Ok having tried absolutely nothing else I am prepared to state that the best way to see Barcelona is from the sidecar of a motorbike. It helps if said motorbike is being ridden by a knowledgeable and cheerful Italian woman with interesting tattoos. Such a person presented herself to me outside my hotel and shortly afterwards introduced me to her Ural motorcycle sidecar possibly the most advanced piece of Russian engineering you can find outside of a Ukrainian wrecking yard.
Safety instructions were brief “Put this on your head, get in.” I obeyed and soon the rumble of a no doubt thoroughly reliable Russian engine signalled that we were on our way. My guide/rider was connected to me via an earpiece on the helmet a service which was only really necessary when the traffic was really bad as otherwise the fact that her head was only a few feet from mine was quite sufficient.
Our tour was quite a wide ranging one taking in the port, the Olympic Village, la Sagrada Familia of course and various other exercises in the architectural equivalent of torture by Gaudi. We paused for dreadful coffee at a down market bar in an upscale neighbourhood. The interlude allowed me to ask her what she as an Italian thought of Spanish coffee. Up until this point she had been an enthusiastic ambassador for her adoptive city but now a look of genuine pain appeared in her eyes and she just sighed deeply. I nodded, that was pretty much what I thought.
To drive away thoughts of coffee she took me to Parc Montjuic home of various Olympic things I couldn’t care less about and spectacular views of the city which generated a fair bit more interest in her passenger. I would return to this park later in a futile attempt to find a poisonous fountain. The views were indeed amazing with a decent chunk of Barcelona stretched out before us posing for photographs. After that we whizzed by the obligatory statue of Christopher Columbus and a train station that at one point would take you to France. That is you could catch a train to France. The station itself remained firmly rooted in Catalonian soil.
With her Columbite duties done there was nothing left for my motorcycle Virgil to do except return me to within walking distance of our starting point. She had finished with me but I wasn’t finished with Barcelona. After a brief pause to rinse the travel dust from my frame and take out a second mortgage to pay my laundry bill I plunged back into the Barcelona heat and headed back to Parc Montjuïc. With no motorbike to haul me to the top I fell back on the Barcelona metro system which rose nobly to the challenge. If you get off at Paral-lel (there’s another station called Diagonal) you can catch a funicular that will haul you up to Parc Montjuic without the need to die of heat exhaustion en-route.
Once in the park I walked for twenty minutes before I realised my destination was a hundred metres down the road from the funicular stop. My destination in case it’s of any importance was the Joan Miro Foundation a modern art museum based around the work of Joan Miro who is apparently a modern artist. Or he was, he’s dead now so not quite as modern as many others. I had come to see the Calder Fountain but when I got there it was closed for maintenance, something I didn’t find out until I had paid the fifteen euro entry price. I tried to appreciate the modern art but my heart wasn’t in it so I went back to the funicular station in defeat and discovered there was a cable car station that would take me to the highest point in the park or at least the highest point accessible by cable so I threw good money after bad and rode to the top where there was a medieval castle with some suspiciously modern gun turrets.
I hadn’t exhausted all that Parc Montjuic had to offer but I had exhausted myself so I fled back to my hotel room as quickly as a cable car, a funicular and a metro train could take me. I didn’t emerge until it was time for dinner, around 8.30pm
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| My noble steed and rider |
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