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sarahxBarcelona was fun. The weather could have been better, but at least I didn't get rained on. And I seem to have made my mum walk further than she has for years!
Saturday morning I went to the Miró museum at the top of the Montjuïc hill. As well as the Miró there was a temporary exhibition of Douglas Gordon installations. Not exactly my idea of good art normally, but I wound up going back to look at 'Through the looking glass' three times. It's a double projection of a 71 second clip of Robert de Niro's 'you talking to me?' speech from 'Taxi Driver' and it looks like he's talking to himself talking to himself (if you see what I mean). Very spooky. And reminded me a bit of the idiot ex. Hmmmmm.
After picking my mum up at the airport and abandoning her at the hotel, Saturday evening I went to the Nou Camp for Barcelona v Espanyol. My second-cheapest-price ticket set me back €58 (thank goodness I don't have to fork out that much every week to watch Wednesday being rubbish!). I was way up in the gods, but the view was still great (if a little distant) as the seats were vertiginous. Ronaldinho and Larsson were both playing, Barca won 2-0 and the team wearing blue-and-white stripes were a bit rubbish. It had rather skipped my mind that, having just won the championship and this being their final home game of the season, there would likely be a party. And, Brucie bonus, there was. Fireworks and everything.
Sunday we hopped on the train to Montserrat, where a monastery sits near the top of a mountain and funiculars head higher up. Great views, shame it was hazy rather than bright sunshine though. On Monday we went to La Sagrada Familia – isn't it amazing that Barcelona's biggest tourist attraction is still a building site? Makes for great photos, though, with scaffolding and building materials threaded through the realisation of Gaudí's mad scheme. I climbed up to the top of one of the towers, in the company of an attractive Frenchman I met in the queue – my mother doesn't do heights! The place is pretty impressive now, if they ever finish it it'll be astonishing. In more ways than one. Then up to Park Güell for more Gaudí insanity, a long walk through the woods, and finishing off watching a group of five little boys of about 7 having a kickabout – they clearly all wanted to be Ronaldinho.
Finally got home at 2am: it was always going to be fairly late as the flight was to Luton, but even though it was on time it took well over half-an-hour for them to get around to putting our bags out. No sign of the cat: dirty little stopout came home at 4am and made her Presence Known very loudly. Thanks, mog. I was actually asleep for once.
Of course I took bazillions of photos, the scaffolding in La Sagrada Familia was particularly photogenic. Here's one for starters...
And the fireworks were pretty, too!
More here
I'm now meant to be working but can't get my brain going. I've got a couple of people in the States I need to talk to, but that might prove difficult: on Sunday I lost my voice (I've already heard all the cracks about it being a great improvement!). It was completely missing for about 36 hours, and although it's now beginning to come back it's not exactly working properly so phone interviews could prove interesting.
And finally... I wrote stuff about the Barca game, and worked it together with the stuff from Espanyol. The whole thing is under the cut below, for completeness' sake. The new stuff is about half way down.
===
Barcelona loves its football. But one could be forgiven for thinking that there’s only the one team in town – the one stuffed full of international megastars. The likes of Ronaldinho. Samuel Eto’o. Henrik Larsson. Giovanni van Bronckhorst (erm, yes, well)..... Yet it has a city rival – the Man City to Barça’s Man Utd, Everton to its Liverpool, Sheffield U****d to its Wednesday....... There is also Espanyol. And they’re a bit rubbish.
Very much the poor relation, Espanyol are mere tenants at the Estadi Olímpic, left over from the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. They don’t have remotely enough fans to fill it, giving the regular sad sight of masses of empty seats in a stadium built to house 65,000. And this is despite the vast advertising banners that are draped across the seats behind the goal at both ends in an attempt to squeeze the fans closer together.
The fixtures calendar – always a movable feast in Spain, with kick-off times not finalised until the gods of television have their final say a week or so beforehand – had been kind to me, and Espanyol were due to kick off at 8pm against Deportivo La Coruña. I just nicely had time to go from airport to hotel, and have a couple of pre-match beers served by a numpty barmaid who did her best to convince me that Amstel is, in fact, a Spanish brew.
