Barcelona

The Ramba of Barcelona. This street says it all for Barcelona. Perhaps the best pedestrian street in the world. Something is always happening here--rain or shine, night or day. Everybody is here--tourists in droves, but also folks obviously from Barcelona out for a stroll. This is not strictly a pedestrian mall--there is a street on either side of this large median, and shops line the streets. Cars don't really get in the way.


Street performance art is always happening along La Rambla, like this young woman dressed up as a sunflower. Sometimes it was "still art" like this one, other times it was a regular show.

Las Boquerias is the neighborhood market adjacent to La Rambla. Much like many of the covered markets we have seen, but a cut above because of all the traffic. Spices sold out of gunny sacks just like we see in the Guatemalan markets. Easy to spend a day in this market!

I think Paris is more walkable than Barcelona (but not by much), but Barcelona excells in architectural flourishes. If you can blow this picture up, you can see a lot of great detail on an otherwise mundane structure.

Barcelona is not known for its flamenco music--but it IS Spain--so Flamenco was there to be had and this was a great performance--very intense!


These little delicacies are called "montaditas". They are somewhat like Tapas, but usually on bread like a little sandwich. You take as many as you want, but you keep the toothpicks and thats how they charge you. A different kind of "fast food".


A typical narrow street in the old city (Barri Gotic). This one is mainly residential. The streets with stores in this part of the city were just a bit wider.





Even in the dense old city, there are little parks everywhere.


Here is dessert from one of our more memorable meals dining on Catalan cuisine. This is a different variety of Pain Chocolat that we had seen in France. This is a piece of bread (a baguette or pan frances) with a thick slice of dark chocolate just slightly warmed at melted, lightly doused with olive oil and a pinch or two of salt. Very different--but quite good!


The famous Sagrada Familia church--a growing masterpiece still under construction. Started by Antonio Gaudi almost 100 years ago. This is about the most impressive church I have ever seen. No pictures (of mine anyway) can do it justice.


This is the best I can do for the inside of this cathedral. These pillars are stone--not poured concrete. The play of light in this church is quite different from that of other cathedrals. There is a real sense of the divine here. Construction is starting to speed up, so perhaps they will finish it within a generation....


Another Catalan dining adventure--Black Rice (with lobster). A Catalan seafood tradition. Not black beans and rice--but BLACK RICE. The rice is colored and cooked in the black ink of the squid. Very unique!


My favorite plaza in a city of plazas--Plaza Real. Very simple--just the way it should be. All the elements are here--eyes on the plaza, pedestrian access and scale, surrounded by restaurants etc. Even on this cold and rainy day a fair amount of people enjoying the plaza.


Street with stores in the old city or Barri Gotic de Barcelona. It is rainy and cold--and still crowded! Thats what the right kind of city design does for you!


Outside of the old city, this is what a great deal of Barcelona looks like. Mid-rise living just about everywhere. Close packed--but all walkable with stores and restaurants nearby.

All of these dense neighborhoods appear to have little plazas and parks like these everywhere. Real gathering places!

Caught in Collioure

From Nimes we took our last drive south to Collioure--about a 2.5 hour drive on the EU tollways. The Camargue is just south of Nimes.

These freeways are everybit as modern as our own. It is impressive to see trucks from all over the EU on these roads. This is quite a powerful union! We left the tollway at Perpignan and drove a very nice road to Collioure--about 20 more minutes down the road. I dropped Leticia off at the hotel and took the rental car to turn it in back in Perpignan. I point this out because it brought out just what a vibrant transporation system exists in Europe. The road was a great well surfaced road--much of it 4 lanes. But i didn't have to catch a bus or taxi to get back--I caught a train! A very powerful and robust multimodal system.











Here is beautiful Collioure. We had hoped to take a few days in a small mediterranean beach town before heading down to Barcelona--but the weather wouldn't collaborate! Cold and drizzly again. We had about one good morning (when we took this picture). This is French Catalonia. Perpignan is its capital (Perpinà to them). Catalan culture very much in evidence everywhere. The red and yellow vertical stripes of their flag is present, but not quite as common as in Barcelona.

As always--wonderful little plazas everywhere!

The train station at Port Bou, Spain, where we had to change trains. This is the train that took us into Barcelona--about the same as the one that brought us from Collioure to this point. (Notice that is is electric--it merges in with the Barcelona metro much as the French RER in Paris).

Nimes is Nice!

