Barcelona

Barcelona is just amazingly gorgeous. That´s all. Everywhere you look there are incredible, beautiful, distinctive buildings. It has character. Barcelona has eaten its vegetables and split firewood and all those sorts of things.

At times I think I love Barcelona. I look around and I think, "Amazing! Wonderful! Interesting!" and I feel a sort of comradeship with the city for, oh, maybe even several minutes before something offensive happens. Like narrowly avoiding the umpteenth pile of human feces. Or like seeing that those weird lumps floating in that beautiful pond are bird wings. Just dismembered bird wings. 7 pairs of them.

Like I walk down Las Ramblas and enjoy the fresh breeze and understand people talking and admire some crazy gargoyle or weird seaweed like ironwork or the bank that is covered in cement japanese umbrellas and stained glass and look forward to getting home and eating, only to find that somebody kindly deposited their half eaten WHATEVER sticky mess in my bike basket. Thank you Barcelona. But then I bike back home and it feels great, so it´s okay.

Or I get out and find someplace that doesn´t smell bad, that had trees (because the parks here are really lovely. Full of random ornate marble statues and complicated fountains and paths and people walking dogs or children etc) and I´m breathing it in, I´m in a beautiful foreign city! I´m eating my lunch and reading about the history of the castle I´m soon to enter to see famous art! Life is wonderful! And then all of a sudden some sprinkler system turns on and oh my goodness get the book! Get my bag! Get the camera and the lunch and get out! "Gosh," we say to ourselves, "Funny things happen somtimes," and that would be that IF the sprinkler water didn´t smell like it came straight out of somebody´s septic system so OF COURSE I have to throw away my lunch (because who really wants giardia? Again?) AND my water AND I smell like excrement.
But then I go into the musuem and chat with the guards, who try to guess my nationality and name every country in northern europe, plus france. And I see piles of exciting art.

But that´s just Barcelona. Doing its best to drive home the point that this world is made of both beauty and poop.