My Last Day in Barcelona: The Purgatory Carnival

First, a real-time update: although there is possibly at least one job offer on the table (it's hard to tell), the job hunt has continued to be slow and painful. At least the weather in Albany was nice this week.

Now, for perhaps a final story-telling moment (then I might write some "essays" about my time in Barcelona), we turn to my last full day in Barcelona.

I was originally very ambitious, having planned to return to Tibidabo in the morning (this time via the cable cars), and then coming back by the afternoon the be with people either on the beach or on Montjuic. As it happened, it rained in the morning and I slept through most of it anyway. I had some time to take a final walk around the Gothic Quarter, taking in its gloomy splendor, before taking the metro to Plaza Espanya (where I was planning to walk up to Montjuic).

My last lunch in Barcelona turned out to be mediocre fast food pasta, although it could have been much worse: it could have been like my last dinner! More on that later.

Although Barcelona was cloudy the whole day, it didn't rain at all. That was nice. I ended up seeing some of the Montjuic sights that I hadn't been to yet with Pat, one of my friends from the CELTA course. The first stop was the Olympic stadium, which was hosting a basketball game that night. The stadium itself is pretty generic, at least from the outside, but adjacent is a really interesting telecommunications tower:

Appropriately (but uncreatively) titled the Montjuic telecommunications tower, the 446-feet (136 meters) tall structure was actually one of the first things I saw when I first arrived to Barcelona on the plane, and it's a striking monument. That's not my picture-all my shots of the tower are in the cloudy weather, this picture is nicer. Although you can't go up to the top (like I had wanted to do), it's fun to walk around and gaze at.

The tower was completed in 1992 for the Olympics so its one of Barcelona's more modern landmarks (there's a handful of them, most from that Olympic building boom). It's supposed to look like the arm of an Olympic athlete holding up the flame. Sure, why not?

The tower was designed by a famous architect named Santiago Calatrava. I almost called him Sergio here but then I looked up the real name on Wikipedia. I also found out through that that Calatrava designed an art museum in Milwaukee.  If anyone wants to go to Milwaukee to check it out you can let me know if the styles are similar.

From there, we went to tried to get to some strange stone structure, but instead wound up at the entrance to the Botanical Gardens. You have to pay to get in, but one of the entrances was open.
If you see an open gate, do not ask the lady at the ticket booth if you have to pay before you walk in. We learned this the hard way. After finding out the price, we got about 10 meters through the open gate before the girl came out, and in English, chastised us for trying to see plants for free.

Here's a photo I was able to take before we were kicked out:

From there, we proceeded to the Castell de Montjuic, which I think in the past I've inappropriate referred to as a castle, but its really more of a fortress, and its been used like a fortress up until (very) modern times, where its now a tourist attraction.

The Castell sits on the highest part of Montjuic; the original fort was built in 1640 but there have been several versions. I thought it was a symbol of Catalan pride but it really isn't because during the Franco (oops! I did it again!) years it served as a Spanish prison for Catalan dissenters. But either way, it was nice to walk around. The outer walls of the fortress are heavily covered in ivy, and the flower beds are shaped to look like cards, reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland.

Once you go over the bridge, there's not much to do inside, except walk around the inner courtyard and try to squeeze into the tiny guard towers. There are some exceptional views from the top level of the fort, however, and you can also admire the heavy artillery (no longer operational) which appear at various points around the fort.

For the evening's festivities, a group of us decided to go to the Feria de Abril, which was a big fair occuring in the northeast corner of the city.. Before I say anything else, it should be noted that this was a very excellent idea before we actually got there. Most of the information about it made the fair made it look, at the very least, like there was some kind intriguing cultural component, such as dancing, and the food in the promotional materials online looked delicious.

The fair was supposed to be a celebration of southern Spanish culture, and apparently it's a copy of a much grander and more famous fair which happens every year in Seville. It certainly looked festive when we got there. There were lots of bright lights and big tents. I knew we are a fair though when, at the entrance (three giant green gates) there was a "Mr. Burger" booth.

Poor "Mr. Burger" must be quite low on the social strata. It's quite a big leap to go from Burger King to Mr. Burger. Oh well.

We settled down for dinner in one of the large tents which, from the outside, looked inviting, as there was a large stage for dancing in the back and a lot of food being fried and served up. None of us bothered to check the price, and if we had, we'd noticed that there...was no price. This was a mistake. You can pobably guess what's coming, sort of.  That counts as something of a spoiler alert here, but I'm having a hard time building suspense, it's 3 am.

