Bread and Whine...

Part 1. The Downside of a Commodity
Olive oil. All I want is some extra virgin olive oil to drizzle on everything. I miss it. For the past six months (since the Italy bike ride trip), it has been a large part of my diet. Yesterday, I went to a large market and came out empty handed since they didn't sell a bottle SMALL enough for travel. 3 euros buy a tremendously large, unwieldy bottle of high quality oil. But I don't want to pour out an entire bottle when it's time to move along from Barcelona. Happily, tonight I found a nice, small bottle. Over 5 euro for this award winning Catalunya Aceite de Oliva Virgen Extra. It has a strong flavor, to be sure. I've been working on drinking wine much more and appreciating the differences. Adding olive oil expertise to my list of things to learn in Italy. Speaking of wine, did I mention the cost of it here? Quite inexpensive. I bought a bottle (not the best, but fine table wine) for 1 euro. I happened to brake that one (1/2 full) all over the floor of the hostel in Mallorca so I would be enjoying some wine tonight if I trusted myself a wee-bit more.

I wasn't going to share the picture of dinner tonight, but what the heck, I'm not there to hear your heckling. Really, it felt great to prepare dinner in civilized fashion at this hostel's kitchen tonight.  You're looking at beets (garlic on top, yep, always looking to make friends with my roommates), balsamic vinegar, olive oil, sesasme bread and chocolates from the Boqueria market. Dee-lish!





Part 2.  Where Not to Ride Your Bike but Thank Goodness I Did
Do not ride your road bike in Barcelona unless you're bike-courier-good with a bike. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not that good, but I got a lot of practice today. Let's put it in perspective. Riding around the streets of New York City is easy compared with cycling around Barcelona. This is a city that feigns being a bike-friendly city. (The people are very bike-friendly, the city layout is not.)

The ride started at noon sharp, ended around 7pm tonight and I covered 50 km which was quite an excellent tour of Barcelona (I took some extended breaks, but much of the time was spent at red lights). I really like to get to know cities by bike. Yesterday I only scratched the surface of the city. Today I felt like I began a relationship with the city, where I got to understand some of what makes it tick. It has a personality and now I can differentiate it apart from other cities. When I started this morning, all I could do was define it by putting in the context of other cities that I know. The hills (just above the city) are steep like San Francisco, it has a Montreal feel (without the french), it's big like Atlanta (but waaay bigger)... Now, however, Barcelona stands alone as its own city to me. 

Definition of a Fake Bike City
There are cute little bike roads here and there (next to the regular road) with lanes for each direction clearly marked...but then, you're cruising along and this happy place disappears and you're tossed onto a major thoroughfare if you don't stop, scratch your head wondering what you missed (nothing, it turns out) and jump on the sidewalk where you now get to dodge pedestrian traffic (which is, arguably, more scary than the cars). The cars were terrific all day--I didn't get honked at once and there were numerous occasions where I was given the right-of-way that I never would have gotten elsewhere. And there are the one-way roads. No rhyme or reason on which way or both a road goes. Parked cars are no indication, either, of which way traffic flows. Fortunately, the signage is pretty decent.

I began the ride on La Rambla since it's packed with stores so I was sure to find a bike shop to sell me a good bike map. NO bike shop. Not one. Not one all day long except for a rental shop with no maps that I found just before getting back to the hostel. And what about other cyclists? It was hours before I saw a road cyclist. I probably saw 5 total all day long and guess where I found them?

The Barcelona equivalent of Lookout Mountain!

The story on that a little later. More about how dysfunctional Barcelona is as a bike city. They also have bike self-checkout rentals all over town. Again, faked you out! These little bikes are fine for kicking around to the stores, etc. and if something happens (flat tire, etc), just return it to the rack and the rental company comes by and whisks the bike away to the super secret place where the only tubes and sole mechanic in town can be found. See? I just spent 7 hours riding a bike in a very populated city and couldn't find a single person to talk bikes with.


There's more, hear me out. The intersections don't have corners so you can't just go straight through an intersection--that isn't safe. You have to go to the crosswalks...very inconvenient. Here's an illustration.

If this is confusing, set it up in your kitchen with the spice jars and play it out like you're a bike heading for an intersection. See how bad that is?! Visibility stinks with this sort of setup, too. Seems more dangerous to me.

Back to the Adventure
When I saw the huge antennae on top of the very big hill, it drew me to it--I just had  to get up to it. And there was a magnificent church up there, too, that was (actually) what I really wanted to see...from the ground it looked like a fortress. Here, this is what it looked like from below: 

Pretty tempting, eh? Without a map or the first idea how to get to it, I ended up riding up and down through all of these cool Barcelona neighborhoods looking for that holy grail of a road that would lead me to the coveted prize in the sky. So those neighborhoods...well, they're all built on the hill so logically the roads were all super steep. There were a few occasions where I was in the easiest gear, going about 2 mph and unable to stand up because the back wheel would skip out. Admittedly, I even walked up one road in my desperate search.

No luck, I decided it was just futile and it was time to move along. It was then (of course) that THE road jumped out at me. I was sure this was the one I was searching for. So up I went, once again, but this time, I got what I was after and so much more. The view was awesome (these pics don't do it one bit of justice. H-E-L-L-O Barcelona!

This is the Tibidabo (amusement park next to this amazing church). Not sure what the church is named. I also ended up visiting Parc Guell which was very pretty and found the bike and I hiking all over. Thank goodness I brought the coffee shop caps for the cleats, really came in handy!

To make many long stories shorter, the ride was very satisfying and I felt better out there on the bike than I've felt in a long time. Foot travel simply doesn't do the same thing for me, even if I walk all day long and see a lot of good stuff.

One of the stops I made was at this interesting outdoor venue--next to a shopping area. It was just the weirdest sort of experiences that I really can't explain. There was music blasting and lots of people wearing red (turns out these are Barcelona soccer fans out en masse). I rode into the area and suddenly, without warning, this whole group of guys swarmed me and they threw this red/white scarf on me (good thing I was wearing red/white already), there were cameras and you would have thought we were long lost bestest friends or something. One guy who spoke a little English just kept saying (in a very drunk, spanish accent): you're sooo boo-tee-ful. Clearly he'd be drinking all day long at this point. Hey, if they're going to get pictures, I wanted one for myself--I handed them my camera for one more round. Then the sober guy in the group apologized for his friends' behavior and drug them all away. "We're not all like this," he assured me. Since they meant well and didn't crush me, I thought the whole scene was amusing.

And my bike asked to go clothes shopping, it's had an eye on a shirt...yeah, I actually rode straight into the mall without being stopped. The pink/black stripped shirt at Desigual was that shirt. :)

The rest of the ride found me pedaling all along the beach next to the Mediterranean while the sun set. It was serene--a very good end to a wild day.

Here's the promised link to all of yesterday's pictures:

Yesterday's Adventure in Pics