Barcelona, San Cugat and Figueres

So when I got there on a Friday night it was raining. I flew from Rome on Vueling Airlines, a Spanish budget airlines. I walked around the Ramblas and Plaza Catalunya that night and went to bed early. The next day I was able to see he city better, even though it was still raining. It was weird to be in a place that I knew well. Everything reminded me of past experiences; just hearing the names of metro stops announced on the metro brought back old memories. Other than a few new stores, nothing has changed. At 1 pm I took a train to San Cugat, where Pau picked me up in his new car, a Seat hatchback. It was raining in Barcelona, and in San Cugat, 15 kilometers outside the city, it was snowing. It was the first time I have ever seen snow in Spain. Pau’s twin brother was in Italy on vacation and his sister is working in London so he was the only kid home. He is studying biology at a University in Barcelona and working part time as a waiter. We had lunch with his parents. The food reminded me of the summer I stayed with them, it was some of the same food I ate everyday there. San Cugat has grown and changed a lot in recent years and with all the snow it looked really different.

Pau drove me back to Barcelona and I went to see some of the Gaudi buildings, the Casa Milá and Casa Batlló. I had never really paid attention to them when I was in Barcelona before. I walked around the L’Eixample neighborhood (where I am going to buy an apartment one day), and the old Gothic Quarter. The next day I went to the train station to reserve a bed on an overnight train to Sevilla, using up the last day of my Eurail pass. I took a train to Figueres, a small town in the Pyrenees north of Barcelona. There was some bad flooding in that part of Spain, some of the fields near the train tracks were under several feet of water. Figueres is the birthplace of Salvador Dalí and he designed a museum to be built there to house his art and his body after his death. It is the second most visited museum in Spain, after the Prado in Madrid.

So as you can imagine, the Dalí Museum, designed by Dalí himself, is weird, it’s hard to describe. The first room I went into was dimly lit and displayed some jewelry he designed as well as his tomb. There is a round building with his more normal paintings. And then there is a lot of weird stuff. The courtyard has an old black car with a lifelike mannequin at the wheel and huge a fat lady on the hood. There are lots of 3D displays that he made that are coin operated, for 50 cents you can put the moving parts in motion and make lights flash. A lot of his work was inspired by famous works of art, some of which I had seen earlier in the trip. Dalí made his own surrealist interpretations of Creation, the David statue, the Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa. Dalí was a weird guy and seeing his personal museum was the best way of trying to get inside his head and discover how he perceived the world.

When I left the museum to walk back to the train station I got caught in a downpour so I was soaking wet for the ride back to Barcelona. I had a few hours left in Barcelona so I walked around the University area, the old part of town and the port. There was a great sunset during the few hours when it wasn’t raining. I got to the train station around 9 pm and had to wait for the overnight train to leave at 10:30. I was in a 2nd class four bed sleeper cabin with one other guy for about an hour and then was bumped up to a 1st class two bed sleeper cabin. The bed was the same in both cabins and since I did nothing more than read and sleep the upgrade wasn’t a big deal. I left Sevilla on a bus at midnight on Tuesday, December 27th and returned on a train almost five weeks later, on Monday morning, January 30th.