The hotel was uphill from the center of town, as was nearly everything, since Andorra la Vella is in a valley. Andorra started as a mountain pass controlled by people who extracted tolls from whomever passed through. They've managed to stay neutral in nearly every political situation, in spite of annoying other countries due to their status as a tax haven and center for smuggling. The country doesn't actively encourage smuggling now, focusing mainly on shopping (which often amounts to the same thing) and skiing. Andorra la Vella, Escaldes, and Engordanay constitute one big shopping area along a river, with stores and banks and traffic chicks with fezes.
We got a late start, making it out in time to have lunch at McDonald's. For some reason, they didn't have the game pieces, even though they had big displays for the game. Our dream of winning a Monopoly game was dwindling.
It was cold, but mostly sunny, so we drove up to Ordino and up into the snow until we saw a sign that said we needed chains. Then we drove back down, through Andorra la Vella, to Escaldes, Engordanay, and Encamp. In Encamp we stopped and bought a few things in a small grocery store.
Encamp is the bottom of a cable car line going up the mountain. I wanted to go up, but Mom has an uneasy relationship with cable cars, so I decided I'd go up by myself the next day. We spent the rest of the day shopping in Andorra la Vella.
We ate at Hamburger Quick Restaurant, which we discovered had excellent chicken wings. They were almost Anwaresque, which is as good as chicken wings can be. We had noticed one of these places in Nice, mainly because of their Simpsons promotion, but we hadn't eaten there. In Andorra, they had apparently used the French promotional signs and pasted Catalán words and Spanish prices over them.
On the same block as Quick was another fast-food place with red and yellow decor. It was called McDom's. Probably just a coincidence.
We had a clever idea. Rather than try to cram all souvenirs and dirty clothes into our already-stuffed suitcases, we would box them up and mail them to ourselves, keeping only what we needed for the rest of the trip.
We asked the lady at the tourist office where we could find a post office and an Internet café. We would have asked some other questions, too, but she was in the middle of an important personal phone call, and couldn't waste time on the likes of us.
Andorra has two separate postal systems. One is French, with postage in francs, and the other is Spanish, with postage in pesetas. Andorra is an independent country, but the nominal heads of state are its "co-princes": the Spanish Bishop of Urguell and the president of France. Even though Andorra's been around for the better part of a thousand years, it's always been at least partially under the co-thumbs of France and Spain. As a side-effect of this, Andorra has no money of its own, and simply uses francs and pesetas. Most stores accept both. The post office doesn't, and is split in two. My guess is that Andorra's too small to handle international mail, and simply sends their mail along to France or Spain, depending on which post office you use. The tourist office lady, without asking, had directed us to the French post office. Since we only had pesetas, the postal clerk directed us to the Spanish post office, five blocks away.
We got some boxes, then went to the internet café, which wasn't one. It was a café, all right, but the internet access consisted of two coin-operated machines called "Computer Boxes" with bizarre flat keypads. You had to press the key fairly hard in order to type a letter, but if you pressed it too hard it typed the letter repeatedly. For many keys there was no difference between hard enough and too hard, so I did a lot of backspacing. After about ten minutes of that, we went to Quick for more chicken wings, then did some more shopping to buy things to mail to ourselves.
In the afternoon, we went back to the room and packed the boxes, then walked back down to the post office at about 4:00 to mail them. The post office closed at 3:30, so we walked back up to the room again.
It was snowing, so I decided not to go up in the cable car, since visibility wouldn't be very good, making this the second cable car I'd missed on this trip.
For our last evening in Andorra, we went to Caldea. Caldea is a giant multi-story glass spa thing. It looks like a cathedral, and you'd almost think it is, the way they talk about it. But it really is impressive. For starters, it seems to be one of the few places in Europe that has its own parking.
Caldea is in the town of Escaldes, which is a source of geothermal springs. Like Iceland, they've found a way to capitalize on this, creating what's billed as Europe's largest health spa, with lagoons, saunas, jacuzzis, a "grapefruit pool", an "Aztecian pool", "Indo-Roman baths", and other, even stranger, things. The grapefruit pool, unfortunately, is only available to club members. It's a pool with grapefruits floating in it, so you can see how they'd need to restrict access.
The main lagoon is huge, and has three mushroom-like pools protruding from it. There's a narrow canal by which you can swim to an outside lagoon. Even though it was 30 degrees out, we could swim outside fairly comfortably amongst clouds of steam. The Indo-Roman baths have warmer water (97 degrees) and an elephant. They also have a cold-water bath (57 degrees), but we skipped that one.