Nimes was one of the real revelations of the trip. A town of about 130,000 with the charm of Paris as well as the medieval city. It is on the edge of Provence--some guides don't include in in the area. Rick Steves doesn't even list it in his book for France. Thats unbelievable. But the Michelin guidebook for Provence lists is as a 3-star area--and well deserved. One of the best remaining Roman arenas in all the world and a wonderful city! An interesting mix of cultures--Provence, the Camargue, and some Arab and Spanish influences as well. Bull fights are a big deal here--those cowboys from the Camargue!

Wonderful, walkable streets in the old city with architecture reminisence of Paris. Lots of restaurants, lots of shopping.

As with the other cities we have visited--many wonderful squares and plazas. A great intersection of private "3rd places" with the public realm. I did not calculate the frequency of these plazas, but they are everywhere in the old city. No more than a 2 minute walk between any 2 plazas--some larger and smaller, of course.

I took this shot of the bus routes on a bus stop in the old city. Amazing coverage for a city of 130,000! Bryan-College Station just a little bit smaller--a system like this is unimaginable in a Texas city of this size. You have to have density to support something like this.

As most cities in this area, Nimes has a wonderful covered market. But couldn't they have done something more interesting with that facade?? Right in the heart of the old city--what an architectural violation. But inside--its another story!

The stalls are very much as we have shown for the other cities. But look at these chickens--obviously very fresh. The interesting thing is the different varieties of chickens offered. No such offerings in our industrial supermarkets.

This covered market merges into a shopping mall very similar in many respects to our own shopping malls--with some important exceptions, like this jack of all trades repair shop. The gentleman is working on a pair of shoes in this picture but you can see that he also works on bicycle tires among other things. A great example of the way small local businesses seem to survive a bit better in France.

A view from Nimes signature large park above the city. Notice the very sharp edge of the city in the background with local farmland and countryside. It would not be hard to go from a very urbane vibrant environment directly into a bucolic landscape. You can see the large arena just beyond the treed boulevard. Our hotel faced the Arena.

But even Nimes doesn't get it all right. This is the main avenue coming off of the wonderful central park. Hardly any sidewalks! All the space is given to cars. So even when you have the model right in front of you, it is sometimes hard to resist the siren song of private mobility at the expense of community structure.

Luberon Hill Towns to the Camargue

From Vaisson we cruised some Luberon hill towns. This landscape shows the "garrigue" of the hills. This road is way steeper than it looks. Like the Texas hill country--just steeper!

This is Gordes, a typical hill town. As explained earlier, hill towns were built as fortified refuges after the fall of Rome. The towns on the plains built walls and were thus fortified as well, but there was a real difference in terms of public space between this hill towns and the towns of the plains. Vaisson also had an older hill town adjacent to it. My understanding is that is was basically abandoned until fairly recently. I think Gordes is mainly occupied by second home folks, hotels, and those who serve them. I don't know if all the hill towns of the Luberon are like this, but this seems to be the case for Gordes and a few others we saw.




Hill towns like Gordes are full of fun little nooks and crannies. But not sure just a liveable such a place really is. These kinds of towns appear to have been abandoned as soon as things stabilized.




From the hills we drove to Marseille for the adventure already described. After the night in Arles, we went to the Camargue, supposedly the largest complex of wetlands in France, on the delta of the Rhone. It is a reserve and there is a visitor center, but not much considering the importance of this region. There is a whole lifeway centered in the Camargue wetlands--a kind of southern france wetland Cowboy-torero culture, mixed in with rice cultivation. The cowboys have their own unique style and rituals.





The Camargue wetlands are pretty wet--as you might expect. There are a whole range of wetland types that we were able to observe on our drive through the Camargue. This area feels very much like the Texas coastal prairie--and I have seen the Camarge referred as the French Texas.





We ran across this major reed harvesting operation.




Tourist images of the Camargue show white horses running through the water. Didn't catch a glimpse of that--but did see the horses. There are specialty hotels in the are that provide rides etc.



Les Stes Maries de la Mer is a very interesting little town on the ocean edge of the Camargue. Great little squares and parks and perfect pedestrian scale. This was on a late Wednesday afternoon in the main square--a leisurely game that appears to be a cross between bowling, croquet, and marbles. Both men and women were playing, and of various ages. I believe this game is played in other parts of France as well but I don't know the name. A venue for real social capital to develop!

Vaisson La Romaine

After Avignon, we rented a car for a 4 days of touring in Provence. This map shows the start of this route, with a little half day loop.

Here is the nice little Fiat we rented--a Punto. Handled great and got good mileage--diesel. The model was extra!

First thing I noticed about this landscape was just a similar it is to the Texas Hill Country--with the exception of the ancient olive trees of course. White and red oaks, yaupon-like hollies, etc etc. The Garrigue is the local name for the shrub-scrub landscape that has resulted from milenia of human management.

