travelswithalice
April 11, 2006
Farewell to Barcelona
We said goodbye to the elegant boulevards of the Eixample, now quiet and almost deserted. Nearly all the shops were closed and it was a job to find anywhere for lunch. We passed a few sandwich bars and delis but we wanted our final meal in the city to be special.
We finally chose Samoa on Passeig de Gràcia. It's got urban cool but today we craved local charm. Service was just a notch above grudging.
A leisurely walk on Rambla de Catalunya brought back the charm. This Rambla is Chic Central, far from the plebeian joys of the other Ramblas. The neighborhood exudes a serene air of privilege: smiling residents walk well-groomed dogs and push designer prams.
We played at Modernist Art-spotting and inspected the elegant building façades along the quiet promenade. There were stretches where too many spas and salons packed too close together spoiled the picture.
We looked out for Casa Dolors, which our guidebook tells us shares the same builder as Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, but it was undergoing repairs and was shrouded in scaffolding.
Casa Fargas more than made up for this by presenting us with arched bay windows, wrought iron balconies, and orieled front door decorated with free-form shrubbery carved in stone.
And when the meltingly beautiful tree-of-life stained-glass window of Farmàcia Bolós came into view, everything was alright in Modernist heaven.
Labels: Barcelona
April 10, 2006
Best Meal in Barcelona
At Mari y Rufo, beside the market
Saturday, we resumed our furniture shopping. By the second shop, we had tired of iconic furniture of the 20th century and completely lost interest in shopping.
Lunch was the next order of the day.
I recognized the pretty wavy roof I had admired in numerous photos and from an exhibit at New York's MoMA. I pointed it out excitedly to Stuart.
The Mercat de Santa Caterina, one of the city's newest architectural showcases, has been extensively retrofitted at a cost of €13million. Its fantastic roof of many-colored tiles is a stylized representation of the bounty it houses: fruits, vegetables, meats, cheeses, and every deli fare imaginable.
A vast pleasure palace for chefs and gourmets, it’s both the best and the worst place to be if you’re hungry. We queued up for lunch at one of two restaurants inside. But when we finally got up to the reception desk, it was still to be a 30-minute wait, so we left.
Stuart promised to find me a better restaurant but I was disappointed, tired, and hungry.
After the buzz of the market, the street outside was ominously deserted. The only place open was a tiny butcher’s shop that had a sign advertising meals.
We walked in and asked about lunch for which we were obviously too late. After a frenzied consultation among themselves, we were led down steep narrow stairs into an even tinier room packed with three rows of tables very close together.
Clearly the only tourists around, we were doted on by the owners, mum, dad, and son Pau Suria (from the ancient town of Suria Pau
They served a set lunch: appetizer platter, entree (a towering mound of seafood,) and dessert (homemade cake or berries bathed in the surprisingly red juice of local oranges.) The appetizer featured slabs of the most succulent ham ever!
Lightly perfumed with garlic and liberally laced with olive oil, it was simply delicious! Best value meal ever at €22; an excellent red wine cost €2.70, whether you had a glass or a bottle.
Hands down favorite!
April 09, 2006
Gaudí’s Casa Batlló
The eccentric genius Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí's Casa Batlló is the main attraction in the city’s famed Block of Discord.
As I climb the winding staircase, the wooden banister moulds itself to the curve of my hand, anticipating the shifting angle of my wrist. An ergonomically designed staircase. Now, that's genius!
A network of elegantly crafted air-vents (Gaudí had a thing for ventilation) clears the air of the musty smell endemic to houses-turned-museums.
Daylight shimmers through artisanal glass. Silky surfaces seduce and invite touch; sinuous planes curve and caress. Glowing wood twists, bends, and pirouettes.
All around is a childlike playfulness and disregard for authority. No concessions to conventional wisdom in terms of what a house should look like, or what is in good taste or bad. There is a glut of wanton decoration and images can go from pretty to crass without warning.
There is, however, a keen awareness of how a particular room should feel. Womblike in the bedroom, voluptuous and expansive in the living room.
At every turn is a flash of genius or an early warning of psychosis (his or mine). There are strange mouldings on the dining room ceiling suggestive of tumours or alien life forms.
And why do two pillars block the doorway to the courtyard?
A gem of an elevator, made of glass and polished wood, travels through a light shaft swimming in subtle shades of blue.
But the door is stuck; and Stuart asks doubtfully,
“Do you really want to go in that?”
“I really do.”
Upstairs is a newly opened section of the house: the attic and the roof. The attic, a service area, is an antiseptic white labyrinth under an arcaded ceiling. I feel like I've been swallowed into some giant creature's ribcage.
