summer on my andirons: barcelona & long-lost relatives have nothing in common with fish

My family is tiny. The roster reads:

Immediate Family: 1 father, 1 mother, 1 brother.
Close Paternal Relatives: 2 grandparents, 1 great-aunt, a few second cousins, 1 aunt, 1 uncle, 1 cousin (now living in Texas), 1 cousin’s wife (ditto), 1 cousin’s baby (never met).
Close Maternal Relatives: 2 grandparents (now deceased), 1 aunt, 1 uncle, 2 cousins.

OK, so nobody qualifies as a “long-lost” relative, but it has been a long time since we’ve been together. I only have 3 cousins, and I haven’t spent any significant time with them since I was running around in my older cousin’s hand-me-down matching-turquoise-sweatshirt-and-sweatpants deals. Even when we were little and spent a lot of our lives driving back and forth across the country to visit both sides of the family, the time we spent apart was long enough that each time we got back together, we had to go through those awkward moments of: “I-wonder-what-they’re-like-now?” and “Are-they-too-old-and-too-cool-for-me-yet?” before we were friends again.

I hadn’t even seen my mom’s side of the family since my grandma’s funeral almost four years ago, and so I had the agitations and fidgets worthy of a fourteen-year-old when my uncle Tom (hereby shortened to “UT”) and cousin Katie (“CK”) started planning a trip to Spain.

I shouldn’t have fretted at all—we had an absolutely wonderful time, characterized by laughter and giggles and uproarious snorts, exploration of new places, confusion of how the heck we get to these new places, goofy eponyms of really goofy places, and goofy UT dances. Yes, my UT can dance. We spent about 7 days together, split between Barcelona and Mallorca, and I’m going to miss having them around. I like people I can giggle with.

I don’t have any photos that I can share with you here, because after carefully documenting the entire trip and promising to let me nab the photos at the end, UT and CK left this morning in a screech of burning rubber with all of the photos still on their memory chips. Scoundrels.

Barcelona: April 1^st-4^th

I flew to Barcelona last Friday, and they arrived from the States, bleary-eyed and jet-lagged, on Saturday morning. We checked into the hotel, freshened up, and hit the streets. First stop: the Boqueria Market, a permanent, outdoor, fresh-food market, full of delicious colors and smells, where we picked up lunch supplies. Toting our goods, we made our way down to Barcelona’s port, where we had a makeshift picnic on a bench in the sun. Next, we wandered our way through some of Barcelona’s old city streets, past the cathedral and through the old Roman district, took a few coffee breaks, and then caught a bus up to the Parc Güell, a city park enlivened by Gaudí’s modernista sculptures. I had gotten restaurant recommendations from a teacher at one of my schools, and so that night we went to Can Culleretes, where they got their first taste of traditional Catalan cuisine. A little before midnight, after forcing themselves to stay awake by propping their jet-lagged eyelids open with toothpicks, they got to crash at the hotel.

The next day, the layabeds didn’t get up and at ‘em until mid-morning, so we had a late breakfast and spent the rest of the day exploring. The Museu d’Història de Barcelona was fascinating: lots of underground Roman ruins, maps of conquerings and reconquerings and expansions, and Neat Old Stuff. The line for the Picasso Museum wrapped around the block, so we skipped it in favor of having a few coffee and pa amb tomàquet breaks, and we had dinner that night at another recommended restaurant: Els 4 Gats.

We got up at the crack of dawn (before 8am) to get breakfast at a local bakery before meeting a guide that we’d arranged a 4-hour walking tour with. The guide showed us all around the old city, telling stories about the buildings and their history, before going to the Casa Milà, also known as La Pedrera, a wacky house designed by Gaudí. The last stop was the Sagrada Familia, Gaudí’s masterpiece. La Sagrada Familia is a soaring church, still unfinished, full of symbolism and color and TOURISTS. Man, is that place busy; even so, it’s absolutely worth visiting. The interior is finished except for one wall of stained-glass windows, and is reminiscent of being in a brightly-lit forest. The columns curve and branch up to the arched ceiling, and the stained-glass windows use browns and reds near the floor, blues at the top, and greens in the middle, to mimic the color scheme in the woods. Since all major Catholic churches had choirs (usually a large, rectangular elaborately carved wooden room in the middle of the church for the monks to sit and sing in), Gaudí designed the Sagrada Familia with a choir, except instead of being a huge room stuck in the middle that blocks all the lines of sight, he designed a narrow platform to run high up on the walls, where members of the choir can serenade the worshippers from above. The church is so huge and architecturally complex that it isn’t expected to be finished until after 2025 (work started in 1882).

After our tour, I had to catch a flight back to Mallorca to be able to work on Tuesday. UT and CK spent another night in Barcelona, then rented a car and drove up to the quiet town of Vic, where they spent two nights in a parador (a restored farmhouse). On Thursday, they hopped over to visit me on Mallorca. 3 days was too little time to spend in Barcelona, and too little time to spend with these fun people that I'm related to: