Wednesday, May 1, 2024 (Beltane/May Day/International Labor Day); from Jinny in Barcelona, Spain to Sally in Taneytown, MD
Dear Sal,
Having chances for long-range travel now that covid has subsided is a blessing I took too much for granted pre-pandemic. I’m guessing you’ll be tied up at the farm for the rest of the growing season at least, so hope you’ll have time some evening to pull up the rocking chair and settle in for some vicarious travel.
This missive, being posted from Barcelona, Spain, will likely take longer than usual to reach you. It’s also likely to be somewhat longer than most of my letters. Lots of exciting people and places—husband Jim and I are on our first leg of a two-stop European adventure (Barcelona, then Paris), after a couple of weeks visiting friends and family stateside.
I left San Diego a few days ahead of Jim to reunite with long-term friend Susan in Richmond. “Suze” is probably about your age—I’ve never asked for specifics. Jim and I met her and her husband, also a Jim, in 2005, just as we were beginning the process of preparing to leave Richmond. They had just arrived. Jim W. had landed a good consulting gig in town, if I recall correctly. The four of us had enough of an overlap to form an enduring bond, sharing meals and beers at our favorite Richmond area Vietnamese restaurant, traveling back and forth together to Consultants’ Camp, then being held in a Rocky Mountain resort town in Colorado. Suze and I have kept in touch via phone, email and letter since our move. It had been way too long since we’d previously seen each other in person, so I arranged a short stay at a downtown Richmond inn and phoned her once I’d gotten settled. We shared laughter, tears (her Jim had died a few years earlier), memories, and a stroll through spring flowers at Bloemendaal, also known as Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden. It’s one of my favorite Richmond natural areas. Deeded to the city by a stubborn spinster heiress, it has banks and banks of daffodils, jonquils, and tulips. The children’s garden includes one of the most elaborate tree houses I’ve seen anywhere.
After Richmond, Jim and I reconnected in Columbus, OH. We got to spend a couple of days with son Scott and family a few hours away. Highlight for me was a total solar eclipse that happened to coincide with my birthday. Morgan had gotten eclipse glasses for everyone in her extended family. We all sat on lawn chairs in their back yard and got a clear view of the sun’s disk gradually disappearing, ushering in several minutes of twilight-like dimness. It seemed to me that the birds stopped chirping, the wind stopped blowing, everything and everyone held our breaths until the moon’s shadow started receding and conditions slowly returned to normal. I doubt I’ll have another chance to see anything like it. Not sure if granddaughter Kenley was duly impressed. For most of the time we were around, she was charming, though she could get cranky toward bedtime.
Before heading to Spain, we’d shoehorned in a brief stay in New York City, meeting up with Jim’s brother Paul and sister-in-law Vivian. We had booked rooms in the same Manhattan boutique hotel. For our final evening together, we had tickets to a Broadway show, “The Book of Mormon.” I’m not sure how much the musical might offend devout Mormons (or expatriate Ugandans, for that matter), but I enjoyed the acting, the singing, and the basic premise: two young Mormon men are assigned to do their missionary work together. The more egotistical of the two, Elder Price, is fixated on going to Orlando, Florida. There, he expects to visit Disney World and to meet and impress lots of eligible young Mormon women. Instead, he and terminally awkward Elder Cunningham get sent to Uganda (same number of syllables, starting and ending in a vowel?), where they come of age in surprising ways. Vivian had found a restaurant near the theater for a late supper. We ate and talked until well past our somewhat elderly selves’ bed times.
The following day, Jim and I made it to Newark Airport in plenty of time for our overnight flight to Barcelona. Prior to the trip, I’d taken a few in-person Spanish lessons with an older friend. During the previous year, I’d also practiced via an online language learning program called “Duolingo.” I hoped that my Spanish would be good enough to get us through the basics of asking directions, making purchases, reading subway signs. As our trip unfolded, it turned out that most of the local people we interacted with had better English than my Spanish. It was also the case that the local Catalan dialect was substantially different from “pure” Spanish, often coming out like a mixture of Spanish and French.
We’d rented a small apartment for a month in a less touristy part of the city. We took an express bus from the airport to within a couple of blocks of our stay. With a little help from friendly locals, we got to our destination, made a few basic food purchases, then collapsed onto the comfortable bed to begin to adapt to changed time zones and culture.