After Caldea, we had planned to go out for a nice meal, but that seemed like too much effort, so we went to Quick again. The manager -- R. Lopez from León, France -- joined us for a while. He'd gotten to know us pretty well in the 372 times we'd come in for chicken wings.
In the morning I took the boxes down to the post office again. Mom's was smaller and contained mostly clothes, but it cost nearly $30. Mine would have been around $60, so I decided to take it back on the plane with me.
Crossing the border back to Spain was similar to the crossing from Gibraltar. We had to confirm that we hadn't purchased any tobacco, alcohol, or electronics in Andorra, which I did. Technically, this wasn't true, since I'd bought a Cuban cigar for Alcalde. Cuban cigars are illegal in the US, but that's okay, since Alcalde doesn't smoke, anyway. And I certainly couldn't visit a notorious tobacco-smuggling country like Andorra without smuggling out some tobacco, even if it was only one cigar.
Our next destination was Figueres, famous for the Salvador Dali museum and little else. There's no major highway from Andorra to Figueres, so we took the most direct route we could, which was a winding road through the mountains. The elevation was higher than Andorra, so after going down briefly, we started going up again. We hit snow almost immediately. The road was clear, though, since we were crossing through a ski area.
On the other side of the mountains, just outside of Argelaguer, there was a big weird treehouse thing. It appeared to be made from narrow branches that had been bent into shape. There were platforms, rooms, spires, and other structures, connected by numerous passageways throughout a small group of trees. There was a driveway and a mailbox. It was obviously someone's home.
In Robell, we got stuck behind a herd of cows, then got on wrong highway and had to cut back across a winding mountain road.
When we got to Figueres, we follow the signs to the Dali museum, but went right past it without noticing it. We ended up going down a pedestrian street and into a courtyard, and had to back out. We parked on the street and walked all the way around the building until we found the entrance.
The Salvador Dali Theater/Museum is interesting, but not very extensive. Most of his best-known works are in another museum in Florida, and the Figueres museum is one he designed. In addition to paintings by Dali and others, it has exhibits and a general Daliesque structure.
Rainy taxi was being renovated, so it wasn't raining. Mae West was interesting, but not from every angle. Lincoln was more interesting close up.
Afterward, we got pizza and Coke at a nearby café. At the gift shop next door I found a small print of Dali's Natura Morta Vivante, which I'd tried to find years ago without success.
We went through the usual nightmare driving into Barcelona. It wasn't as bad as Sevilla, though, since we eventually did find parking. We parked on La Rambla in a garage that the attendant described as "antiguo". He was right. It was a small garage and the attendant parked the car to get the cars as close together as he could. He left the parking brake off because the floor was perfectly level and the cars would stay wherever he put them. To get in, he had to pull on the wheel well to get the car out far enough to open the door.
Photos of The Pyrenees, Argelaguer, and the Dalí Museum
In the morning I took the rental car back. I was a little apprehensive because the door was sort of smashed in and even though I had full coverage, it wasn't hard to imagine something going wrong. But it didn't. I found the airport easily, turned in the car, and took the bus back to Plaça de Catalunya, not far from the hotel. It wouldn't have been far, anyway, if I hadn't started walking in the wrong direction. Even with my map, I had to try three different directions before finding the right one, because of the lack of street signs. In one of the wrong directions, I found an internet café called Cybermundo, and made a note of where it was so I could check email later.
Our first idea for the day was to take the funicular railway up Montjuïc. It didn't look too far, so we started walking. On the way we came across Palace Güell, which was one of Gaudí's early buildings, so we went in and caught up with a tour group that had just started. The tour was in both Spanish and English and went from the basement to the roof. An interesting building, but not as flamboyant as some of his later works.
We continued up toward Montjuïc and with some effort found the funicular. It was closed. In winter it only runs on the weekends, which this wasn't. Since the funicular station was part of the Barcelona Metro station, we took the Metro to Parc Güell, the city park designed by Gaudí.
The Metro is a subway system somewhat like BART, although with a more extensive train network within the city. BART covers more distance, but is more linear. The pricing is also different. Whereas BART charges based on distance travelled, Barcelona's Metro is a flat 60 pesetas (about a dollar) to go anywhere in the city. Since even BART's comparatively expensive system doesn't come close to covering its costs, the Metro must be almost entirely tax-supported. As non-taxpaying tourists, this meant we got a mostly free ride.
Parc Güell is on a hill. The main entrance is on a more gently sloping side of the hill, where we weren't. We were on the steepest side, which, fortunately, had escalators and stairs to the edge of the park at the top. After trudging and riding most of the way up, we met a girl from Texas as she was coming down. She must have heard us speaking English to each other because she started out with English. She told us how to get to the main areas of the park, starting with a stone monument at the top.