It seemed easiest to hop in a taxi to the stadium, as looking at the map of its home in the Montjuïc area I figured it would be interesting (to say the least) to try and find it from the metro station. OK, so, I was feeling lazy, and fancied beer more than the long walk... Anyway, the cabbie spoke little English but not bad French, and my talents at communicating in French are substantially more proficient than they are in Spanish (not that that’s saying much). So we had a long conversation about football in French, in which he proved that he knew sod all about the subject, not least by attempting to convince me that Barcelona were also at home that night. They weren’t. They were away at Celta Vigo. But more of that later.
When I finally got to the stadium, I beetled off to stand in the queue at the ticket office and (as expected) ended up buying a ticket off a fan – his mate’s season ticket that wasn’t being used. I paid him €20 for a €5 ticket that would have cost me €35 at the box office. A good deal for both of us.
The stadium is beginning to show the signs of age, and battered edges are appearing on the concrete. And, as it’s primarily an athletics stadium, the action was a little far away, on the other side of the running track. Those Espanyol fans that were there (the newspapers report a crowd a shade over 16,000) were reasonably vocal, and it wasn’t at all clear where the Deportivo fans were. The fact that both teams wear blue-and-white stripes (they have good taste) didn’t help, but I couldn’t even pinpoint them after they’d scored.
The stadium announcer had an annoying habit of bashing his microphone – bop bopbop – to get the crowd clapping. And goals at matches elsewhere were flashed up on the scoreboard accompanied with a Hi-de-Hi-esque ‘bong-bing-bong’, to occasional cheers when the scores suited the Espanyol fans.
The match itself started pretty slowly, and the only highlight in the first 40 minutes was a fine ‘handbags’ fight that the Deportivo goalie charged 40 yards up the field to get involved in, earning himself a yellow card and plenty of boos whenever he went near the ball afterwards. Espanyol took the lead after 44 minutes through Luis García, and the home fans went into the half time break in good voice.
Obviously, it couldn’t last, and a silly free-kick given away by the home team in their own half allowed the lime-green clad Ivan Carril to break free and equalise for Deportivo about half-an-hour into the second half. A second goal from Espanyol substitute Coro was adjudged offside –he was well off but that didn’t stop the home fans screaming at the officials. Referee Rodriguez Santiago is, apparently, a whore.
Another silly free-kick, this time on the edge of the Deportivo area led to the corner that gave Diego Tristán an 89th minute winner for the away side. This was the cue for the Espanyol faithful to start streaming towards the exits in disgust, their team having thrown away a lead that they had scarcely deserved.
Heading back into the city first required dodging a sea of scooters, but the walk back to the metro at Placa Espanyol gave a glorious view of Barcelona at night while travelling down the escalators that lead off the hill at Montjuïc. And Barça had turned into a party town. Yet more proof that Espanyol are in a minority: the city was celebrating Barcelona’s away win at Celta Vigo that had secured a second successive league title. The stripy claret-and-blue shirts were out in force, celebrating yet another triumph.
Three days later, I was lucky enough to be at the Nou Camp for Barcelona’s final home match of the season, ironically against Espanyol. Discretion being the better part of safety and all that I wore the black Wednesday away shirt rather than risk being mistaken for one of the opposition; though, of course, what did I spot on the metro on the way to the game but an Espanyol fan wearing a black away shirt?
They still had a handful of tickets left at the ticket office, and €58 later (yes, €58) and I was the proud owner of a second-to-cheapest price ticket. Almost (only almost, mind) makes Chelsea seem affordable. The Nou Camp holds 95,000 fans when it’s completely full, and I knew I was on for a bit of a climb. Sure enough, my seat – about half-way up the top tier – was up 142 steps, behind the goal towards the corner flag.
I’d been being a bit dozy and it hadn’t quite clicked that, as Barça’s last home game and the match after they’d secured the title, there would be a bit of a party going on. Sure enough, there were coloured cards to hold up (which spelled out ‘Champions’ in Catalan in yellow on a red-and-blue striped background – though from where I was sitting I couldn’t tell what it said until I saw a photo in the paper the next day). And plenty of singing.
During the darkest days of the Franco regime, about the only way the populace could show their Catalonian sympathies was by supporting Barcelona, and the sectarian chanting continues to this day, with the small group of Espanyol fans in the area behind me singing ‘Y Viva España’, and the Barça fans calling them ‘Spanish whores’ in return. One has to wonder – much as with the sectarian chanting that still plagues the game in Glasgow – whether the younger element actually know what they’re chanting about.
