I suggest that you stay out of whatever area this is; they don’t seem to like tourists. :eek:
Yeah, seriously, anyone who feels like giving me crap about being American or a tourist can go to hell (politely, of course), and I will tell them so, in Spanish. (Actually I am far more likely to go the snarky-with-a-smile route.) I do a pretty good job blending in while traveling, and so far the only person who has pretended he couldn’t understand me or tried to be rude was the guy at the information desk at the Gare d’Austerlitz when I was 19. Never had a problem traveling other than annoying people trying to sell me things I didn’t want, or (when I was younger and traveling solo) hitting on me.
Seriously, I’ve lived in my share of tourism centers and gentrifying neighborhoods, and though I empathize with people who are sick of tourism and gentrification, Spain would for sure be in a much worse economic place without tourism than it already is. And hell if I’m going to apologize for the behavior of other people, in which I did not participate. I’m not an Ugly American, and I’m not going to apologize simply for being born where I was.
(Sorry to bump this thread but figured there were already a lot of Barcelona travel threads out there and just to use the most recent one)
A couple questions as we just booked our trip to go to Barcelona over the US Thanksgiving weekend.
We really want to go check out Montserrat. Would that be pretty much a whole day of the trip taken up for that and what’s the best way to get there? (Also sounds like hitting the Boqueria Market beforehand would be the best way to go too).
Also, a couple questions re: the Catalan language.
Does it use the same general grammar as Castillian Spanish?
The pronounciation guide herelists the “D” as in “dog” but later it phonetically sounds it out with a “th” dipthong:
What is your name?
Com et dius? (informal) (kohm uht THEE-oos?)
Which is correct? (also, I thought it was the soft “C” that was “th” as in Bar-THAY-loh-nah)
Plenty of places in Barcelona offer day trips to Montserrat. We only spent an hour or so there, but that’s probably because we skipped the hiking bit.
Try this article: http://www.tripadvisor.com/Travel-g187497-c79251/Barcelona:Spain:Day.Trip.To.Montserrat.html
We rented a car, but only because we were traveling all over the coast after we left Barcelona.
BTW, people aren’t kidding about pickpockets there; I would strongly advise taking a taxi to your hotel from the airport rather than bumbling around with 3-4 bags on a busy train.
Following up on this; we did have a nice tour of one of the wineries, but were surprised to discovered how little tourist infrastructure there is there; no food or drinks available near the winery, so if you take a trip, eat before you go or pack a lunch. (We ate a really horrible meal at a restaurant in the nearby town - the only bad meal we had in Spain.)
We watched the Globe Trekker episode of Northern Spain which features Barcelona. In the opening montage showing glimpses of the beach and Gaudi buildings is a man grabbing a woman’s purse and running away with it. We are light packers (do the whole one bag thing) but I’ll still take your advice and go for a taxi instead. Better to play it safe than have a trip ruined by that.
Tip o’ the hat for the link, HazelNutCoffee!
The grammar is very similar to both Spanish and French; Catalan is between both in the linguistic sense as much as in the geographical one. If you speak Spanish (or French), you’ll be able to read pretty much any sign in Catalan; understanding it spoken will be harder. I liked Eva Luna’s description of “signs in Catalan look to me like Spanish with missing letters”.
It’s a D. That’s one of the problems of English phonics: “th” can be a D or what Spanish would call a Z, or it can be what English would call a Z, and there’s actually a fourth option, so using it in phonics is… not a very solid proposition. The grammatical structures are similar, the specifics differ as do the phonetic correspondencies (i.e., how do you write/read sounds).
And that C is indeed a K. The phonetics of C are similar to those of Spanish (ca, co, cu are “strong”, ce, ci are “weak”), but the “soft c” is not a “soft c”, it’s an s: barthayLOHnah is Spanish (using your own phonics - and again that’s a very strange way to represent that vowel in ce, it’s not a diptong), but barsahLOHnah is Catalan. And yes, you had the stress in the wrong syllable: to be barTHAYlohnah it would be Barcélona, not Barcelona. And dius is a dyptong, damnit, not two sillables! deep breaths
I was in Barcelona for a wedding this past September. Flew in on Thursday evening and left on Monday morning so I guess about the same length as your trip.
We went to Sant Sadurni, although this was an organized trip of about 60 wedding guests to the bodega which provided all the cava for the wedding, hosted by the owner (…man, Catalan barbecue is AWESOME and I learned how to drink out of a porrón). I don’t know how much there would be to see now, though, since the harvest season is over.
This was a really nice tapas restaurant (chain). We went to the one in Born on Argenteria. This was really good but set us back a whopping 65 euros per person, although that probably wouldn’t have happened without the Waguy beef dishes. El Xampanyet is small and usually packed but I enjoyed the atmosphere. We ate here the evening after the wedding and…probably won’t be invited back, let’s just say. We got a little raucous. But the food was excellent.
…actually, most of my suggestions are food- or drink-related. I guess that’s what happens when you have two gourmands who marry 
Hold on to your personal belongings. It’s easy to get pickpocketed. (Although in the interest of full disclosure I should say that I walked back to our apartment all the way up La Rambla at 4.30 a.m. on Fri-Sat night after at least four drinks and none of my stuff got nicked. I did have to give a dirty look to one guy, though.)
Wonderful! Thank you so much!
Some anti-robbery mechanisms:
- distribute cards and cash around. If you have several cards, you may wish to carry some with you (in a different pocket as your money) and leave the others in the hotel - I don’t normally do this, but I’ve done it when I was in a particularly iffy-looking place.
- when you sit in a restaurant or bar: purses, jackets and backpacks should be in whichever point will be hardest to reach for someone passing by or sitting at another table. For example, if you’re in a corner table inside a room, the pile of Stuff goes on the corner chair; if you want to people watch or get nervous having the door at your back, sit beside the pile of Stuff rather than in front of it. A handbag is better off between your feet than hanging from the chair’s back (even better with a leg going through the strap).
- if you get a T10 (combined 10-trip ticket for bus, train and metro), don’t carry it with your largest amount of money - this isn’t even anti-pickpocket, but simply because you’ll be taking the T10 in and out and if it’s in a pocket with a roll of money the money can fall off easily. They’re not personal: you can use a single card for two or more people.
Usually crimes suffered by tourists are crimes of opportunity, so it’s basically a matter of erring on the paranoid side and not creating those opportunities.
We went in June and didn’t have any problems with pickpockets. I felt safer than I did in Rome, although we still took the normal precautions we do in a big city.