A video presentation on site explains the technical merits of the elliptical arch as a really smart architectural device. To my untrained but interested eye, the structure seems sound indeed. Spare, strong, and beautiful.
Up a twisting staircase, onto the roof, and the experience goes phenomenally surrealistic. Like walking into a Cirque du Soleil landscape.
The roof is a heaving, undulating cornucopia of decorative emblems and motifs, all clad in “trencadís”, Gaudí’s vigorous mosaic of multicolored tile fragments.
The effect is magical, surreal, psychedelic. Sublime!
April 08, 2006
Going back in time in the Barri Gòtic
We walked around the Barri Gòtic.
Outside the grand Palau de la Generalitat, a gaggle of protesters stood in somber single file against the wall, carrying signs indicating a mute protest against something or other.
Rounding the corner along one side of the Generalitat, we peeked into a colonnaded courtyard with lovely orange trees. Just ahead, a bridge linking two medieval buildings gave me a fleeting sense of dejà vu: it was a replica of the Bridge of Sighs in Venice.
Dinner was at Can Culleretes, the oldest restaurant in Barcelona. I had a spinach salad (a Catalonian specialty of which there was too much) with my rabbit. Stuart had soup and fish.
The total bill of €36.40 included €7.20 for pa y vi plus an indifferent dessert- the waitress warned me off the “too sweet” crema catalana.
Unanimous verdict: disappointing. As Stuart observed early into the meal, food is obviously not their main preoccupation.
Labels: Barcelona
Rambling through the Ramblas
The Rambla changes its name and character as it meanders busily through five different sections, starting from Plaça de Catalunya stretching all the way to the harbor.
Its central pavement funnels promenaders through an avenue of plane-trees, leaving just a trickle of car traffic on either side of it. The depressing images of the Sagrada Familia quickly melted away into the flow of wall-to-wall people moving to different rhythms, pushed along by diverse interests and errands: the opera house, the central market, cafés, patisseries, restaurants, gift shops, bookshops, or just the afternoon paseo.
A cacophony of voices, snatches of song, and earnest renderings from violins and flutes, guitars and drums, or any number of other orchestra orphans swirled through the human traffic. There was a knight in armor (probably Don Quijote); a snappily dressed danseur wielding castanets; an upturned torso, legs flapping in the air, top half completely buried under a pink tutu; plus the usual cast of nomadic street theater: fortune tellers, mimes, jugglers, and living statues.
It was time for a caffeine fix.
So with Barcelona’s high-profile café culture in mind, we diligently scoured the area for the perfect place, unable to decide which of the obvious options to take.
Café de l’Opera didn’t appeal; and someone had made a mess on the floor at Dulcinea. Schilling was too smoky.
There was a moment of weakness when we almost walked into Starbucks. But we soldiered on and found Forn de Pa Pastisseria.
It was bigger than it looked from the outside and less cozy than we expected.
But the superb hot chocolate and the sticky almond-and-honey bar were just what we craved for.
A Barcelona indulgence. Something to help us kick our biscotti-and-macchiato habit right there. Cold turkey.
La Sagrada Familia
Stuart went on walking tours from which I was exempt due to the strenuous nature of the activity, i.e., serious walking. I picked him up from Rambla de Catalunya at the end of one of these outings, him glowing with health and achievement, me just starting the day, for the obligatory visit to La Sagrada Familia, the pride of Barcelona.
I stared at it and stared at it. I circumnavigated it. I inspected it from the fruity tops of its hallucinatory spires to the bases of its hysterically encrusted walls.
And I couldn't for the life of me understand how the creator of the enchanting Casa Batllò could possibly be responsible for something so atrociously ugly.
L’epoca de mal gust (the epoch of bad taste), as some people call the period of artistic flowering of Gaudí and his Modernist peers, must have begun here.
I think it was fairly obvious what the Divine Architect thought of it when the original plan for the church was lost in a fire.
And then Gaudí, by this time homeless and broke, and still struggling heroically to finish the building, was run over by a tram.
Yet, they strive to finish it even now, 80 years on. At the time of Gaudí’s death, only one tower had been built. There are eight now; and four more spires are planned, plus another colossal 170 meter central tower.
We headed for the Ramblas to clear our heads.
Labels: Barcelona
April 07, 2006
A Different Picasso
The Museu Picasso is a beautiful complex consisting of three elegant aristocratic mansions linked together by a pretty courtyard presided over by a water fountain in the shade of a 150 year-old date palm tree. (The original three palaces were joined in the 1990s by two more medieval buildings.)