Barça started the game much the brighter, and it didn’t take long for Ronaldinho to show us what he’s made of. I remain astounded at some of the things he can do with a football. A gentle little back-heel here, a cheeky wee chip there; no-one else would even think of trying some of the things he does, let alone having the bottle to have a go. Little Ron just seems to do them automatically.
The first goal for Barça took just 19 minutes to arrive, with a cross from Samuel Eto’o taking a huge deflection off Espanyol defender Jarque into the back of the net. Needless to say, the scoreboard gave the goal to Eto’o. Espanyol never really looked like getting back into it, and the lead was doubled early in the second half by that man Little Ron, who calmly put a rebound off the goalie into the back of the net after Henrik Larsson (still in possession of the best thighs in football) had skipped round the defence but failed to beat Espanyol’s keeper Gorka.
A flurry of attacks from Espanyol in the final few minutes proved too little and far too late, as they squandered their chances. The match had been a real case of men against boys, and the blue-and-white clad visitors had done well to keep the score down to just the two goals.
The final whistle was the cue for much celebrating, singing of the Barca anthem, and the league trophy was presented for the benefit of the television cameras. The players – and trophy – then all disappeared back into the changing rooms, but the fans stayed put. What was I missing? Best not go yet, just in case. And sure enough, about 20 minutes later, a boy-band came out to sing the Barça anthem, followed by the team who did the lap of honour that had been strangely absent earlier, to the accompaniment of a very impressive ticker-tape welcome, with cannons firing pieces of blue and red paper high into the air, carried around by the swirling wind. They even reached the vertiginously high parts where I was sitting.
Back to the middle of the pitch for more photos, and coach Frank Rijkaard, captain Puyol and sexy-thighs Swede Larsson (soon to be departing the Nou Camp) all gave short speeches, ending with ‘Viska Barça, Viska Catalunya’. Catalonian nationalism lives. And finally the entire backroom squad – there must have been a couple of hundred of them – spilled out onto the pitch in white trousers and pale blue jackets to take the applause, and the fireworks started. Football, Little Ron’s tricks, Henrik’s thighs, and fireworks. What more could a girl ask for?
Twenty-four hours later, and the red-and-blue clad hordes were still celebrating, with a parade around the city’s streets and a huge party in the Plaça de Catalunya at the top of La Rambla. Here’s hoping they’re rather more subdued after their hot date with Arsenal in Paris on 17 May.
Saturday morning I went to the Miró museum at the top of the Montjuïc hill. As well as the Miró there was a temporary exhibition of Douglas Gordon installations. Not exactly my idea of good art normally, but I wound up going back to look at 'Through the looking glass' three times. It's a double projection of a 71 second clip of Robert de Niro's 'you talking to me?' speech from 'Taxi Driver' and it looks like he's talking to himself talking to himself (if you see what I mean). Very spooky. And reminded me a bit of the idiot ex. Hmmmmm.
After picking my mum up at the airport and abandoning her at the hotel, Saturday evening I went to the Nou Camp for Barcelona v Espanyol. My second-cheapest-price ticket set me back €58 (thank goodness I don't have to fork out that much every week to watch Wednesday being rubbish!). I was way up in the gods, but the view was still great (if a little distant) as the seats were vertiginous. Ronaldinho and Larsson were both playing, Barca won 2-0 and the team wearing blue-and-white stripes were a bit rubbish. It had rather skipped my mind that, having just won the championship and this being their final home game of the season, there would likely be a party. And, Brucie bonus, there was. Fireworks and everything.
Sunday we hopped on the train to Montserrat, where a monastery sits near the top of a mountain and funiculars head higher up. Great views, shame it was hazy rather than bright sunshine though. On Monday we went to La Sagrada Familia – isn't it amazing that Barcelona's biggest tourist attraction is still a building site? Makes for great photos, though, with scaffolding and building materials threaded through the realisation of Gaudí's mad scheme. I climbed up to the top of one of the towers, in the company of an attractive Frenchman I met in the queue – my mother doesn't do heights! The place is pretty impressive now, if they ever finish it it'll be astonishing. In more ways than one. Then up to Park Güell for more Gaudí insanity, a long walk through the woods, and finishing off watching a group of five little boys of about 7 having a kickabout – they clearly all wanted to be Ronaldinho.
Finally got home at 2am: it was always going to be fairly late as the flight was to Luton, but even though it was on time it took well over half-an-hour for them to get around to putting our bags out. No sign of the cat: dirty little stopout came home at 4am and made her Presence Known very loudly. Thanks, mog. I was actually asleep for once.