The monument is something that, in the US, would be closed off after numerous lawsuits citing the ADA and public safety laws. It's a stone monument with a cross at the top (lawsuit from the ACLU as well) and stone steps curving up two sides. The steps are narrow, uneven, and have no railings. There are no railings at the top. Stoned college students probably fall off of it on a regular basis while looking at the view.
We didn't fall off, though, and after not falling off for a while, we walked down the hill to the main area of the park, where we intended to get some lunch at a sort of café thingy they had. We looked at their menu: lots of sandwiches, hamburguesas, that sort of thing. We ordered two hamburguesas. They were out. Oh. We tried some sandwiches. Didn't have those, either. Coke? Nope. It was like the Monty Python cheese sketch.
So we skipped lunch and wandered around taking pictures, petted a friendly cat, and looked at the Gaudí House-Museum, where Gaudí lived from 1906-1925. He didn't design the house, but it contains some furniture he designed. After that, we had a quasi-lunch from a nearby vending machine.
We walked to the Greek Theater and the Hall of Columns, above the main entrance to the park, where the lizard - El Drac Protector - guards the entrance.
Then it was back down the hill and right on the street at the bottom and right on another street that wrapped around to a street that took us back to the first street and a quick jaywalk to a small park that took us to a tunnel that went under the street that crossed the first street and down the stairs to the Metro station and back to the hotel.
In the evening, we went out looking for something more local than McDonald's, Monopoly or no Monopoly. Walking up La Rambla, a man asked us if we spoke English. Not a tough call, since we looked like tourists. He said that there was a factory leather sale right inside this very building and we were welcome to go in and look around and blah blah blah. Mom had been regretting not buying a red leather jacket she'd seen in Gibraltar, so she was more willing than I was to have a look. The man led us into the building, through a door, and up a narrow flight of stairs. I kept expecting a couple of thugs to jump out of a doorway and mug these gullible American tourists, but we just ended up in a leather outlet. And Mom found exactly the kind of jacket she wanted. And it was at a good price.
Leather really is a lot cheaper in Spain. This jacket was about $150, but it would have cost at least double that in the US. Consequently more people wear leather, and not just jackets, but pants as well. Even people who, for strictly aesthetic reasons, shouldn't.
After walking a little farther, we came across the Santa Ana restaurant, a tapas bar off La Rambla. We didn't really know what to do, so we let them seat us at a table and we ordered from a menu. That's not really the tapas experience, but we were hungry and we didn't care too much.
We ordered an assortment of different things, which gave us more food than we really needed, and in particular we both got prawns. Not convenient shelled prawns, nakedly waiting to be consumed, but prawns that required significant disassembly. Neither one of us has sufficient skills for this job, so each bite required a lot of cracking and pulling and peeling and scraping, as well as several reams of napkins. We were mostly done when someone at the next table ordered prawns. She had no trouble at all, but I couldn't tell what she was doing differently. Maybe we just had defective prawns.
We talked to her for a bit afterward. Or rather listened. She was from Australia and her husband had been sick for most of the trip, so I think she was glad to have someone to speak English to. I didn't ask her about prawn technique, but I did ask her about tipping. She said you generally didn't tip, but you could, maybe 10% or so, or just leave the change, or not, and I really didn't get any sort of clear direction out of what she said. So I left 20%.
I managed to find Cybermundo again and we checked email while the guy next to us checked websites devoted to female anatomy. He seemed very nearsighted and had to look at the pictures and the keyboard from a distance of about six inches. He also chain-smoked, so after a while we gave up and went outside to breathe.
We took the Metro to Sagrada Familia. This is the huge church that Gaudí spent the last years of his life designing. It has never been finished, because Gaudí was run over by a streetcar in the 1920s, putting the project on hold. The Spanish Civil War stalled it even further. After Franco's death, the Spanish government decided to fund its completion, based as much as possible on Gaudí's original design. So the church, which looks finished from a distance, is still very much under construction, and is nowhere near as immense as it will be when it's finished in 2020.
The first step was to find restrooms, which turned out to be on the other side of the church. Then we went back to where we started to look at the displays, then up a level to the main entrance. The elevator wasn't working, but I went up the stairs in one of the towers while Mom waited below. I don't generally experience vertigo, but I did in this thing. It was narrow and dark and seemed to change direction from time to time, leaving me somewhat confused as to where I was until I reached a bridge that crossed to another tower. That wasn't the top, although it was still very high up, but I figured I'd been gone long enough and started down. Vertigo aside, this was a wonderfully strange labyrinthine place that needs to be in a movie or novel.