Although the food was kind of terrible, we enjoyed ourselves for the most part. The flamenca dancing was fun to watch, even though they were local girls from just outside of Barcelona and the "native" (my flatmate from Gibraltar) with us at the dinner table assured me that this was not exactly award-winning material. But how would I know that? It looked like flamenca dancing to me.

All the same, we ordered some bad tapas, talked about our general difficulties finding work, and at one point one of my friends was teaching us sign language.

I'll repeat again, that the food was not particularly excellent. The calamari was good, but the baby octopus we ordered was cold and kind of greasy-gross, and the patatas bravas seemed like defrosted potatoes in ketchup. But who cared, right? We didn't go there trying to eat a fancy meal, we just wanted some cheap eats, because we were having a good time and talking and watching flamenca dancing.

At one point I even (foolishly) commented on the possibility of a "second dinner." Because who goes to a fair but to eat as much fried food as possible, and besides, we'd have plenty of cash and appetite left over for more eating, right? Right???

WRONG!-said the portly and pompous waiter when he delivered us the bill. The waiter, who was a real prick, didn't actually say anything. He just calmly assessed the damage and then wrote out in hand a bill for us for 100 Euros.

Now, that almost sounds like a reasonable bill for five people, but...we didn't really eat anything. We had three appetizers and a plate of ham. The tent was charging 18 Euros a plate for cold and/or microwavable "tapas." I'll try not to whine too much here (too late), but when I was eating at nice restaurants in Barcelona, ones that are considered expensive, the price for tapas was about 3 or 4 Euros (6 tops and only for the nice things like monkfish stew). On the beach, I ordered four times that much food for half the price. This is like the equivalent of someone trying to charge you 20 dollars for half a sandwich at Subway. That's what it felt like. Or I think that's what it felt like, since I've never actually been to a Subway.

We did not take this lightly or without an argument. After the initial gasps of shock and outrage, our reactions ranged from continuous eye rolling, to looking down and fidgeting with the money in our wallet, to refusing outright not to pay. That was never really going to work, but in the end, over about 20 minutes, we cleaned ourselves out of cash (at least I did) and slowly skulked away.

That ruined the fair for me.

I'm not actually if we survived the dinner, because afterwards, we got stuck in the largest, most offensive display of temporary carnival rides that were ever assembled in one place on planet Earth, ever. That's not hyperbole. I was pretty sure that we had all died because the procession through the rides DID NOT END. It also started to rain.

For a few minutes, it was kind of amusing, to stare at all the tacky, very non-cultural, attractions. There was a "Jamaica Express" which rocked people back and forth. There was a funhouse. A ferris wheel. A carousel. A caterpillar that went around in a circle. Another carousel. A tilt-a-whirl. A makeshift roller coaster. One of those giant swings that people love. Some arcade games. Another carousel. Another ferris wheel. Another makeshift roller coaster. A pirate ship. Giant Spongebob Squarepants balloons. Bumper cars. Bumper boats. Bumper pirate ships. Those stupid flying airplanes. Another carousel.

By the 1,495th tacky ride, I realized that we were in hell. There was one moment, where we were walking past this loud and garish ride where people were riding fake bulls backwards and forwards, that I had this terrible feeling of panic. That I wanted to leave IMMEDIATELY but could not, because the carnival never ended. It was just the right combination of overly bright lights, loud American music, screaming children, rain, and stupid smoke effects, which pushed me over the edge.

There were just so many rides, and all of them were so bad. It was almost as if someone had looked at all the rides in Disneyland and tried to create a smaller, cheaper, tackier, carnival version of them to try to scam people with. There was even a fake "tower of terror" that people could ride on. I just wanted to sleep, I asked the man working the ticket booth for the "Hollywood hotel" how much it would cost to stay the night. He stared at me and said nothing. I don't think he thought my joke was funny.

I would have taken some pictures to try to convey the full horror of this experience, but

1. it was raining and I didn't want to ruin my camera and

2. I don't actually want to remember it

Four days later, we finally arrived at the exit, and after we waiting around for a while trying to figure out what to do next, the evening was mercifully transmuted to one of the CELTA students' flats back in the Gothic Quarter.

The final few hours of my time in Barcelona turned out okay. People stayed for a long time and talked, every so often someone would go downstairs to buy a bunch of cheap beers from the illegal vendors outside, and at one point, the flat got engaged in a political discussion, which I tried to stay out of, just because as a rule I don't follow up bad carnivals with politics. Even so, I think the argument was all in good fun. If it wasn't, it certainly seemed like people had made peace by the end of the night. To prove that the night ended well, here is a picture of the CELTA kids, being fabulous:

It doesn't look like it, but I am happy in this photograph. This is my "happy and content" face. And there was a gold pillow behind me, which is neat.

The End.