Hello from my friend’s home in Barcelona! This is NordLetter #116, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland.
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I’m on vacation! We travelled to Barcelona aboard a connecting Lufthansa flight. This is perhaps the first time we have travelled short duration flights (Helsinki > Munich > Barcelona), so the experience was a bit similar to what we get in domestic flights in India. We got water and a chocolate at the end of the flight. Which is smart, I felt.
It was an early morning flight, and we had left home at 03:30, so Savya slept through the first flight. He was a little more excited in the second flight, but still we managed to get him to sleep in the second flight as well. This was Savya’s first time travelling on his own seat, a milestone of sorts.
Maybe a lesson for the next time would be to carry some things that he could play with.
Some quick observations, since that’s all I’ve had time for.
Barcelona is a walkable city. There are wide side-walks with trees on the sides. There are similar (to Helsinki) lights on almost all the crossings. The weather is hot.
We are staying in our friend’s apartment at Avinguda Diagonal. I can see the Sagrada Família from our terrace. It’s a lovely apartment - roomy and bright with plenty of rustic touches. The doors and window panes are wooden and have old style hinges, etc. There is a bare brick style wall in their living room.
The buildings (at least to the places we’ve been) are beautiful with detailed facades and so on. Most of the building these days don’t have the intricacies in the name of modernity or minimalism. I feel like we are missing something when we go in this direction.
The weather plays a big role in what the residents of a city do. Here, for example, almost all restaurants have outdoor seating and in the evenings almost all of these seats were full - with people drinking, eating and talking. The city feels alive - or at least more alive than Helsinki. In Helsinki, even walking through the busy Design District, you don’t hear so many voices.
On the topic of architecture, there’s a school across the street from us, which was an old church at some point, and it looks so beautiful.
On Saturday, we visited the Barceloneta beach - which is a man-made beach. It was built around the time of the 1992 Olympics, sand was trucked in, a promenade was built. The W hotel stands on one side of the beach and there are plenty of chiringuitos and sea side restaurants. The waters were calm and clear. The beach was clean too. There were plenty of people playing volleyball on the beach.
We ate at a Nepali restaurant and a South Indian restaurant. Both had good food.
Samosa is my test for good Indian food and this one was good.
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Until next week.
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