At the bottom, I arrived just in time to see a Japanese transvestite. It took a few minutes to decide whether he was a transvestite or just a remarkably ugly woman with a blonde wig and heavy makeup, but the misaligned breast modules finally decided it. Also, he had more tattoos than you generally see on women. We saw him again a little later when he went in the women's restroom, although the men's restroom was closed for cleaning, so maybe he was just desperate. A Spanish man was watching him and rolling his eyes.
For lunch, we went across the street to McDonald's, but we still didn't win that damn game.
We walked back to Passeig de Gràcia, which is a wide street with numerous examples of modernist architecture -- the Ruta del Modernisme -- including Gaudí's Casa Milà and Casa Batlló. They were both closed, although Casa Milà has a currency exchange office in it that was open, so I exchanged some more dollars for pesetas.
It was on Passeig de Gràcia that I really discovered the limits of the guidebook I was using. It described the Casa Lleó Morera as having the center for the Ruta del Modernisme, which it didn't, and recommended visiting the building, which you couldn't. There were numerous inaccuracies like this, and we weren't actually able to go inside any of the buildings, although some of them, such as the two Gaudí buildings, were only closed for renovation. So we stopped at another Häagen-Dazs Café.
Back on La Rambla, we found another internet access place, called net.movil, that had a large non-smoking section and a nice view overlooking the street. It was also closer to the hotel.
As we were coming back down La Rambla, I broke up a shell game. We were coming down La Rambla and there was this guy turning over little boxes and getting people to bet on which one the ball was under. So I started filming him. He didn't appear to notice, but a burly guy who appeared to be a spectator kept getting in front of me. So I kept going around him. Finally he backed up completely against the camera. So I held the camera up over his shoulder. At that point he went up to the con artist guy and said something to him, glancing back at me, and they picked up and moved down the street.
Mom went back to the room to take a nap and I went out to the Erotic Museum. This was right on La Rambla not far from the hotel and featured...well...artifacts. Sexual ones. And quite a variety of them, too. There was intricately carved statuary from India, less intricately carved but still identifiable statuary from Africa, a continuously running porno film from the 1920s, a carnival ride that was at once obvious and puzzling, a Victorian walking stick that contradicted most people's notion of Victorian stuffiness, and numerous other marvels. The only other people there with me were an older Spanish couple who were slowly inspecting each display as they might inspect a display of Greco-Roman pottery, discussing it in conversational and completely non-prurient tones.
The whole thing was on the second floor, and I bought my ticket from a German girl at the base of the stairs as I went in. When I left, I bought a t-shirt that had the name of the place in Catalán and talked to her and another girl that worked there about the differences between Spanish and Catalán. They both spoke English with German accents, although one looked Asian.
And speaking of prurient things, Spanish magazines can have topless women on the covers. And the magazines are in grocery stores and newsstands and they don't have to cover them up or put fig leaves on them or anything. In the US there would be groups of Concerned Citizens picketing to protect The Children. In Spain they don't care, apparently realizing that The Children are more interested in scooters and Pokèmon.
I went back to the room and we went out for another exotic foreign meal adventure at McDonald's, but still no Monopoly. Our chances were dwindling fast.
In the morning we walked down La Rambla in the general direction of the main post office, in order to mail a couple of packages and about twenty postcards. On the way we stopped at Plaça Reiall to look at some lampposts designed by Gaudí. They were nice enough lampposts, but they didn't compare to the lizard. We'd gone as far as the Columbus statue when Mom realized that she'd forgotten the packages. So I checked my email at a nearby internet place while she went back to the room to get them.
When she got back, we continued on along the waterfront, past a giant prawn, to the post office. Then out along the harbor to the cable car tower that we thought would take us up Montjuïc. Instead, it took us across the harbor to another tower and then down to a station only about a third of the way up Montjuïc. There was some attractive artwork, but not much else, so we followed the road up the mountain. We found the other end of the funicular line, where it meets another cable car line that goes to the castle at the top of the mountain, but that was closed, too, being on the same schedule as the funicular. We decided against walking it, and continued along the main road.
After a while we stopped at a small snack stand to get chips & Coke, and tried to figure out what we were doing. There were supposed to be many things of interest on Montjuïc. So far all we'd found was a castle we couldn't get to. We could see the Olympic Park, too, from where we were sitting, but we'd missed the Olympics by 8 years.
