Oh, one thing I just thought of, don’t expect to eat dinner at a normal time. Most restaurants are closed from something like 2:00 until 8:00 for siesta time.
Have a late lunch and a late supper, or starve.
And if you have a screwed-up ankle like I do, don’t rationalize that you can walk down (because it’s down, not up) instead of waiting for the elevator. Your leg will be sorry later, because that’s a lot of stairs.
Yeah, or pack a sack lunch/snacks. Wish we had done that in Granada - we got out of the Alhambra after having left practically at dawn, and it was 5 pm. Silly me, I had thought we could at least find a tapa or two somewhere. Well, we eventually did, but it was in a smoky, dingy, filthy dive bar, and it wasn’t exactly the tastiest meal I ever had. Maybe now one can do better Internet advance recon.
very civilised,
I used to carry some snack bars with me to help me through the afternoon. I was only there a short time so didn’t want to waste time sleeping.
Go check out this thing for me, and tell me if it looks as cool up close.
Domenech i Montaner (or Muntaner, you can see both spellings), like the Hospital de Sant Pau (upper end of Passeig Gaudi), the building the Museum of Sciences has at the mouth of the Ciutadella (very close to the Arc de Triomf), or Fundación Tàpies in Barcelona; he’s got several houses in Reus too. My aunt jokes that DiM’s ghost must have been spending the last hundred years exclaiming “I’m not Antoni, damnit!”
We’ve forgotten to mention Barcelona’s markets. Most are 19th century; check out La Boqueria when you’re walking down the Ramblas (on your right if you’re heading down, same side as El Liceu). Santa Caterina has recently been redone and it’s both pretty unique and pretty-period.
The “restaurants close from 2-8” thing Leaffan mentioned: first, that’s not “siesta time”, it’s “people are at work in the afternoon time”. Second, it actually starts later. Third, when you think about times, take whatever hour you’re used to having things happen and add two hours to get a good approximation of when it’ll happen in Spain. Fourth, restaurants close between meals - but bars don’t! The concept of “tapas bar”, like the confusion between “afternoon work hours” and “siesta hour”, is a foreign thing: in Spain it’s rare to find a bar which doesn’t serve any food, what they won’t have outside of mealtimes is sit-down meals. Most offer tapas, pinchos (careful with fritos, those things are a lot more powerful than they look) and/or sandwiches.
And speaking of meals in bars, many bars and restaurants post outside something called Menú del Día (Daily menu). It’s two dishes plus dessert, water/glass of wine (soda is usually not included, they’ll charge you extra for it) and bread (not included in Madrid or parts further south, included north and east of Madrid) for lunch, which is the heaviest meal here; if you can eat that much at 2pm-ish, it’s a lot cheaper than eating from the (full) menu and the dishes will usually be from what’s considered home-cooking in the area (so, no asados other than chicken, but it gives you a glimpse into daily life). If you’re eating in one of those, you don’t want la carta or el menú, you want menú del día; some have the balls of charging you individually if you make the mistake of ordering from the full menu a combination which was included in the daily menu. Ask if they do medio menú, if a full one is too much - still cheaper than asking from the full carta, it’s one dish, drink, (bread) and dessert.
El Retiro is a beautiful park with a lovely crystal palace-type thing that was, strangely enough, hosting a zeppelin exhibit when I was there.
Speaking of El Retiro, let me tell a story that requires way too much backstory to be funny, but still, here goes:
At the time I was living in Spain, there was a show called “Las noticias del guiñol” that was a satirical news program using puppets to portray political figures. There was a George W. Bush puppet who spoke Spanish with a surprisingly well-done and hilarious Texan accent. My friends and I used to joke around by speaking Spanish in this accent.
My mother came to visit me in Spain over the Easter holidays, and we did the tourist thing around Madrid and Andalucia. One night in our hotel, my mother was looking at the map of Madrid and she asked, in the worst possible American accent, “What is this ‘Par-Kay de buen Reh-Tire-Oh?’”
I burst out laughing because she sounded exactly, exactly like the George W. Bush puppet.
Maybe you had to be there.
I wasn’t and I just cracked up loud enough to wake the neighbors. Oops.
Sample guiñol with Condi and Bush. It’s the Spanish guiñoles, although V-me is in the US.
You could sit in for an exam.