Sometimes I Feel Like I'm In Barcelona.

I'm gonna sing this song with all of my friends, when we run to Barcelona...
- 'We're From Barcelona', I'm from Barcelona.

These photos were taken on my visit to Barcelona as a student on a college trip in '08. As educational as it was intended I think everyone was consistently hammered on Sangria, the 'cannabis shots' from the bar at Callella beach and anything else we could find (including that sick creamy pina colada we bought on the first night as we wanted something vaguely exotic to drink). I think me and my roommates found ourselves either fully clothed in the bath or in our swimsuits in bed every night, and as interesting as it was from that respect I did see some unforgettable art and architecture.
The Picasso Museum opened my eyes to the development and career of an artist whom I had seen and heard much of as one of the greats, but probably bypassed a thorough inspection as to why due to his fame as a great cubist. As my knowledge of Picasso has grown from this seminal visit, I have come to appreciate him as the godfather of many modern art movements and appreciate his talent in many degrees of drawing and painting - his sustained sketches as a young boy were not only unmistakable in talent, but the development of his style really opened my eyes as to how and why he became one of the greatest artists of the 20th Century.


If I'm honest, for whatever reason it took me some time to really grow accustom to the look and feel of the city. The immediate love affair that I have with London, Edinburgh and Paris did not happen. Edinburgh I love as it's not only my birthplace but my spiritual home. When I walk down the streets of London I can sense not only the history of the city but feel the swelling of a vibrant multicultural hub; it's noisy, dirty, industrial but at the same time arrogant and haughty where tradition and old etiquette battle with youthful sub-culture and cutting edge fashion and design. It's Dickens and Vivienne Westwood, Dizzie Rascal and Pugin, the Crown and the Underground. My Paris is half symmetrical and pastel coloured, aloof and assured of itself, a manicured Haussman playground of coffee and cigarettes and a volatile city re-built on the shaky foundations of revolution. Both these cities are a myriad of contradictions and I suppose that's what makes them so immediately exiting for me. However my relationship with Barcelona was a slow one, the antithesis of Freddie Mercury's defiant and sudden outbursts of the city's name in the song that we had on repeat at the beach. As sharply as the heat hit me on our exit from the airport, Barcelona was a tirade. It was a multi-coloured, heady, feisty place and I didn't rest for the entire time I was there. Emotions, colours and flavours were to the extreme. Everyone was sunburnt, drunk, naked. It was only when I left that I realised what an experience it was, whilst there I had no time to actually reflect on what was going on.


From the crowded alleys of Las Ramblas to the hotel room at night the whole thing was a riot. A festival of inhibition and debauched youth. I had a friend who turned up to our hotel room door dressed in a trench coat with nothing but full lingerie on underneath; I asked her where she was off too all dressed up but she then claimed to not even be aware of who she or I was. Others defecated all over their hotel room, shaved each others pubes off in the shower and showed everyone pictures of it the next day. We held a 'pants party' on our balcony where about 25 turned up in their underwear, drunk Malibu and stole the German boys' umbrella from next door.

Being in a predominantly German tourist area, the atmosphere of the Euro 2008 final against Spain and Germany was electric. We went to watch the game on a tiny television at he bar on the beach. Early on in the evening my friend bought a German flag and ran into the Spanish bars only to be chased out again. After much pervy deliberation with a rather handsy street seller for a pair of Spanish flags, we misunderstood his offer and Lois got chased down the street for about 15 minutes only to return the offending flag in case he turned into a sexual deviant. We weren't sure who we would prefer to win, after all everyone in the local area was bound to be fighting anyway - but at Spain's victory we were encountered by people dancing on top of moving cars, fire in the streets, brawls at every corner - it may not sound that randy but it all made the more precarious by the fact that we were all so terribly drunk so it was magnified. We were kept up all night by Germans and Spaniards shouting obscenities across the hotels using megaphones, which was another welcome layer of noise over the rather lethargic humping on the floor above and the catcalls of 'oh fraauuuuuline' across the balcony from next door.

Barcelona, like a jewel in the sun. When you came into the room you took my breath away...
- 'Barcelona', Queen

But with the explosive behaviour came the beauty. I don't think I have actually seen anything like Gaudí's Park Güell. It was so whimsical and enchanted that it felt like stepping into a theme park. All of Gaudí's buildings that I encountered were unmistakable in their genius and reference to things of natural form, that inspiration was so that they stood out like great shells of mythical creatures amongst the structures of jutting white concrete and spindly, imposing Gothic architecture that it shares it's space with. The architectural diversity of Barcelona is mind blowing; you're going to find an array of styles in any city, but it's the boldness of the buildings of Barcelona is what almost jars the eye when trying to register the appearance of a street. Each are standing proud next to each other, each representing a moment of aesthetic obsession in Barcelona's history, the most notable of these being Gaudí. His apartment building we visited was marvellous, but Park Güell for it's intimacy and escapism in such a vibrant city really took my breath away.


MACBA was holding an exhibition of the work of Francesc Torres. The exterior of the gallery building is strongly modernist and at a parallel Torres' work that it housed was at times starkly violent; the large photographs of soldiers with the disturbed ink encroaching on the figures from the neck down, consumed by the task of war. The hidden atrocities of the civil war were explored in photographs that from a distance deceive you as an intricate pattern, but on closer observation are piles and fragments of human bone. Like Picasso, fellow Spanish artist Torres had a great deal of experimentation in his work. There were pithy political statements; a spoon with 'capitalism' on the underside and 'Communism' engraved along the handle. And the more obscure; a video of a horse galloping along a field with a soundtrack of the roaring of racing car engines that never quite seem to start the race. Other smaller works included a series of photographs exploring the composition of a small triangle in each of it's subject matter, which combined with his expressions on war and politics showed the workings of a mind occupied with the intricacies and mechanics of the world around him.


Unfortunately we didn't visit the famous Sagrada Família but we looked around the Cathedral of Santa Eulalia which was less ornate but still majestic. For the first time on the trip, my classmates were lulled by a quiet rapture when entering the Cathedral. It was not only the art students that appreciated the lovingly created statuettes that resided in their own miniature rooms within the walls of the cathedral, accompanied by faithfully flickering little red candles in dedicated lines. Most agreed that it was humbling to see a reminder of those things that so impressive created out of sheer worship and dedication. In fact one of the most touching things that I heard whilst in Barcelona was Gaudí's remark on whether he should die before his masterpiece, the Sagrada Família, should be finished. He simply said that "My client is not in a hurry."


I would like to see the Sagrada Família when it is completed, but whilst standing on the plateau of Park Güell, Lois and I wondered if our experience of Barcelona had been so intense that we would ever decide to come back. This was not in the sense that it was un-enjoyable, but more that we wished it to be preserved. It would be strange to return somewhere after having such vivid experiences of the place; our time in Barcelona might have been overwhelming but it wasn't at all dull. In a way it was a coming-of-age; we were living with our friends and acquaintances for 5 days in Spain. We drunk all sorts of weird and wonderful concoctions from waking up to going to bed (or just passing out in some cases), constantly covered in sea-salt and glow-stick fluid, encountering some of the worlds greatest masterpieces. It was a whirlwind, but it was unforgettable. I arrived not knowing what to expect, and I left delirious from a week of Gaudí, sun and sangria in a metre wide sombrero.

"The things that happened could only have happened during a fiesta. Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences. It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta."
- Chapter 15, Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway