New Camp (3/4: Barcelona, Spain)

Up and out around 10:30, today I’m headed to Camp Nou (New Camp), home of FC Barcelona – one of the most famous soccer clubs in the entire world. Find my way over on the Metro, and finally get there around 11.

It’s awesome. I don’t mean that just in the sense of “cool”, but also in the sense of awe inspiring. It doesn’t look like much from the stands, or even sometimes on TV, but standing on the field (ok, next to the field), imagining the stadium fool of fans, it’s easy to see why New Camp is considered one of the best stadiums to see a game. I take the full self guided tour (11E), which gets you into the visitors locker room, up the players tunnel and onto the field level (but not actually on the field), the second level of seats, the press box, and finally the FC Barcelona Museum, where they have (a replica?) of the UEFA cup trophy they won last year. After the tour, you exit by causeway to the gift shop, which is really part FC Barcelona gift shop, and part Nike shop. I bought a sweatshirt... mostly because I like it, but a little bit to annoy Michel (Barca bought Ronaldinho from Paris-St. Germain, his favorite team).

After, I head back to the metro, when I realize I’m starving. There’s a McDonald’s right next to the Metro station. I can’t do it. I may be hungry, but I’m not that hungry! Anyway, hop the metro back to the hotel, meet up with Christie, and we’re out and on our way back to the El Borne district for lunch. We stop into a tapas place (noticing a trend?) called “El Rivoli” that also has really good tapas. Since it’s still early afternoon, we skip the wine, but I manage to stuff my self into a coma and have to drag myself out of the restaurant. From there, we head over to the Eglise de Santa Maria del Mar, which, after all the Gaudi stuff, is really quite boring. So, we head over the Picasso Museum instead. Now, had I known before hand that the museum focused mostly on his “early works”, and not on any of the stuff for which he is famous (which is mostly all in Paris), I probably would have skipped it. I’m glad I didn’t. I never realized that 1) he was so prolific, and 2) early in his career he really did a lot of very “classical” style painting… illustrations, portraits, etc. It’s really cool to see how he started out as a “classic” painter, and then slowly started to break out of the mold and into all the cool other stuff he’s done. I think later Christie put it best by saying “it was neat to see how he had to learn the rules before he could break them.”

From there we headed back to the hotel for naps. Since we’d been out late the night before, and had been powering through site seeing for the last two days, we decided to take it easy for dinner, and just went to one of the touristy places near the hotel. I had the tapas version of a burger and fries (she had some more adventurous stuff), and we shared a pitcher of pretty good Sangria.

One thing I need to make perfectly clear (based on some comments): Christie is one of my best friends; and even though we’re not into all the same stuff, we usually have a great time hanging out together. If in places it seems like she’s “a drag”, it’s only because I haven’t elaborated on:

1. how much I’m putting her out by making her go do all this sight seeing stuff she’s mostly already done.
2. what a pain I’ve been about taking pictures. I swear, there are more than a few pictures that in my attempts to be “artistic”, I’ve made her wait at least 20 minutes while I tried to get “the shot”.
3. that there have been more than a couple situations where I knew going in it was something she didn’t want to do, and I dragged her along anyway.

The occasions (in Barcelona, at least) where she’s put her foot down and said “we’re doing this” have been minute compared to the number of times I’ve said the same thing, made her go along with it, and she did without complaining. Clear?