We went in the coliseum. It was mostly empty, except for a cat, so we went out the other side to see the rest of the Olympic Complex. From the stadium we came down wide steps to a large open area surrounded by giant pillars. There was a strange cluster of doohickeys, behind which, further out, was an enormous something that seemed to have no other function than to look cool. Beyond was miles and miles of Barcelona.
There were also museums on Montjuïc. We found them down the hill a ways from the Olympic Complex. But we'd had to make a general decision about museums. Europe has museums out the wazoo, and they're huge and you can spend whole days in them. And a whole day you spend in a museum is a whole day you spend not doing something else. The opportunity cost was just too high, for the most part, so the only museums we saw were small ones, like the cave-house museum in Guadix, or one-of-a-kind types, like the Dali museum or the Erotic museum. Thus, we didn't go into the museums on Montjuïc.
We wound our way down the hill, along pathways and down escalators, until we came out above Plaça Espanya. There was a model there filming a car commercial (apparently) and I took some video of her walking to the car, then walking backward to her starting point, then forward to the car, then backward...at least a dozen times.
From Plaça Espanya we took the Metro back to the hotel. The Metro was convenient, but not as convenient as it had seemed at first. The Australian woman in Santa Ana had told us this, but at the time we didn't understand what she was talking about. The Metro has several different lines, and they don't all connect very neatly. To get from one line to another, and sometimes to get to any line at all, you have to walk. You walk down stairs. You walk up stairs. You ride escalators, you go down tunnels, and you pass through turnstiles. You can sometimes walk the equivalent of two or three blocks before finding the train. And then you stand and wait for the train.
So where we finally got on the train was probably nowhere near Plaça Espanya, but all our walking was underground, so there's no telling where we really were. Eventually, we found the train and rode back to La Rambla.
After a short break, we went out to the Barri Gòtic, the oldest section of Barcelona. It's a relatively small area with a very high amount of ancientness per unit area, including the remnants of the Roman city wall from the 4th Century.
One particularly dramatic sight is the 17th-Century Sant Felip Neri church, the front of which is riddled with bullet holes from the executions that took place here during the Spanish Civil War.
For a late afternoon snack we went to another Häagen-Dazs, this one on La Rambla. It was much smaller than the others we'd seen, and was adjacent to a large game arcade. We sat next to an enormous rotating machine full of Pokèmon toys.
Later that evening, after checking email again, we wandered in and around the Barri Gòtic looking for food. We'd given up on the Monopoly game and were looking for something a little more local. At night the narrow streets are densely packed pedestrian vectors, punctuated with street performers who barely have room to move. We wandered aimlessly with no clear idea of where we were, before giving up on finding someplace new and deciding to go back to Santa Ana. Then we spent another half hour or so wandering aimlessly trying to find Santa Ana.
Eventually we found it, and sat at the tapas bar instead of a regular table. Our last night in Spain and we finally did it right. Sort of. We didn't really know what we were ordering, but we didn't end up with anything disgusting, just a lot more than we really anticipated.
After breakfast we defied several major laws of physics and compressed everything into our suitcases, then took a taxi to the airport.
Getting the $15 tax refund for Mom's jacket was no simple task. The man in front of us had two or three people working on his refund, which had numerous issues that needed to be discussed and checked and verified for what seemed like hours but was probably more like twenty minutes. Finally they counted out his refund, which was at least twenty 10,000Pta bills, or about $1200, meaning that he had spent about $12,000.
Alcalde's Cuban cigar was in a metal container that set off the security alarm. When I put it in the tray, a member of Spain's Guardia Civil pointed the cigar in a safe direction, very carefully unscrewed the cap, and slowly slid the cigar out. Then he smiled, said "Okay", and handed it back to me. What did he care about the US embargo with Cuba? Just so long as it doesn't explode!
We had one more chance to get our passports stamped somewhere. We thought for sure that they would stamp them as we left the EU. But when we got to Customs, there was no one there. The stands were empty, the lights were off, and the gates were open. So we walked through.
After waiting for a little while and watching Pokèmon cartoons on a nearby TV, we started what seems to be the standard Spanish schtick for plane travel: board a bus and wait, then ride in the bus to a plane, then wait to get on the plane. Once through that routine, we flew to Madrid, where we sat on the plane for 90 minutes, then taxied all over central Spain, just as we had two weeks previously, before finally taking off for New York.
The Atlantic was wider going back. Our adrenaline was gone. And instead of feeding us continuously, they turned the lights off, so it was a long, dark trip over nothingness. The last thing I saw before drifting off was a small child with a glowing Pokèmon on a spring.