Our first stop was at a very impressive 2000 year old very large Roman aqueduct. But the high point of that park was a large "landscape" park recreating the ancient landscape and lifeways. Lots of wonderful live exhibits like this olive orchard. Even full scale soil profiles on stella-like monuments. Another wonderful conversation with French guides about landscape management. A quick check of the dictionary for how to say "fire on purpose"--le feu expres. Definitely a part of landscape management for milenia but rarely used now.

Paris and just about every little French towns love their Plane trees (similar to the Sycamore). But they also love to butcher them. We were there at the height of the butchering/pruning season apparently. Similar to our fixation with pruning crepe myrtles, I guess.

Vaission is said to have one of the better market towns of Provence--probably true. I don't think my photos quite capture the vitality of this market. I described this market in an earlier post so won't add much here. Lots of tourists at this market--but it is not held for tourists by any stretch of the imagination. A few squares and many side streets feel up with everything from the sublime to the mundane.

Here is a local guy selling hams and sausages. He cures the meat as well as raises the pigs. He is from a village in the region and he visits several markets a week. A very pleasant fellow. Let me say here that we found the French to be a very warm and pleasant people. We have read and have been told by many how rude the French can be. Certainly we encountered a few idiots along the way, but most were quite charming. We did try our best at speaking French, so maybe that helped. We read that most people would be able to speak English--not really true, especially outside of Paris. We found more people that could speak a little spanish then english--but many that could only do French. Invariably, people were more than happy to struggle along with us in our very halting French. This fellow provided way more explanation about his operation than I could undersand--but he encouraged my questions.

This fellow's food is not cheap. But you are getting real quality. The people who are buying from him are not wealthy--probably on the average less income per capita than a similar sized texas town. But you are not just buying a ham here--you are buying into a way of life.

Food in general in France is not very cheap. We learned to save by buying hams and sausage from guys like this, some bread from a local boulangerie, some cheese and that would do for breakfast and even lunch, so that we could enjoy some splurges on great meals (and we had several of those!). McDonalds and Burger king are doing well in places like Paris and even Nimes. Nowhere else can you get a burger for 2-3 bucks. A homemade burger at a local joint will cost at least 7-8 bucks. You have to decide where you want efficiency or stable local economies--a decision that France and other members of the European Union are struggling with. So far they seem to be making better choices than we are.

We had to buy an extra basket to handle all the loot--mainly irresistable local food stuffs.


The view from our room in Vaisson on market day morning. Below are butchered plane trees and market stalls. Above is the old walled town and the castle or chateaux.

Avignon

I am going to post travelogues by sequence--so even though we say we are back in the last post, I am going back to Provence and then forward.

Just for context--the road to Avignon via TGV--the super high speed train I already wrote about. We are way to the south now.

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This is our hotel in Avignon. The little window by the narrow cedar tree is our bathroom. We looked out onto this nice little park. Notice the lack of grass --very common in all the parks we have been seeing. Just a gravel surface. Seems to work just fine for them!

Here is a nice aerial that shows up on windows live local. The arrow shows our hotel and you can see the little park.

This is the covered market (less Halles) on the Sunday morning we were there. This aint no Walmart, folks. Local people selling local goods! A real smorgasboard of good stuff. And lots of local interaction going on as well.

Typical market stall. Oranges obviously not local (from Spain), but there was abundance of good local stuff--strawberries, for example. I am probably trying to figure out how to ask about local apples or something as I peruse my French dictionary!

Leticia just outside the market in one of the many squares that dot Avignon. No lack of public civic space!

How about this for a wonderful square with lots of great public activity. A good example of the way public spaces intersect with what some urbanists call "third places"--the bars and restaurants that are so important to civic life. It is all together right here. As in much of France--the thing to do is to sit with your drink and food and watch people.

A windows live local view of the same shot from above, showing location and direction. Could there be a better demonstration of how density helps make a place?

This is a small square just off of one of the "main" squares of Avignon. When you see kids playing in the square (there is a soccer ball in there somewhere!), you know the design is right!

All is not perfect in Avignon of course. Outside the old walls things go downhill pretty quick in some directions. There is a whole lot of development that is just as car dependent as anything in Houston. This picture shows low income housing not too far from the old walls. Mainly inhabited by Muslims as far as we could tell, mainly middle eastern but some African (Algerian?) as well. Not too happy of a place. Could the public realm been designed a bit better here?? Many of the riots that occured a few years ago in Paris were likely in neighborhoods like this.

There is no subway in Avignon--too small for that (about 90k people), but it does appear to have a very good bus system. We met a couple of Peruvians selling jewelry on one of the squares. How do you guys get around we asked--do you take the bus? Not us--we drive! they said. The allure of the car...