Queue Up: Ottmar Liebert’s Barcelona Nights

Ok, action packed 24 hours so let’s get to it. I’ll start with today’s highlights, and then cover last night’s unplanned activities.

Today, we focused on all things Antoni Gaudi, a Catalan architect that helped usher in Catalan Modernist architecture, or an easier way for me to remember, the Catalan version of Art Nouveau.

We started off in Park Guell, which is up high on a hill overlooking Barcelona. Gaudi had a rich friend, Guell, who had dreams. Guell invented corduroy (I bet you always wondered who was responsible for those hip warm winter pants.) Guell bought the land on the hill with dreams of making it like a “factory-town”, with all services in this exclusive enclave. Except it wasn’t for the working class, it would be for rich people. You know, escape from the city, walk around your neighborhood, and shop in the local market under the city square. He bought a barren hill, far away from the the hustle of the city. After the model home, and 2 other houses were built, no one was really interested, so it was eventually donated to the city as a park.

But the history isn’t what makes this place so crazy, it’s the infrastructure Gaudi created to support the communal like feel of the town. There were three radically different, two-story viaducts you could drive on top, and stroll underneath. And this wouldn’t be like taking an ordinary Sunday stroll. One was like walking through the rip curl of a wave, the other was a little more terrifying, like walking through a rock tunnel with boulders precariously hanging like they were going to drop from the ceiling.

If you wanted to live in an architect’s LSD-laced fantasy version of Disneyland, this would be your place. I leave you with some photos to help illustrate, although pictures really don’t do it justice. You just have to go.

Our next stop was a UNESCO World Heritage site, The Sagrada Familia. It’s a church that was started in 1882, and is scheduled to finish next year, 150 years later, (people say this with their fingers crossed and a smile). When I walked through it 30 years ago, the front and back entries to the church were built, there were the basic structures for the 4 walls, and couple of towers were finished. There was no roof, it was open to the sky, the floor was dirt, and you walked on construction platforms around the building equipment and cranes that were scattered around the inside. Back then, there were debates as to whether it would ever be completed, because people were arguing over how to interpret Gauid’s vision (he was run over by a tram when less than 25% of the church was complete), and of course, there was the question of who was going to pay for it. I mentioned my visit 30 years ago to our guide, and she said “back then, no one came, only a handful of Americans that read about it in a tourist book”. Yep, that was me, and about 3 other people who had Rick Steves book. We were all there standing in the dirt trying to imagine what it would look like when it was done.

Today, imagination wasn’t needed. It was unlike anything my brain could have conjured up. After going through security process that was on par with anything you’d experience in an airport, there I was with thousands of other people just staring. Sometimes straight forward, other times with my head craned back staring skyward, at all times wondering who could have envisioned all this for a church.

I mean, I know Gaudi was an intellectual who was deeply religious. But the way he distilled organic natural shapes into geometric forms and seamlessly incorporated them into a religious structure to honor its foundational tenets was mind boggling. And then when my brain short circuited on trying to make sense of all that for myself, I decided it looked like what you would get if you smashed PeeWee’s Playhouse into a cathedral.

Now, about last night. For the first time, out all of our travel adventures, we made use of a foreign medical system. Peter injured his foot on Monday, in only a way that Peter could….he overdid things, in what the doctor would later declare “too much hiking in improper shoes”, and ended up hurting the tendon that runs underneath his foot.

For this trip, we used a local travel planner to help put things together (I will write more about our experience with that in a later post), and one of his services is to help with emergencies. We contacted him, and there was a doctor at our hotel room within 35 minutes. The nice, very hip dressed doctor carrying a correspondingly hip backpack (no old school black medical bags here for housecalls), wrote an X-ray order, gave us instructions to a hospital that provides international services, put us in a cab, told the cab driver exactly where to drop us off at the hospital, and called ahead so they knew we were coming. And if that wasn’t enough, he knew we were missing our tapas tour, so he texted us with his 3 favorite tapas places that he said even San Sebastians’ would agree were good.

In less than 2 hours we were out of the hospital and back to the hotel with a diagnosis and a prescription.

Because it was early here in Spain, 9:30 PM, I made a run to the pharmacy to fill the prescription and that’s when things got a little weird.

The pharmacy, on a busy street corner, in a nice part of town, was barricaded like Fort Knox. Glass doors, closed and locked, and bars across everything. There was a sign that said they were open and to push the button, which you had to hunt for. Out of the darkness, a guy appeared behind the glass, and opened the steel drum in the wall for me to insert the prescriptions. Not one word was exchanged. As I was standing on the street corner, in the dark, shifting from foot to foot, with my hands in my pockets to deter pickpockets, I kept wondering if I looked like I was engaged in some suspicious activity.

Less than 5 minutes later, the man reappeared. Yelled one word through the glass door, over and over, because I couldn’t hear or understand him, and then I realized he was asking for my credit card. When I produced it, he put the machine up to the glass, and I started wildly tapping my card around trying to get it to work. Relieved to finally hear the card and reader connect with a beep, he put the drugs in the barrel and reversed it open for me. I scurried away quickly hoping no one on the street was watching me and would try to roll me for what amounted to 7 Euros in prescription drugs.

Oh, and it rained today. All day.

©Copyright 2025. All rights reserved. No reproduction of text or images without permission.