Of course I took bazillions of photos, the scaffolding in La Sagrada Familia was particularly photogenic. Here's one for starters...
And the fireworks were pretty, too!
More here
I'm now meant to be working but can't get my brain going. I've got a couple of people in the States I need to talk to, but that might prove difficult: on Sunday I lost my voice (I've already heard all the cracks about it being a great improvement!). It was completely missing for about 36 hours, and although it's now beginning to come back it's not exactly working properly so phone interviews could prove interesting.
And finally... I wrote stuff about the Barca game, and worked it together with the stuff from Espanyol. The whole thing is under the cut below, for completeness' sake. The new stuff is about half way down.
===
Barcelona loves its football. But one could be forgiven for thinking that there’s only the one team in town – the one stuffed full of international megastars. The likes of Ronaldinho. Samuel Eto’o. Henrik Larsson. Giovanni van Bronckhorst (erm, yes, well)..... Yet it has a city rival – the Man City to Barça’s Man Utd, Everton to its Liverpool, Sheffield U****d to its Wednesday....... There is also Espanyol. And they’re a bit rubbish.
Very much the poor relation, Espanyol are mere tenants at the Estadi Olímpic, left over from the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. They don’t have remotely enough fans to fill it, giving the regular sad sight of masses of empty seats in a stadium built to house 65,000. And this is despite the vast advertising banners that are draped across the seats behind the goal at both ends in an attempt to squeeze the fans closer together.
The fixtures calendar – always a movable feast in Spain, with kick-off times not finalised until the gods of television have their final say a week or so beforehand – had been kind to me, and Espanyol were due to kick off at 8pm against Deportivo La Coruña. I just nicely had time to go from airport to hotel, and have a couple of pre-match beers served by a numpty barmaid who did her best to convince me that Amstel is, in fact, a Spanish brew.
It seemed easiest to hop in a taxi to the stadium, as looking at the map of its home in the Montjuïc area I figured it would be interesting (to say the least) to try and find it from the metro station. OK, so, I was feeling lazy, and fancied beer more than the long walk... Anyway, the cabbie spoke little English but not bad French, and my talents at communicating in French are substantially more proficient than they are in Spanish (not that that’s saying much). So we had a long conversation about football in French, in which he proved that he knew sod all about the subject, not least by attempting to convince me that Barcelona were also at home that night. They weren’t. They were away at Celta Vigo. But more of that later.
When I finally got to the stadium, I beetled off to stand in the queue at the ticket office and (as expected) ended up buying a ticket off a fan – his mate’s season ticket that wasn’t being used. I paid him €20 for a €5 ticket that would have cost me €35 at the box office. A good deal for both of us.
The stadium is beginning to show the signs of age, and battered edges are appearing on the concrete. And, as it’s primarily an athletics stadium, the action was a little far away, on the other side of the running track. Those Espanyol fans that were there (the newspapers report a crowd a shade over 16,000) were reasonably vocal, and it wasn’t at all clear where the Deportivo fans were. The fact that both teams wear blue-and-white stripes (they have good taste) didn’t help, but I couldn’t even pinpoint them after they’d scored.
The stadium announcer had an annoying habit of bashing his microphone – bop bopbop – to get the crowd clapping. And goals at matches elsewhere were flashed up on the scoreboard accompanied with a Hi-de-Hi-esque ‘bong-bing-bong’, to occasional cheers when the scores suited the Espanyol fans.
The match itself started pretty slowly, and the only highlight in the first 40 minutes was a fine ‘handbags’ fight that the Deportivo goalie charged 40 yards up the field to get involved in, earning himself a yellow card and plenty of boos whenever he went near the ball afterwards. Espanyol took the lead after 44 minutes through Luis García, and the home fans went into the half time break in good voice.
Obviously, it couldn’t last, and a silly free-kick given away by the home team in their own half allowed the lime-green clad Ivan Carril to break free and equalise for Deportivo about half-an-hour into the second half. A second goal from Espanyol substitute Coro was adjudged offside –he was well off but that didn’t stop the home fans screaming at the officials. Referee Rodriguez Santiago is, apparently, a whore.
Another silly free-kick, this time on the edge of the Deportivo area led to the corner that gave Diego Tristán an 89th minute winner for the away side. This was the cue for the Espanyol faithful to start streaming towards the exits in disgust, their team having thrown away a lead that they had scarcely deserved.
