Barcelona, part 3
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
Hi folks! A couple of quick news items:
If you missed the RESURRECTIONS virtual launch, you can watch it here.
RESURRECTIONS is also the Book of the Month on the Apex Book Company Patreon. I mean, of course it is, because it’s the book they’re releasing this month, but I whipped up a photo tour for them. It has a lot of the same photos as these posts here, but I organized it differently, focusing less on a blow-by-blow account of where I went when, and more on the lessons learned.
And now, on to Barcelona!
Sunday
When I wake up today I can already tell something's wrong. Those little warning signs of overload I was feeling yesterday? Yeah, they're not warning signs anymore. I'm feeling the thing I always feel when I've badly overloaded myself - vaguely sick and unable to do anything.
It's honestly fine. This used to happen to me a lot more than it does these days, and I have procedures about it. I know what to do.
So, instead of going to the history museum, I spend the day flopped over in my hotel room, doing Self-Care (tm). That's all.
Monday
Now that I feel better, today is a tourist day. And the one big, BIG thing that EVERYONE says you have to do when you're in Barcelona is to visit the Sagrada Familia - a big cathedral designed by Antoni Gaudi, which is still under construction a century after it began, but is also open to visitors. Unfortunately, I left buying tickets until the very last minute and now the Sagrada is sold out for the whole week.
Well, I'm not going to let that ruin my day, and it’s not like the Sagrada is the only place where you can admire some Gaudi. So after a bit of hemming and hawwing, I settle on La Pedrera, an apartment building which was one of the last works he completed before starting on the Sagrada. This time I am very careful and I write down EXACT directions for the whole day’s itinerary in my phone's notes app.
Or at least I think they are exact, but when I emerge from the subway station at the correct stop, I realize I only wrote down, "La Pedrera is one block from the exit." Which block? Which exit? All I see are cheerful city streets with no helpful "this way to La Pedrera" signs.
So, I wander and look around. According to my Lonely Planet Guide, this neighborhood is called L'Eixample - named the Gaixample because of its thriving LGBTQ+ nightlife. Look at those glitter stars hanging above the street!
It's also the high fashion district, and I feel very schlubby walking around in my rumpled tourist clothes.
I actually walk past La Pedrera at one point, saying to myself, "That looks like a Gaudi building, but I think Google Maps said La Pedrera is over that way." Turns out, no, it is not over that way, and I sheepishly double back.
Gaudi has a very distinctive style, which eschews straight lines and instead uses irregular curves inspired by the natural world. The facade is instantly recognizable, but a lot of the inside of La Pedrera is actually not that weird. People actually lived here, you know? There's an audio tour which cutely pretends to be narrated by Gaudi himself, and it takes us up an elevator into a top-floor apartment. It's really just an elegant rich person's apartment and I feel a little voyeuristic wandering through the relatively narrow halls and looking at, like, kids' beds. Or bidets.
But then we get into the attic, where there's a little exhibit about Gaudi and his process, and that's where it starts to get properly weird.
And then: THE ROOF. Which is splendid.
We are just walking around on the uneven roof of this building and it's excellent but it's also giving me a little vertigo, and then somehow the audio tour takes us down 8 narrow flights of weird green stairs and I am just shuffling down it like a really old person. (I hear the stairs in the Sagrada Familia are worse.) I forgot to take a picture of the stairs. But then we end the tour in a beautiful courtyard painted in lovely pastels.
This was originally a garage, back in the days when rich people were just beginning to have automobiles. And for a crowning point of weirdness, there is a massive sculpture in the shape of a baby's head. (The audio tour explains that the person in one of the lower apartments was a famous gynecologist.)
All told, I'm finished the tour a little earlier than I expected, and I bum around on a park bench uploading photos to social media for a while before I hop on the bus to my next stop: the Park Guell. This is another Gaudi design; this time it is not a building, but a public park.