Early in our stay, we took guided tours to two architectural wonders designed by Antoni Gaudi: the Sagrada Família (Holy Family) basilica that dominates part of Barcelona’s relatively modest skyline, and Park Güell, an outdoor extravaganza of columns, serpentine walls, sculptures, and inlaid ceramics in some of the city’s outlying hills. Many years ago, when son Jason was a young dreamer in architecture school, Gaudi had been one of the designers he studied, with a whimsical style different from anyone else’s.
Our Sagrada tour guide gave us a capsule biography of Gaudi the architect: born in 1852, Gaudi practiced as an architect in the Barcelona area for over 40 years, designing both private and public buildings and parks. As he got older, he became increasingly devout. He devoted the last couple of decades of his life to work on the Sagrada Família. He also was somewhat absent-minded, apparently. He died as a result of a streetcar accident, after he’d wandered at dusk into a busy thoroughfare without first checking for traffic.
Covid had slowed construction progress on the basilica substantially, with work stoppages and materials shortages galore. A revised completion date of 2026 has been set to coincide with the centennial of Gaudi’s 1926 death. The exterior of the basilica is a whole series of highly decorated towers of varying heights, some with colorful sculptures of plants and animals adorning them. When we were there, the tallest tower (the “Jesus tower”) was not quite finished, but enough of the rest (12 for the apostles, 4 for writers of the gospels, one for the Virgin Mary) were completed to anticipate the edifice’s completed look. In the plaza in front of the main entrance, we looked at a couple of scale models of Gaudi’s overall design.
The interior of the basilica is bathed in light. Part of Gaudi’s genius seems to have included avoiding much of the buttressing and visible reinforcing you find in most other cathedrals and basilicas. The stained glass windows along the exterior walls diffuse an ever-changing set of colors as the day progresses. I tried taking some pictures, but nothing quite captured the sense I had while there of being in the presence of benevolent spirits. Even when there were hoards of tourists, the place had its own quiet.
Today we did a set of activities at and near a different architectural wonder, “Palau de la Musica Catalana,” or, roughly, “Palace of Catalan Music.” When we learned that a friend from our Cary, NC era would overlap our Barcelona stay for about a week, we asked Linda for recommendations for a day together. She suggested that we sign up for a morning tour of this place. Though not a Gaudi creation, the music hall dates from roughly the same period, when Barcelona was at the height of its prosperity as a fabric and clothing center. Architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner conceived of the place as a venue where people from all walks of life could practice and enjoy music. The music palace opened in 1908, and has been in continuous use as a concert hall ever since. During the Spanish Civil War in the 1930’s, it was one of the few cultural icons in Barcelona to escape bombing. It sat at the heart of a residential neighborhood and had a low enough profile so it was somewhat “sheltered” by surrounding buildings.
At the center of the concert hall’s ceiling is a marvelous stained glass sunflower, bringing additional light into the interior despite the buildings all around it. I’m told the acoustics are superb—we got a short example of “canned” music as part of our tour. Jim and I have signed up for a live concert in a couple of days.
We finished our tour and came back into the plaza surrounding the Palau at just the right time to catch parts of an International Labor Day parade. I’d forgotten that this holiday is celebrated in many other parts of the world on May 1, rather than the first Monday in September as in the U.S. We saw lots of flags and banners. I couldn’t make out exact translations for most of them, but the general theme seemed to be upholding the rights and dignity of workers. The atmosphere seemed more festive than confrontational, with very little police presence that I noticed. Once the parade had gone by, we found a place to have lunch with Linda, spent a pleasant afternoon wandering nearby, then parted ways for the evening.
Before this trip, I’d forgotten how much I enjoy travel, especially travel to different countries and cultures. During covid, we couldn’t even consider an overseas trip. I’m very grateful this one has worked out so far. As we age, Jim and I are finding that we can still manage most of the logistics of planes, trains, and buses (automobiles less so). We’ve had a few “blips”here so far—some chest congestion for me, brief periods of dizziness and disorientation for Jim. We’re starting to tiptoe toward considering group travel for some of our future excursions “far afield.” However, we still have a good bit of this trip to enjoy, with a couple more weeks of Barcelona followed by a month in Paris. Stay tuned!
Hope this finds you well. Please take good care. Virtual hugs to all!
Love, Jin