Heading back into the city first required dodging a sea of scooters, but the walk back to the metro at Placa Espanyol gave a glorious view of Barcelona at night while travelling down the escalators that lead off the hill at Montjuïc. And Barça had turned into a party town. Yet more proof that Espanyol are in a minority: the city was celebrating Barcelona’s away win at Celta Vigo that had secured a second successive league title. The stripy claret-and-blue shirts were out in force, celebrating yet another triumph.
Three days later, I was lucky enough to be at the Nou Camp for Barcelona’s final home match of the season, ironically against Espanyol. Discretion being the better part of safety and all that I wore the black Wednesday away shirt rather than risk being mistaken for one of the opposition; though, of course, what did I spot on the metro on the way to the game but an Espanyol fan wearing a black away shirt?
They still had a handful of tickets left at the ticket office, and €58 later (yes, €58) and I was the proud owner of a second-to-cheapest price ticket. Almost (only almost, mind) makes Chelsea seem affordable. The Nou Camp holds 95,000 fans when it’s completely full, and I knew I was on for a bit of a climb. Sure enough, my seat – about half-way up the top tier – was up 142 steps, behind the goal towards the corner flag.
I’d been being a bit dozy and it hadn’t quite clicked that, as Barça’s last home game and the match after they’d secured the title, there would be a bit of a party going on. Sure enough, there were coloured cards to hold up (which spelled out ‘Champions’ in Catalan in yellow on a red-and-blue striped background – though from where I was sitting I couldn’t tell what it said until I saw a photo in the paper the next day). And plenty of singing.
During the darkest days of the Franco regime, about the only way the populace could show their Catalonian sympathies was by supporting Barcelona, and the sectarian chanting continues to this day, with the small group of Espanyol fans in the area behind me singing ‘Y Viva España’, and the Barça fans calling them ‘Spanish whores’ in return. One has to wonder – much as with the sectarian chanting that still plagues the game in Glasgow – whether the younger element actually know what they’re chanting about.
Barça started the game much the brighter, and it didn’t take long for Ronaldinho to show us what he’s made of. I remain astounded at some of the things he can do with a football. A gentle little back-heel here, a cheeky wee chip there; no-one else would even think of trying some of the things he does, let alone having the bottle to have a go. Little Ron just seems to do them automatically.
The first goal for Barça took just 19 minutes to arrive, with a cross from Samuel Eto’o taking a huge deflection off Espanyol defender Jarque into the back of the net. Needless to say, the scoreboard gave the goal to Eto’o. Espanyol never really looked like getting back into it, and the lead was doubled early in the second half by that man Little Ron, who calmly put a rebound off the goalie into the back of the net after Henrik Larsson (still in possession of the best thighs in football) had skipped round the defence but failed to beat Espanyol’s keeper Gorka.
A flurry of attacks from Espanyol in the final few minutes proved too little and far too late, as they squandered their chances. The match had been a real case of men against boys, and the blue-and-white clad visitors had done well to keep the score down to just the two goals.
The final whistle was the cue for much celebrating, singing of the Barca anthem, and the league trophy was presented for the benefit of the television cameras. The players – and trophy – then all disappeared back into the changing rooms, but the fans stayed put. What was I missing? Best not go yet, just in case. And sure enough, about 20 minutes later, a boy-band came out to sing the Barça anthem, followed by the team who did the lap of honour that had been strangely absent earlier, to the accompaniment of a very impressive ticker-tape welcome, with cannons firing pieces of blue and red paper high into the air, carried around by the swirling wind. They even reached the vertiginously high parts where I was sitting.
Back to the middle of the pitch for more photos, and coach Frank Rijkaard, captain Puyol and sexy-thighs Swede Larsson (soon to be departing the Nou Camp) all gave short speeches, ending with ‘Viska Barça, Viska Catalunya’. Catalonian nationalism lives. And finally the entire backroom squad – there must have been a couple of hundred of them – spilled out onto the pitch in white trousers and pale blue jackets to take the applause, and the fireworks started. Football, Little Ron’s tricks, Henrik’s thighs, and fireworks. What more could a girl ask for?
Twenty-four hours later, and the red-and-blue clad hordes were still celebrating, with a parade around the city’s streets and a huge party in the Plaça de Catalunya at the top of La Rambla. Here’s hoping they’re rather more subdued after their hot date with Arsenal in Paris on 17 May.
