monarchy had only ended a few years earlier and there was an ongoing tension over the role of the church within the state, and both of these were much more prominent factors in Spanish fascism. Catalunian nationalists paused separatist activities to fight on the side of the republic during the civil war, and Catalunya was punished aggressively by Francoist forces as a result.
King Cake is sold in New Orleans in anticipation of Mardi Gras, but they sell it in Spain from Three Kings Day through the entire Epiphany season.
Montserrat gets its name from the way the mountain resembles the serrated edge of a knife. It’s the highest point in Spain, and the peak is roughly at the same altitude (and latitude) as Salt Lake City, Utah. Nobody knows for sure how old the monastic community there is - monks have gathered there for more than a thousand years in many different groups. The current Benedictine structure is only about 150 years old.
Listen to your wife when she says “we should head back to the cable car”. Even though I thought we were leaving the mountain top way too early, we still caught the second-to-last cable car off Montserrat (and that was with the cable car running an hour later than we thought it would). We spent about half of our six hours at Montserrat standing in line - first to go up, then to go back down.
There’s an amazing technology museum in Figueres that has hundreds of antique typewriters, calculators, and sewing machines. There was way more variation and variety in the typewriter business than I ever would have imagined. I wonder how much of this variation was driven by the need to develop new mechanisms to evade patents and how much was just individual inventors exploring different approaches in the decades before standards like keyboards, shift keys, and space bars emerged as standards.
It was a long time before someone developed a typewriter that would let you see what you typed as you typed it! Long before touch typing, you had to remember what you’d typed (or lift the typing mechanism to glance at it.) Some typewriters had integrated pencil holders to facilitate easy underlining.
Typing with your thumbs isn’t a new trend - some late 19th century typewriters were thumb operated. And a few used a “point and click” interface that combined a stylus with a “select” button.
There’s a massive cluster of dormant volcanoes north of Barcelona. Sant Joan les Fonts is allegedly one of the best places in Europe to see the different ways lava crystallizes - there are three different floes from three different volcanic eruptions at different times all layered on top of one another.
This region is a great place to go stargazing. It’s the first time I was able to see the Milky Way clearly in over 30 years (and we also saw a half dozen satellites and a beautiful faint crescent moon).
Hand sanitizer does more than kill germs: the alcohol is an excellent solvent, so it also works great for cleaning up other surprise messes - like if your kids get mud all over their hands, or if a neighboring car backs out without looking and leaves a meter-long white streak on the side of your rental car.
Dali’s landscapes appear much less abstract when you see the sea and islands around his home in Cadaqués - they’re abstractions, not imaginary.
Be sure to bring small change (20 cent and 1 euro coins) when visiting the Dali Theater Museum in Figueres. There are some exhibits that are operated like coin-operated arcade games.
There’s an inexpensive “Museum of Gardens” near the the 1992 Olympic Velodrome, and they have a real hedge maze! I’ve wanted to do one of these for years!
Casa Batlló really gave us a proper appreciation for Gaudi’s architecture - he believed that good design is incomplete without being functional, and this house blended some amazing technical innovations with a design that resembled something that had grown at the bottom of the sea.
Applying an adhesive metal ring to the back of an iPad Mini makes it useful as an even better external monitor using the tools I discussed in a previous post.
I tried a more minimal charging cable setup than what I discussed in my last blog post - I brought only a single 60 watt charger with three USB-C cables and a US (NEMA) to Euro (type G) adapter, along with a new 36 Watt-hour battery pack with an integrated Apple Watch charger. This worked great, and I’ll be using it in the future - but there are two things I wish I’d done differently:
I have yet to find a good NEMA to Euro adapter that is both small and ONLY supports NEMA connectors. As a result, the adapters tend to not grip onto plugs very well. I’ve found this to be true with every adapter I’ve used, EXCEPT the one I discussed in my last blog post. I’m going to be experimenting with some smaller (if not small) NEMA to type-G adapters on my next trip.
I forgot that I’d need a second adapter for my travel hot water pot. This led to some frustrating situations where I had to make a difficult choice between recharging my gear and making a cup of coffee.