Here I found a gentler, more sentimental Picasso at a time when he was still living in Barcelona with his parents and studying at a local art school. This Picasso is virtually unrecognizable and might just as well have been some other genius I had yet to learn about.
Lunch at Els Quatre Gats (The Four Cats), the café where he famously hung with his Modernist friends and where he mounted his first exhibit, rounded up this early Picasso experience. Even the works featured here, including a menu he designed for the café, looked to me more like Toulouse-Lautrecs than Picassos.
Lunch at Els Quatre Gats (The Four Cats), the café where he famously hung with his Modernist friends and where he mounted his first exhibit, rounded up this early Picasso experience. Even the works featured here, including a menu he designed for the café, looked to me more like Toulouse-Lautrecs than Picassos.
And what about the food? I don’t remember a thing about the food. The place of course was touristy (what did you expect?) But I loved just being there, imagining how it must have been in his time. I might have seen this café in a movie about Picasso but I can’t be sure.
Labels: Barcelona
April 06, 2006
Tapas and football in Barcelona
We left the Gaudí experience for later and headed straight to Vinçons to buy the iconic furniture that I couldn’t wait to get my hands on. It was the wrong place for furniture, but the lighting fixtures were interesting. We also liked the cut paper installation in their art gallery.
Adjusting quickly to the local timetable, we then went in search of tapas to tide us over until dinnertime. Sinatra beckoned with a name that seemed intriguingly out of place here. The bar downstairs had dramatic mood lighting and swishy chairs and tiny blue lights crept up the staircase where a giant Lempicka print (I’m guessing, it could have been an original) provided a languid air. Tapas were served upstairs where more Lempicka females hung on quilted and buttoned silver walls, very decadently deco.
Food and wine were great and the English-speaking staff was young, trendy, and friendly.
As we settled in for another round of wine and tapas, people carrying suitcases started arriving at the bar. Almost all at once, the place began to fill and the noise level spiked up. We had missed all the clues: the game schedule on the blackboard beside the door and the big TV screen visible from downstairs and up.
When the big brawny man went to stand guard outside the door, we realized the football types had taken over the bar and it was time for us to leave. We would have been readily identified as aliens; or worse, as non-Barça. In this part of the world, one didn’t mess with football.
Labels: Barcelona
April 04, 2006
Art and the City
In the taxi coming in from the airport, I caught a brief glimpse of the giant red dots of Roy Lichtenstein’s massive Barcelona Head. I waited to round the corner to see more of it but we darted into a tunnel and when we reemerged, the landscape had changed.
I never had the chance to see the famous sculpture again but it didn’t much matter because in this city, art is majorly all around you. It's even found underfoot. The famous Barcelona pavement tiles are on permanent exhibit at the MOMA in New York.
The city’s precise geometric grid is made pretty by highly individual buildings that adorn it like jewelry. I spent hours inspecting intricate details on pillars and roofs, floors and walls, door knobs and window handles.
There are hand-drawn, hand-painted embellishments on exteriors of even the most prosaic establishments.
The suburban landscape is littered with murals and friezes and freestanding sculptures; apartment blocks are transformed by dreamy trompe l’oeil firewalls.
Barcelona- An incident at the hotel
On our first day in Barcelona, there was no hot water in the room and housekeeping said it would take a while to fix. Having only unpacked the night before, we didn't fancy moving just yet, so the hotel offered us the use of another room's bath, next floor up.
It was too much trouble for Stuart who was okay with a cold shower but I took up the upstairs option.
It was too much trouble for Stuart who was okay with a cold shower but I took up the upstairs option.
Later, happily hot-showered, in bathrobe and slippers, wet hair wrapped in a towel, I rang the bell and waited for Stuart to open the door to our room. To my horror, the door of the room next to ours opened and out came an elderly couple, just about to step out in their smart city clothes.
They responded to my bright “Hi there!” with the briefest of nods and it didn’t take much Spanish on my part to figure out her murmured “Who was that?!”
They responded to my bright “Hi there!” with the briefest of nods and it didn’t take much Spanish on my part to figure out her murmured “Who was that?!”
We plan to use assumed names next time we come.
I realized early on that my rudimentary Spanish wouldn’t be much help in Barcelona where they speak català, which to me is a very disorienting melange of French and Italian. We wondered how we would manage ordering lunch on our first outing.
We had yet to study our maps and guidebooks, but Tapa Tapa on Passeig de Gràcia seemed a safe bet: the menu was illustrated. It proved to be an inspired choice. Lunch was delicious and the location couldn't have been more auspicious.