I head into the park from a side entrance by the parking lot, which means I'm not in the biggest, flashiest part yet, but just on some nice garden paths with pavilions here and there. After the bustle of the buses and big streets, I like this a lot. I can see Gaudi's signature in the unusual, organic shapes and it feels really appropriate for a park, which is an organic environment anyway.
If I turn certain corners, I'm on enchanting little paths with no people around at all.
I spend a good long while wandering this environment and soaking it in. (For a few minutes, I sit on one of those curved benches and read some of Pluralities by Avi Silver, and then I have to pause because I am overcome by the feeling of reading a relatable thing about Being A Weird Person in the middle of all this beautiful but weird stuff.) Eventually I find may way over to the park's central areas, which are a different story. There's a big open space with a sand floor - Barcelona in general tends to have sand floors, like a bullfighting arena, in places where an American would have a big lawn - which dramatically hangs in the air on top of giant pillars:
Below it, there's the front courtyard with the very weirdest sculptures and buildings:
I'm struck by the uneven distribution of humans in this park. In the front courtyard there are 73 million people trying to get selfies in front of the sculptures - so many that it's hard to walk even a few steps without getting in the way of someone taking a picture of someone else. And just one or two minutes walk away is all this greenery and quiet. I get the sense there are a lot of tour groups that stop here for 5 minutes of selfies and then move on.
Anyway, I grab a popsicle and a chorizo sandwich and then I head back to my hotel satisfied. Or I try to, anyway, but I've miscalculated again, because my directions describe how to get back to the hotel from one of the Park Guell's entrances and the one I went in by is a different entrance, and I don't fully figure this out until I've already left. So I spend a lot of time frowning furiously at Google Maps and trying to maneuver myself to one of the bus routes that actually appears in my instructions. But I make it eventually, and honestly, the streets in this part of Barcelona are kinda pretty. There's a nice sunset happening. I'm okay with this.
Tuesday
It's my last full day in Barcelona today. And I'm not spending it alone! I got an email on Sunday from Tim Pratt, who is also staying in Barcelona a few more days before he heads to Valencia and Madrid, and who asked if I wanted a travel companion. I was out of commission Sunday and our itineraries didn't line up Monday, but today we're both headed to the CosmoCaixa science museum - a destination that Gonzalo recommended to me after hearing how I liked the aquarium. Plus, the Lonely Planet guide says it's good. I have another exacting set of directions on my phone, which I pull out as soon as I leave the door of the hotel.
"I love traveling with a systems thinker," says Tim. It quickly becomes apparent that I have met the one person in the world with an even worse sense of direction than mine. Apparently he has just been wandering aimlessly on foot and getting even more lost than me, but not really minding; after all, it’s pretty here.
CosmoCaixa an unusual structure where the ground floor, with the entrance, is floor zero, and all the other floors are negative numbers. Most of the public attractions are on floor minus five.
Here is a picture of a dog in Antarctica listening to a phonograph, from a mini-exhibit about Antarctic expeditions:
They also have dinosaurs, of course. Every single dinosaur in the exhibit is from Patagonia, which seems a little random to me but I guess that it's the most prominent Spanish speaking (er, Spanish colonized) place that has dinosaur fossils. I am compelled to take a picture of EVERY DINOSAUR. I will spare you the full load of pictures, but here's a few:
("There's a cosmic horror for you," says Tim.)
(There is a poem about a fish like this in RESURRECTIONS! See, I’m totally doing book promo.)
There is also a big area with lots of interactive exhibits teaching kids about physics and we gleefully race through there and try all the little games, which range from touching a giant block of ice (which gradually gets random holes in it from people's fingertips) to moving a little ball back and forth, usiing some kind of neurofeedback mechanism, with our brain waves.
To finish it off, there's a rainforest exhibit, visible from all the other floors through an enormous glass pane, where the trees reach all the way up from the negative-fifth floor to the entrance level.
