Copyright © Tanya Piejus, 1999

I've called this 'Barcelona: First Impressions' because, even though I went there for six days, I only managed to write anything about the first 24 hours. Very slack, I know, but here's what I wrote anyway...

Wednesday 3rd February 1999

The flight out to Spain was surprisingly frilly for a no-frills airline [EasyJet]. All that was missing was the plastic meal and the video. You couldn't really ask for more for £39 return.

On arrival in Barcelona, it was sunny and pleasantly mild and we caught a clean, efficient train service into the centre of the city - Placa de Catalunya - with no hassles at all. We emerged, luggage-laden and blinking, into the bright, busy square which is, to quote our first Cairene taxi driver, 'centre centre' Barcelona. We'd already ear-marked a couple of likely hotels off the main drag, La Ramblas, and wandered round the square until we found it. The presence of KFC, McDonald's, Marks & Spencer and C&A were enough to tell us that we'd found the heartbeat of the city.

The Rambla is a wide boulevard with two narrow lanes of traffic separated by a generous strip down which can be found an odd mixture of stalls and street entertainment. One section of stalls sold pets and their attendant paraphenalia. Most of the livestock were birds, although there were also hamsters, mice, fish and terrapins on sale. Another section of stalls sold a gorgeous, heavily-scented collection of fresh flowers. Newspaper stands with a wide variety of porn and FC Barcelona merchandise are also scattered along the street.

We turned off about halfway down La Ramblas into Carrer la Boqueria to find the Pension Palermo above a cafe. A room with en suite bathroom was 5200 pts, more than we'd budgeted for, but it was spotlessly clean, had a lovely bathroom and a comfy, if rather truncated, bed so we booked in for two nights.

Once settled in, we headed off to look for a late lunch as it was approaching 4 pm. We found a place on La Ramblas called 'Bocatta' and with our limited grasp of Spanish ordered a cured ham and cheese hot sandwich and drinks which went down very well. Having checked out the local bureaux de change, of which there are several, we headed back towards Placa de Catalunya and the metro. You can buy a 10-journey travelcard for a reasonable amount and this we did to get us to the Temple de la Sagrada Familia, Antoni Gaudi's greatest, and probably weirdest, achievement. We arrived too late to make it worth shelling out the entrance fee but walked all round the outside from where you can see Gaudi's work. The bit he was alive to see finished looks like a giant termite mound of oozing stone, frozen into religious icons, heralds and the four most bizarre towers. The whole thing is strange and not desperately attractive but totally captivating for its uniqueness. There can't be anything quite to match it for its originality and Gothic grandeur. The inside, such as it is, will have to wait until tomorrow.

We decided to walk back to La Ramblas, taking in a couple of sights on the way. We hiked down Pg. Sant Joan, stopping at the monument to Dr Robert who it seems was some kind of revolutionary philanthropist but we couldn't understand enough of the inscription to know for sure. All round the monument were trees filled with feral parakeets and their squawking gave the little park a bizarrely tropical air even though it was surrounded by speeding traffic.

We carried on down the road to Barcelona's Arc de Triompf. Not as triumphal as the Paris equivalent, it is nonetheless a pretty impressive monolith of red brick and horn-blowing angels. Next we headed back toward Pl. de Catalunya via the monument to Casanova. Not sure whether he's THE Casanova though - will need to check in the guidebook.

By the time we arrived back in La Ramblas it was dark and the temperature was dropping fast. Our hotel room had been pretty cold when we checked in but the man at reception assured us that the heating would come on at 9 pm. When we came back after our hike, it was very cosy and the man had actually switched the heating on at 8.30 especially for us chilly Brits.

The Spanish don't go out to eat until at least 8 pm so we rested our feet and legs, tired from stomping the city streets, and consulted the Rough Guide for a suitable eating place. We found plenty that we liked the sound of but couldn't find them on any map. The Rough Guide to Barcelona is proving to be a somewhat frustrating thing. It lists the restaurants with their addresses but the streets that they're in aren't marked on the map, so how the hell are you supposed to find them? None of the other maps we have go into enough detail either so we were pretty stymied. One of the listed restaurants was on La Ramblas so we decided to go looking for a better street plan, have a drink somewhere then go to this restaurant when it would be serving dinner. The nearest newsagent sold various street maps of the city but only one, the Falkplan, showed the particular street we were looking for. It was too expensive, though, to justify buying it for a one-off holiday so we didn't and decided to see if the tourist office has a better one tomorrow.

We found a nice bar and asked if we could have a glass of Cava but they only did bottles, so settled for the very palatable house red instead. We finally got to the Restaurant Moka, which wasn't at all like the Rough Guide described, at about 9. I had a Catalan speciality, botifarra (sausage), with garlic-doused white beans. Scott had grilled chicken and both were really tasty. We finished off with crema Catalan (basically creme brulee) which was also really good and washed the lot down with half a litre of red wine. The whole lot cost about £6 each.