I looked up from my pa amb tomaquet (the much tastier local equivalent of the Italian bruschetta) and was confronted by the skull-like balconies of Gaudí's Casa Batlló gazing at me from across the street.
What an introduction to one of the world’s most intriguing pieces of architecture!
Labels: Barcelona, Battlo, food, Gaudi
April 02, 2006
NY: the shows, the restaurants, the bars
The shows
The appeal of New York as a fun place is due largely to our friend Erle. He is solely responsible for our social life in that great city. Without him, we’d probably skip the city all together. Evenings, mostly planned by Erle, were spent thus:
Tuesday- An evening of chamber music, Schumann & Stravinsky. Admission free; delightful music, storytelling and mime by Juilliard students.
Wednesday- Juilliard Orchestra- Schumann, Beethoven, Bartok; Joseph Kalichstein at the piano. We had never heard of him but he was in all the papers.
Thursday- The Met: Samson & Dalila, Saint Saënz. We had never seen it before. Our box seats had a restricted view of the left side of the stage where a lot of the action took place. I could actually hum to the music of Act 2, which I suspect is the part most people come for as evidenced by the number of them who didn’t come back after the intermission.
Friday- Broadway: The Producers. Predictable.
Saturday- The Met: La Forza del Destino, Verdi. Again, never seen before. The miserable plot was redeemed by the beautiful music and my conviction that the star, Salvatore Licitra, had picked me out and was smiling only at me at the curtain calls. Jet lag sometimes does that. Or maybe it was the shock of the cost of our front row seats.
Several Met seasons ago, tenor Licitra had gamely taken on a house full of Pavarotti devotees (there was also an enormous crowd watching a giant screen on the courtyard outside the theater) after the maestro called in sick.
Sunday- Broadway: Spamalot. Very enjoyable. Stuart found it a bit tame though, not embarrassingly crass enough . The fact that this was the first outing all week where I didn’t have to fight to keep awake during the critical first fifteen minutes of the performance owes a lot to my familiarity with the material as a result of constant exposure to Stuart’s iPod repertoire.
The restaurants
And then there were the restaurants. Let’s skip the unavoidable food court lunches at Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s, shall we? Lunches at MOMA were infinitely more enjoyable- at The Modern and at Cafe 2.
Dinners before performances at the Lincoln Center: Pan e vino is always exciting, everybody all a-quiver with anticipation of the evening’s performance. I was there four times in one week so I had to repeat my choice for the set menu.
Then there was Cafe Fiorello across the road from the Lincoln. Cheerful and noisy crowd; beautiful coats and fur hats.
By the way, I like the idea of having dinner at the opera itself: one course per Act. Very nice; must try it sometime.
And then there was Zucco on Orchard and Houston, say “House-ton” or the taxi driver won’t take you.
I wanted to curl up and sleep at the tiny table beside the radiator. (It was a tablet, actually, the place is so small- 8 people at little tables like ours, then about 8 more can squeeze in at the bar!) I had a cozy cassoulet, so delicious and thick and hot, I would have been happy to swim in it.
And jazz at Cajun. We loved it last year but Hurricane Katrina had obviously put a damper on all things Creole this year. The young jazz trio played beautifully but no one was listening.
There was too, the formerly tres chic La Côte Basque, recently downgraded to brasserie. I can’t remember what I had there. Maybe that means something?
We looked in at Matsuri but just checked out the decor. Huge temple to the gods of sushi and sashimi.
The bars
The bar at our hotel was sadly lacking in character. All suits and briefcases. So late nights were better spent at Spice Market for margaritas and cumquat mojitos.
And Nobu for sambucca with coffee beans swimming at the bottom of the glass.
Too bad about that pretty girl at the bar in Nobu, all alight and sparkly one minute then sickly green in the face and spectacularly legless the next. Her date was not amused.
Labels: Erle, New York, restaurants
San Francisco and New York
San Francisco
In San Francisco, first stop was Neiman’s for gloves. I found the sweetest cashmere-lined leather ones, probably made in the Philippines- they never say so!
We met Margie for lunch. I chose a restaurant I remembered was very close; my cousin Fe took me there last year. Stuart and I walked around the block twice before we found John’s Grill. It somehow lacked the clubby feel I remembered it for. The food was good though. Margie and I shared a very generous serving of “Sam Spade” lamb chops. It was succulent and sweet and yummy!
Stuart then went back to the hotel for a nap so us girls could hang. Oh dear, that sounds too elderly-gentlemanly! It wasn’t really, it was a power nap.
