The heat could be felt across the street like the sun on a cold winter day. Everyone was scurrying this way and that as I approached. Broken beer bottles littered the ground and 
crunched as I stepped forward to get a better angle through the scrub-brush trees. Obscenities rattled out like a kettle drum. The language was garbled, though and muted through the roar of the fire. A man, picking up objects hurled them at a woman through the back door, screaming something. All the while the house was burning a path to heaven. Would she not come out? Was the man trying to kill her? I couldn’t tell. The men standing next to me yelled for her to get out of the home as if that would help with some enraged beast throwing plates and pieces of burnt building at her. The tragedy of losing those plastic, dollar general serving trays was more than they could bear. It’s all they had.
The word was, that she fell asleep with a cigarette on the sofa, that he tried to put it out, and the entire place exploded in flame. I have my doubts. There was something sinister. When is there not something sinister at those rentals? Sinister was in the fine print of the contracts. Oh, hell, they probably don’t even have contracts for leasing there. Give me some cash. Here’s the key. Don’t burn it down. I assume that’s the general rental conversation. And, these tenants couldn’t even manage that. Nor could the one’s that lit a 
different unit on fire two weeks ago. Broken glass and burning rage, and upside-down peace signs. Or maybe it was a tilted Mercedes, their dream car. Hard to say. But that car that was out front had to be pushed aside because it probably hadn’t started in a year.
The firemen finally arrived. 15 minutes? 20 minutes? Not the quickest response, though I must say it was a sleepy, cold day and who wants to be out in that? Let the place burn. It’s probably worth more torched and blackened. That one brave fireman did run out and he was ready to save whoever was in that ramshackle. He began to break down the front door when a management type ran up and told the guy it’s just cats inside. Leave ‘em.
toward the nearby Rambla de Poblenou. Now Poblenou is one of the many neighborhood burroughs of Barcelona and I hadn’t explored it yet, so there you go.
was better is the photos came to me while I sat there sipping on tea by some 500-800 year old church. There were some tables of tasty cheeses and other wares in the plaza as well – a temporary setup as you see here and there around the city. So, yes, you don’t always need to go to the photos. Sometimes it’s better just to kick back with your camera and wait, and then be very sly. Some people get very angry about photos. Like the old chinese lady who ran me out of her store. And, I am guessing this guy here would get VERY cranky about having his photo taken, but hey that’s the front lines of photography, right? No, that cane is not for a gimpy leg! Of course I’m saving the best shots of him (and everything) for my book.
burroughs. I read on wikipedia that the city of Barcelona was 1.6 million people, but then read further and the Barcelona metropolis (it’s not like dallas and plano, the metropolis really is all Barcelona) is 4.6 million. No wonder I felt like the place was so busy. Look at all the people!! Oh yes, on to Guell, for the second round. Got yelled at by children playing a soccer match for photographing. “No photo! No photo!” No problem, they were terrible shots anyway and you couldn’t even see the people because I had the wide angle on and I was far away, through brush. I really have no idea how they even saw me amongst like 4.2 million other Barcelona visitors that all had their cameras out taking photos of everything there. The trick at Guell? Taking a photo that hasn’t been shot 10 million times. Uggghh. Well, it’s a challenge but I got a few that maybe weren’t exactly like everone elses. And, I got one that is amazing (in the book, more of a shot of a person at Guell).
haven’t bothered to figure out the bus system which might or might not go there. So, we took the metro to the nearest point which is below the hill where the Catalan museum and the Olympic Park reside. From there, we hoofed it. Up, up, up, stairs, up, hills, up, stairs, up escalators, up walking… On and on and on.
