Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #118, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland.
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We are back from Barcelona! And I have some thoughts. The first thought I have is this - how do you write about (review?) a place? I have been to different places and I have tried to do this differently. Heck, for this Barcelona trip I have written two posts already, in two different styles - first few days in Barcelona is an itinerary style of post, I did this on day 1 and so on; while Madrid Day Trip talks about some interesting things I found in Madrid. While writing that, I realised the interesting thing about places is the people you get to talk to.
After our New York trip, I wrote a series of posts chronicling our time in NYC - NYC I, NYCII, NYCIII and NYCIV.
NYC was a different trip though, everything was planned. Each day was more or less mapped. We had one empty day, but nothing much other than that. We used that free day on a day we were feeling tired and jet-lagged perhaps.
This was a different type of trip. I wanted to relax. I wanted to get there and then figure out what I would do on that day. I did not want to have an itinerary.
That’s not how we usually vacation. It was a fun experiment. One learning from which was that two weeks was perhaps too long a time to be travelling with a 2.5 year old. The second was that we don’t really like hot weather.
All this preamble and I still don’t know where this will go. Though to be honest I know. There are scrambled notes written in this note which point a way.
Itinerary
Because I want to have a list of things we did and places we visited.
- Roaming around Eixample
- Barceloneta Beach
- Arc de Triomf
- Parc de la Ciutadella
- Lloret de Mar
- Plaça de Catalunya
- Les Rambles
- Port Vell
- Sagrada Família
- Barcelona Aquarium
- Madrid
- Mont-Louis
- Andorra
- Casa Batlló
- Casa Vicens
Places we ate at
- Royal Nepal
- Chennai Masala Dosa
- Honest Greens
- Saravanaa Bhavan
- Mummy’s momo
About Barcelona
Barcelona feels closer to Delhi than Helsinki, my two chosen homes. Home. Yes, home. This is perhaps the first time I’m calling Helsinki home.
Barcelona is magical - in that you may find your wallet disappear! - a joke our tour guide was extremely proud of.
Barcelona is walkable.
Barcelona was hot, at least in these months. And it was the sticky, humid kind. Though this was the time to go dipping at the beaches. We would not have been able to do those things around April, say.
We were staying at our friend’s place on Diagonal. We could see the Sagrada Família from our (their) balcony. Each day I would go out and walk around it. There was a Mercadona (their version of Prisma) just next to it. Groceries were a bit cheaper in Barcelona. Public transport felt better maintained than Manhattan. And did I say Barcelona is walkable?
There are so many beautiful buildings in Barcelona. The architecture, the square blocks and then the diagonal where the block meets the road. You have to walk around the diagonal, and then cross the road. Which is not how we do it, here in Helsinki. Also, almost all the road crossings had lights on them. Some here in Finland have lights, but many don’t.
Barcelona felt alive. There were so many shops and restaurants everywhere. In the evenings, there were people having beer and tapas. Barcelona feels like a proper city - a feeling I get only while walking around Central here in Helsinki.
About broadening your mind
They say travel broadens your mind. It’s a cliche at this point. But it happened to me. Not in the way I expected, mind you.
There was a restaurant close to where we were staying - Royal Nepal. We had visited it the first day to have Samosa Chaat. If you know me, you know that I love samosa. That’s my litmus test for Indian restaurants!
I visited them again once or twice. And as I waited for my order to come, I saw the music video that was running on the TV. A mopey Nepalese singer was singing about missing his girlfriend or something. That was followed by a Nepalese rock star in what looked like a Coke Studio type setup. Another similar singer followed.
And I thought, here I am sitting in Spain, learning about Nepalese culture. Nepal has rockstars! Nepal has music!
Beaches and Swimming Pools
We visited two beaches - Barceloneta and the one at Lloret de Mar.
The water at Lloret de Mar was clean, pristine. The sand was porous and sand-like. I could see fish swimming in the water. There were a ton of people there. I had Savya in my arms, and we both rocked slowly to the waves.
We were staying at an apartment hotel with two pools and a restaurant. Savya enjoyed himself at the kiddie pool. They had designed rides and slides that the kids could go on. There was a larger pool with warmer water than the kiddie pool.
The food
The food in general was better than the food we get in Indian restaurants here in Finland. Since we are vegetarians, we could not really try out Spanish cuisine.
We mostly ate at two South Indian restaurants - Chennai Masala Dosa and Saravanaa Bhavan. Saravanaa Bhavan was better.
Savya
Savya grew up during the trip.
He has started to do two new things - asking to get his photos clicked and asking for rhymes to be sung to him when he goes to sleep. When he was smaller I had tried the Nindiya Re song with him, it hadn’t really stuck earlier. Now it has. Now he says, “haule haule”, when he wants me to sing it.
He asked to get his photos clicked during the Madrid Day Trip. He would sit on stairs and say photo. He eventually started doing that at different places.
I have become his Apple Music subscription. He asks me to sing a song, then asks me to sing a different one, kind of like, how one may press skip on a playing song.
When things come to an end
All trips tend to have a cyclic nature to them. You are excited in the first half of the trip, while you have not seen the place yet. While there are things left to do.
In the next half, after you’re done with the tour and on your way back, you get impatient and you just want to get home as soon as you can.
I had this feeling while we were sitting in the bus, somewhere around Mont-Louis, the beautiful castle somewhere in France, on our way to Andorra. It was Monday, and we would be going back on a Thursday. I had thoughts of work and other things creeping into my mind.
The guide was talking about the mountains, about the changing scenery and so on. And I thought she would not be talking about these same things on our way back. She would be quiet.
It wasn’t only dread though. I was happy at the thought of going back home, going back to my rhythms and routines, to walking around Kumpula with Savya. My library had reserved a copy of Breakneck for me. I was excited to start reading it.
There was also the Independence Day celebration on 15th August and then the India Day event on 16th. I was not super excited for those.
Andorra
We enjoyed our trip to Andorra. I love getting on a bus and letting them drive us around. We did this on our trip to Zurich a lot. And there’s freedom in someone else being responsible for all the practicalities. What you lose out on is control over the itinerary. So even though we wanted to spend more time in Interlaken, we couldn’t.
It was a similar feeling here. We got hardly two hours in Andorra. Most of which we spent running around and shopping. The result of which was that we could not pick a fridge magnet from Andorra.
Casa Battlo
Casa Battlo is amazing. Gaudi designed and built it for a rich family in Barcelona. You are supposed to download an app before you get to the building if you want to get an audio tour - which I had. But I saw others who hadn’t and they got a small audio device they could stick to their ear and hear when they were in a room.
Prerna and I shared the audio from my phone using one tip each of my AirPods. It was better this way. We had paid for two audio devices in the Bernabeau tour and we were not really in sync during that tour.
It was better here.
The house is beautiful. The audio was beautiful too. It provided context to the different choices Gaudi had made when designing this place, like the different hues of paint for the roofs of the halls. The view outside from the hall was beautiful. The brass handles on all doors, which Gaudi himself had made. The different shades of blue on the wall opposite the stairs. I looked from the glass and it looked as if I was looking at something from inside water.
It was wonderful.
If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄
Until next week.
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