At Margie’s Chinatown hairdresser (he had colored her hair too red and so had to redo it,) we caught up on a year’s worth of stories. She has a new job and a fancy new address. We took a bus back, then we battled a very cold wind as we walked the last block to the hotel. At least I thought it was very cold; I hadn’t got to New York yet.
The restaurant at the top of the Hilton was very crowded so we sat at the bar and waited for Stuart to rejoin us for dinner. Margie asked to have her Bloody Mary glass rimmed with salt and it arrived dripping sugar!
At dinner, looking out over the sparkling San Francisco nightscape, we talked about Margie’s love life, which Stuart declared to be very complicated.
New York
In New York, they were preparing to turn the Waldorf Astoria into apartments so we stayed at the Intercontinental. What a let down!
We stayed ten days and I saw the doorman smile only once, and even then not at me. The taxi drivers were a lot nicer. Except the one who seemed to be having a very bad day, a very bad life maybe, and was getting ready to blow something up.
After a few acerbic exchanges- only about directions, nothing to do with religion at all- I asked him why, for goodness’ sake, was he so angry? In a deep menacing voice, he intoned, “I don’t want to talk. I pick up, I drop off. That’s my job.” When he gave me change from my fare, I very deliberately counted every last cent in my hand, thank you very much.
It was cold, freezing. 16 degrees F and wind chill of I don’t know, cold!
We were in New York on the coldest day of the year. Of the decade. For me, the coldest ever! Remember my sweet cashmere-lined leather gloves? My hands could have been wearing a pair of icebags for all the difference they made!
So, did this horrific weather dampen my enjoyment of one of my favorite cities in the world? Not a chance! We were out every single night. I was out everyday except when it snowed.
The MOMA took up most of two days. I practically memorized the Contemporary Furniture exhibits, to which I dragged Stuart so he could gain an appreciation for the new look I was contemplating for our house. He wasn’t very impressed.
I also spent hours pondering the On Site installations demonstrating how new buildings and retooling of old buildings are transforming the landscape of present day Spain. I didn’t like the new buildings much except maybe the pretty new wavy roof covering the old central market. I resolved to make it my first stop in Barcelona.
Edvard Munch was much too frightening. I fled before my psyche got completely traumatized. I was not willing to make that sacrifice even for art’s sake; which, by the way, I didn’t think it was. My kind of art lifts my spirit and makes my heart sing. The Impressionists still do.
Stuart saved me the cost of admission on my second visit. Citigroup is a great friend of the museum. So I took him to lunch at The Modern, the current “must be seen at” place in the city. And I was seen there twice in a week! How about that!
Labels: MoMA, NY, restaurants, San Francisco, SF Hilton
April 01, 2006
Getting ready for NY and Barcelona
A text message from my friend Winnie has just made me peel myself off my TV couch (it’s a library wingchair actually, "TV couch" conjures up aspects too unattractive) and start writing about my fabulous month-long holiday, a.k.a. “Stuart’s business trip to New York.”
We got off to a splendid start in Hong Kong where we met up with Winnie and JJ who were revisiting old haunts in celebration of Winnie’s technical birthday. (For a number of years early in her life, she had been led to believe she was born a few weeks off the mark but that’s another story. Hers in fact, so we eagerly await her own accounting in her new blog.)
Over coffee after a long carbo-charged brunch, Winnie gave us a crash history course, taking us back to when Spain was a precinct of the Holy Roman Empire and walking us through the Ramblas of present-day Barcelona.
I later took them to my designer fashion knock-off shop in the Pedder Building, then nursed a headache for the rest of the afternoon (I suspect from the chicken rice). Miraculously I bounced back up for cocktails and pica-pica at the Grand Club, then an R&B band at newly reopened JJ’s.
Kenneth, my favorite maitre d’ brought us a luscious bowl of golfball sized strawberries on ice. He earlier promised me a gold JJ’s pin for JJ but we all promptly forgot about it. We toasted Winnie’s birthdays, practical and real, and wished each other good times ahead, them in Bali and us in NY and Barcelona.
The next day, I shopped for leather gloves in anticipation of the deep freeze awaiting me in NY. I didn’t find gloves but I found Singapore friend Victoria just outside Zara in Pacific Place.
It was only a few hours before Stuart and I were to leave for San Francisco and I was chatting up a storm with V over drinks at Cité, unmindful of the packing I had neglected to do for the trip.
Back at the hotel, Stuart was gamely filling up three suitcases for me with every item of winter clothing he could find, including four pairs of boots.
Labels: Barcelona, Hong Kong, New York
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