We happily chat with each other the whole time and end up eating lunch on the museum patio. It's a beautiful sunny day in Barcelona and I'm not looking forward to returning to a Canadian November. (At one point earlier, Gonzalo remarked to me that he didn't understand how the levels of snow we get in Canada don't shut the whole city down; I was like “Well, you see, in Canada everyone has a shovel in their house.”) Then we take the bus back to the hotel. We both kind of want to hang out even longer, but I am starting to feel my spoons dip low again and I probably need a rest before tackling my one last professional duty this evening. Tim agrees sometimes that's the grown-up thing to do.
So I take my rest, and then I'm off to La Font de Mimir - a sort of all-purpose nerd store with science fiction books, games, and comics. This is Gonzalo and Toni's home store - the place where they feel most comfortable, and where they have a monthly book club, so I'm here to grace the book club with my presence. It's a group of people - including Anna Llisteri again - who look a lot like the assortment of people you'd expect to find at a game store in North America, and I find this weirdly endearing.
Gonzalo interviews me himself this time, before opening up the floor to the rest of the club; he says he's been trying hard to come up with questions that I won't have been asked yet. Sure enough, we do some deep cuts into parts of the book that people don't often ask about. A woman asks me about Akavi and Elu's relationship in The Fallen, saying she's been in some awful relationships herself and found it super compelling. (I’m like, “lol same.”) A man challenges me to name my favorite board game, and after a moment's thought I tell him about the long afternoons I whiled away with my family, as a kid, playing Talisman. Someone else asks who I would want working on the Outside trilogy if it was filmed. I tell them my dream director for it is Gareth Edwards. (Toni does a little happy dance; apparently he is a Gareth Edwards fan. I had no idea people are ever emotionally invested in an author's answers to this question; I always thought it was strictly an ego game for the authors.) They have to Google Kristin Kreuk when I tell them that's how I picture Tiv, but when I mention imagining Sigourney Weaver as Ev, everyone is instantly delighted. Someone suggests Tilda Swinton as Akavi. "No!" says someone else. "Tilda Swinton should be Irimiru!" (One of the fun things about Akavi is that I rarely hear the same actor recommended for him twice…)
When we're all done, I sign one last round of books and then am presented with the biggest pile of gifts of the whole trip. I get a tote bag in my choice of color (what am I going to do with all these tote bags?!) and a random German card game which may be a gift from the store, or may be a personal gift from a random guy in the book club - I'm having trouble keeping track. Gonzalo presents me with print copies of the Catalan translation of the whole trilogy - which is the one gift I wanted most of all but had been too shy to ask for - as well as art cards and bookmarks.
The final gift is “L’Horror de Dunwich.” "You must continue learning Catalan," Gonzalo says earnestly, handing it to me, "so that you can read Lovecraft in Catalan!"
I'm even more excited to read my own trilogy in Catalan, but that's beside the point. I thank him profusely.
Finally, Gonzalo and Toni and Anna and I head out for tapas and drinks in an outdoor patio nearby. I don't even remember most of what we talk about. Anna gets into some of the complexities of the new book she's translating - a name that partly has a double meaning in its original language, but partly doesn't, and it's unclear what to do with the whole thing. Sometimes the group gets excited about something and breaks into Catalan and I just munch on calamari and enjoy the ambiance of the beautiful evening in this beautiful city. Gonzalo and Anna both slyly tell me that they're interested to hear about it next time I have a book out.
When they finally do drop me off back at the hotel, I feel weirdly, intensely bereft. It's over. Unless the stars align and I somehow get to do this all over again someday, I may never see these people or this city again. Tomorrow morning a taxi will take me back to the airport (driven by a dude who doesn't speak a word of English, although we manage to sort things out by babbling at each other and pointing) and I will start the unpleasantly long journey back across the Atlantic to my regular life. It seems like hubris to expect an experience like this even once in a lifetime, let alone more. But I'm super glad I was here. I'm super glad I said yes.
A mi m'encanta Barcelona, el ciutat mes bonic. <3