After spending thirty minutes or so in there, I was tired and finished and couldn’t use my big camera so it was time to move on. On the far side of the cemetary you can see the commercial shipyards and the sea. They were as busy as the rest of the city. We finally wound our way down and eventually found the only other exit from the cemetary, which led onto the main highway which runs by the sea all the way from Barcelona to Valencia. From there we walked along the highway for nearly two hours and finally made it home, with very tired feet and ate some leftover Barcelona Fajitas that I made. Yes, I finally found tortillas!! And one Mexican restaurant too, which has the best mojitos and tequilla sunrises ever. The food there was ok, but not great. They have a deal if you order two things you get some free nachos. The free nachos were like 7-11 nachos with chili and fake cheese. Don’t ask me where they find that fake cheese in this city because I wouldn’t have thought it could be done. And guess what? Those nachos hit you later the same way the 7-11 nachos do. Ouch. haha.
many sleazy Moroccans approach women and don’t take no for an answer, which is one of the ways they get their poor reputation with just about every other ethnic group in town. Nobody here like Moroccans, particularly the Pakistanis. I know that Muslims here don’t normally wear their robe things, but on Friday they did so it must have been some kind of holy day or festival. I know that even the Asians speak Spanish here, and that if you are in a fine restaurant you can almost guarantee that the waitstaff knows a modicum of English.
Barcelonetta is a quiet burrough with the gridded city streets, but lively along the edges which are beach. Barcelonetta is a short little peninsula.
Montjuic in front of the Olympic Park. It was rather extensive and had a great variety of artwork. But most noteworthy was a piece of graffiti outside the place on one of the stairway railing columns. It said “Catalania is 
not Spain!” in English. So why in English? Was it an American or Brit? I think that is unlikely. I can’t imagine what American or Brit would care at all about some locals only cultural indication. And enough to graffiti it… No I think it must have been a local. Why English? It would have been in Catalan, but perhaps this Catalan man or woman did not know Catalan, as the language was nearly stamped out by Franco before making a late resurgence (you find Catalan on many menus and signs and it is significantly different from Spanish, as much so as Italian or French). No, I think this man or woman knew English as a second language and refused to use Spanish to write that Catalonia is not Spain.
leche. After that it was determined that we would go on a “treasure hunt”. A couple nights previous, it was determined, while sitting around doing nothing with no tv and no music and no internet that we should do a kind of photographic treasure hunt – so a list was made. What we were looking for yesterday was: pandora’s box, insight, the key, the throne and the garden. Now, let me tell you, taking photographs of what’s there is one thing, while actively searching out and creating photographs of preconceived ideas is quite another. That is no easy task, even in a place as diverse as Barcelona!! But, we did get photographs of pandora’s box, the key (the photo is a keyhole, but abstractly it the same concept) and insight. How do you photograph insight?! This is what I was mulling over most of the day when Misty finally saw “insight”, so she gets full credit for that.
displayed all over the place. One was even placed in the branhes of a small tree. Artists milled about, and there were a couple musicians here and there mixed in with students with books, probably not really studying, but feeling better about having a textbook with them. We found a little cafe with outdoor seating at the edge of the plaza and got a snack. I ordered swiss fondue with curry and toast with thin duck slices, but the waiter said the fondue was only at night, so I amended the order to add sauteed mushrooms with bacon and “nachos”. Yes, nachos! Ok, they weren’t really nachos but it’s the closest thing even resembling Mexican food I have yet found. It was tortilla chips with a bowl of real cheese, melted and stirred with about three peppers in it. Of course peppers are easy to come by here, but tortilla chips? They almost don’t exist. It was awesome.
days that I was dying to play a guitar out on the street, and then, lo and behold, this guy offers me his guitar. Awesome.
the photos (which showed later – I think I must have shot 50 + good photos yesterday), so we contiued on into the Born and discovered many cool shops where Misty bought some earrings and a skirt and I found an awesome shirt (shown below). We wandered some more and after finding two of our three “treasure hunt” items, suddenly we were back at the restaurant we had lunch at. We basically had wandered completely aimlessly for a couple hours and there it was. And it was night, so we went back for the fondue! Though, I decided on the mustard and tarragon fondue instead of the curry. It was really, really good.
There are several building structures built out of stone, in something of a gingerbread style. From what I’ve read, it was apparently Gaudi’s intention to build this park as a “playground for royalty”, though there really wasn’t much left in the way of royalty by Gaudi’s time. Like most artists, he was an eccentric sort. In addition to these buildings, great winding stairways of stone works forming at least three vaulted levels exist in the park as