Barcelona strikes me as a very civilised place. There's a lot of space per person so it's not crowded, too noisy or stressful. There are big, wide streets, limited traffic and the room to wander, stop, look and meander on again without getting in anyone's way or being rushed. Sod London - this is what city life should be like!

Thursday 4th February

Today was Gaudi day. Our hotel doesn't do breakfast so after a rather disturbed night we headed out into La Ramblas for something to eat. A nearby cafe attached to a supermarket gave us chocolate croissants, coffee and hot chocolate. There were too middle-aged English men in there who clung to what they know best by having toast and jam for breakfast. They obviously haven't heard the phrase 'When in Rome...'!

Before eating we wandered into the famous covered food market off La Ramblas and ambled through the stalls of immaculate fruit and veg, fresh-out-of-the-Med fish, piles of cheese and strings of cured meats. We brought a couple of tomatoes, some fruit and lump of local cheese for not very much money at all to eat at lunchtime.

The supermarket where we had breakfast is rather like a Spanish version of Woolworth's with a Kwik-Save underneath. The only other British people we saw today were, predictably enough, looking at the price of Rioja in the alcohol section. The shop didn't have fresh bread so we bought a couple of cans of soft drink and headed for a bakery. We didn't find one before getting to the metro so headed back to the great Gaudi creation on the underground.

I think the government's resident psychologists must have decided that the best way to keep the Catalan people from revolting again is to play soothing, cheesy music to them all the time. All the shops, bars and even the metro are filled with panpipe and light classical melodies, played at just the right volume not to be annoying but to gently massage your brain into a trance-like state of complicity. Consequently, the Barcelona populous doesn't shout, sound its horns or fight amongst itself like you'd expect a large city's population to do. Very strange.

We went inside the Temple de la S. F. for about £3.50 and took the elevator for a further 200 pts up one of the new towers that's been built since Gaudi's demise. Apparently, he was so busy admiring his great creation from the middle of the street that he got squashed by a tram. Not a bad way to go, really.

Most of the cathedral is still being built to Gaudi's original specification, even though he died in the 1920s. Consequently the interior is still largely scaffolding and you can watch the construction teams welding, hammering and carving as you admire the bits that are already there. The new parts are much more modern and starkly angular then Gaudi's swansong and I don't find them as appealing. That said, I'd love to see the whole thing once it's finished. It'll be colossal and such a work of art, which will be breathtaking no matter how aesthetically pleasing you find it.

Once we'd had our fill, we bought a baguette and descended to the clean, shiny depths of the metro for another tube trip up to Parc Guell. Not realising that the park is on a hill, we got out at a nearish station and had a long, hot climb up the hill to reach it. It was the middle of the day by then and the temperature had climbed to about 16 deg. C. The winter sun still had a lot of heat in it and we were soon stripping off the layers. Parc Guell seems to be in a very affluent area and there are some gorgeous houses around it.

We arrived at the front entrance and were confronted by a Dr Seuss-like house of blue and white which contained a book shop. We climbed up to the terrace and sat on the famous wiggly mosaic bench that snakes all around the edge to eat our packed lunch. Students and working people on their lunch break lounged all round the bizarre bench, soaking up the sun and listening to the gentle flute music that drifted up from underneath. We assumed it was coming from a CD somewhere, but later found a real, live flautist busking in the colonnaded area below the terrace.

Once fed and rested we went for a wander around and saw the ceramic patchwork lizard that the park is famous for. What was Gaudi on? Nowhere does it mention that he took drugs, but the results of his unique and fertile imagination are the sort of thing that Lewis Carroll needed acid to produce. His oozing, organic, candy-coloured shapes are a weird fusion of Disneyland and Dracula. His own house, now a museum, definitely looks like something out of 'Green Eggs and Ham'.

We spent a very pleasant afternoon enjoying the sunshine and being smug about the fact that it's Thursday and we're not at work before heading back down the hill to the metro.

After the first couple of days in Barcelona, we caught the train to Figueres to visit the Dali Museum which is well worth the trip if you're a fan. We also walked around an old fort and did a day trip to Girona, a beautiful town between Barcelona and Figueres. Once back in Bercelona, we went to the Picasso Museum and Fundacio Joan Miro, both excellent, and saw some more of Gaudi's weirdness. Casa Pedrera is unmissable. Barcelona is justly proud of its footballing tradition and went to see Espanyol play at the Olympic stadium. We also went to Camp Nou and saw a particularly hilarious collection of anatomically impossible brasses of footballers that had us crying with laughter. We had some excellent food and wine, especially at the Academy in the Barri Gothic which I'd recommend to anyone.

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