oh, and did i mention the station officer had never even heard of st. jean pied de port? we eventually established that it´s a four-train journey and one can only book two of these four trains ahead of time, which means that you have 15 min in between trains to book the other two and get onto the right carriage or else your pre-booked ticket goes to waste. grrr. so please think of me tomorrow, racing between trains.
anyway, after about half an hour of frustrated wandering i eventually got picked up by a taxi driver who was NOT awesome. he started jabbering away at high speed in spanish and when i explained that my spanish was not very good, he just ploughed right on. i told him the name of my hotel, which i happen to know is just 500m from the station and which was very near to where i was lost because i recognised some of the shops (i was just too frustrated and wet to keep trying), but this man drove me around the block about 15 times and charged me nearly six euros for the privilege. and naturally i did not have the spanish to say, listen you cheating baboon, i may be foreign but i am not completely stupid. not that he would agree, since he kept arguing with me about the location of my hotel and pointing enthusiastically to a totally different building, while i pointed enthusiastically to my actual hotel and tried to explain that i had stayed there before and was intending to return. well, my spanish is not very good but he was obviously VERY keen for me to go to his preferred hotel and shook his head as though he could not believe he was saddled with such an idiot, and i could swear i heard the words ´puta´ and ´estupida´ coming out of his mouth. what an ideal opportunity this would have been to use the phrase lovingly handed down by Naomi´s grandmother: ´No, senor. Yo soy bonita e inteligente. Pero USTED eres un prostituto.´ (No, sir. I am pretty and intelligent. YOU are a prostitute.´)
the trip to the plaza catalunya, which is the centre of barcelona, was much more pleasant and the taxi driver actually told me my spanish was very good (you see, i AM pretty and intelligent. take that, stupid taxi driver number one). well, i may only speak three sentences, but i obviously spoke them with gusto, because when i apologised for the poor quality of my spanish he said nonsense, you speak very well. so i felt an absurd level of pride and puffed my chest a great deal, and went onto the bus tour in a considerably better mood. anyway, i was very proud because he asked me where i wanted to be dropped off and i actually understood and managed to tell him! it is amazing how fast one picks up a language if it is all you hear. Actually, I am so ridiculously over-confident now that I ordered my lunch in spanish even after i heard the waitress speaking english, and i did not end up with souffle de kitten or a live pig on my plate. go me.
the bus tour was fantastic; an architecture guide focusing on (mostly) the work of gaudi. we spent a considerable amount of time in la sagrada familia, which was just amazing. we were lucky to get in because, as i said in my first letter, there was a fire recently. my spanish wasn´t good enough to catch the story properly when i saw it on the news, but i asked the tour guide today and she said the fire had been started by a mad tourist (she pointed rather accusingly at me as she said this). the church still smelled of burn today. the church itself (nope, it´s not a cathedral) is based on the concept of a cypress forest - trunks for columns, branches for arches and leaves for the ceiling. it is *beautiful*. the light comes in in a completely magical way, almost as though one were in a forest, and it apparently looks different at all times of day.
the church is quite an amazing conglomeration of artists´ design signatures, because gaudi believed in letting his co-creators have creative freedom as well as credit. so for example the facade has sculptures arranged in an S shape, for the sculptor´s initial, and the sculptures themselves are in a cubist-influenced style because the sculptor thought that would be more interesting than gaudi´s original design. (he was faithful to the design in general, just changed the style in the individual statues.) and on the front of the church some of the sculptures are lighter in colour. this is because they are newer - during the war they were destroyed, and a japanese architecture student took it upon himself to replace them at no charge. he painstakingly re-created them exactly as gaudi had, with one exception - they have a slant to the eyes.
Gaudi´s designs are wonderful - he uses broken ceramics and pieces of beer bottles and all sorts of things, back when people had no clue what recycling was and thought he was just a mad man who built with trash. Nonetheless he became weirdly fashionable among the rich and it´s a misconception that he died poor - what people mean is that he died LOOKING poor, because he wandered around in ancient clothes and didn´t really care what he looked like. (when he died, the tram driver who hit him assumed he was a beggar and took him to the cheapest hospital he could find. it was only when they found plans of la sagrada familia in his pockets that they realised who he was.) actually, the architecture throughout barcelona is something to be seen - gaudi was not the only famous architect active in barcelona, and many of the buildings are unusual or eye-catching.
i am now off to try and find a t-shirt that costs less than my hotel room, since i am a total banana and only packed one. and nobody, not even me, can last for seven weeks on one t-shirt. can they? i have already done washing twice, and my current shirt has a hole in it and is looking linty. oh dear. on the other hand, maybe i am just channeling gaudi.
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