Transcript of Tape-recorded Diary
In earlier times I habitually carried a small recorder while travelling on vacation, and dictated a diary of the trip - usually on a catch-up basis every few days or so. After transcription I added page-by-page footnotes to fill in gaps in the oral material, and for elaboration and correction. However, given the continuous nature of the Blog format I have now integrated the footnotes into the text. I have split this Blog into seven parts and have added photographs, some off the net The diary will likely be of interest only to indulgent family members, and to readers with a vicarious interest in other peoples' travel experiences.
PART 1 of 7
Tape 1, side 1
Eighty-two steps. There are eighty-two steps up to our apartment at 20 Bejar Street, Barcelona. The locals say Carrer de Bejar 20. The street is quite short, a hundred metres or so in our section, and it’s barely a block from a huge square, the Placa d’Espanya, and runs off one of the major thoroughfares that runs off the square. It’s quite a narrow street, and where cars are parked on either side there’s room for only one vehicle at a time to move along the street. There are a number of commercial premises, and while it’s undoubtedly a residential precinct there is very little noise at night. There are no domestic garbage or wheelie bins, but dumpsters placed every so far along the street for all to use.
The apartment is small, but just fine. One bedroom, with the laundry in a separate alcove near the window; and one living room-cum-kitchen area - also with window (and pseudo balcony) overlooking a courtyard. Of course a bathroom, very good. A divan bed in the living room, hence accommodation for more than one couple.
Staying with us for our week in Barcelona is our friend from London, Judy Rowe, Anne’s nursing mate and travelling companion of nearly 40 years ago.
Our journey from Melbourne was long but uneventful - certainly not accompanied by the stress of my flight in 2000 when I left home (to join Anne in London) with Tom in hospital and not knowing whether he had some serious affliction. I must say though that with the busy lead-up to departure, and the flight itself, Anne was pretty knackered by the time we got to Singapore. I can’t believe I said “uneventful”.....read on for the sagas of transiting, and luggage.
We were on Air France from Paris to Barcelona, equivalent to a local flight in Australia; and earlier were on Singapore Airlines from Tullamarine to Singapore, and from Singapore to Paris. The TV screen in the back of the seat in front (with the control unit attached, by cable, to the armrest) means that you’re never short of entertainment - although I didn’t watch any movies, preferring to read. But tourist class travel could never be described as comfortable - any time you want to leave your seat, or the person beside you wants to leave their seat, or some food is delivered and the tray table is lowered, there’s this need to untangle the cables. Add to this the cushion provided - which for me was too fat to be used behind me so was jammed in beside me and the armrest - and the blanket (thin blanket for those who feel cold through the night), and the fact that you’ve got your shoes off and they’re somewhere on the floor below: all of this makes for moving out of the seat quite a complicated exercise. Not that I’m really complaining! The flight was superb, the food was excellent, and Singapore are a great airline. It’s just the fact of the matter: if you go in the water you’ll get wet, and if you’re flying economy on a long haul flight you’ll be uncomfortable.
We both had snatches of sleep through the night, and the good news to report is that by the time Anne got to Paris she was in a much better condition than she had been at Singapore.
Paris was a complicated procedure for us because we had to transfer not only between airlines but also between terminals. In Singapore the two terminals are connected by a long promenade of lounge space and shopping opportunities, but in Paris we were on opposite sides of the vast airport and it was necessary to take a transit bus. This was fine in theory, although it was a little bit disconcerting to have to sit and wait for ten minutes until the departure time of the bus knowing that we had limited time. But the real problem was with the French penchant for lack of signage. We were dropped off at our destination terminal; there was a very simple doorway; inside the door there were escalators, one going up to the left and one going up to the right. No signs whatever, except that pasted on the wall on the right-hand escalator was a hand-written sign saying "EU". Logic suggested that since we were headed to Spain - an EU country - this was the way to go. Gary logic, but not airport logic. When we got to the top of the escalator there were two queues forming, one was for holders of EU passports, and the other was for all the rest. That’s us. Again, with what I would regard as typical of French disdain for logic or convenience, there were two officials attending to each queue and about ten times as many people passing through the non-EU queue as through the EU queue - and no suggestion whatever that the surplus might be dealt with at the EU counters.
Anyway, after fifteen minutes or so we got to the top of the queue and handed up our passports and our airline tickets only to be told that we didn’t have boarding passes therefore we couldn’t go through. What had happened is that we’d gone straight to the immigration departure counters without first having gone to the airline counters which, as it turned out, happened to be up the left-hand escalator. So, by the time we tracked back in something of a panic to the Air France counter we were a tad stressed. The first person we spoke to, when he saw that we were to get on the Barcelona plane, ushered us straight to what I think was a help desk rather than a seat allocation desk, and we were attended to there. But not without trouble, because the operator wasn’t able to print our seat allocation cards from her console and the chap at the adjacent console had to be recruited to our aid. A quick rush back through immigration, no problem this time, and to our departure lounge - and we were the last or almost the last people on to the plane before it took off.
Our total journey time from Melbourne to Barcelona was about twenty-six hours - quite an ordeal. But in a sense the worst was yet to come because our baggage didn’t arrive with us. At Melbourne our two cases had been checked right through to Barcelona and I thought at the time that this was a big ask because we were changing from one airline to another along the way - and so it proved to be. The stumbling block I think had been the shortness of the changeover time at Paris. Anyway, we forlornly watched the baggage conveyor go around and around, and the last stragglers come from nowhere to pick up their bags - and no sign of ours. So, to lose one bag is unfortunate, but to lose two is downright careless .......as Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest would have said. It seemed curious to me that the only place to go to report missing baggage in the Barcelona airport, at least at the part where we were disembarking, was an Air France kiosk. Does this mean that it’s only Air France baggage that goes astray, or is it only Air France that has the courtesy to provide their travellers with the necessary assistance? But the people were very helpful. Before going to the counter, I’d written down all the relevant particulars. Sure, we had our baggage checks from Melbourne; and they were immediately able to check on the computer screen and tell us that the bags were still in Paris. We were relieved at least that the bags hadn’t been on-forwarded to Moscow or somewhere further east. It was just a matter of waiting until the bags arrived later that day from Paris. The Air France people would definitely deliver them to our apartment.
The next thing was to meet Judy Rowe. Judy was scheduled to arrive in Barcelona from London about two hours after our arrival time, and it had been agreed that we would hang around the airport and that we would all go on to our apartment together. But with all the mucking around to do with our baggage we then had only about an hour to wait - the plan being to meet at the Hertz desk. But upon enquiry we found that the Hertz desk was at Terminal B and we had arrived, and Judy was going to arrive, at Terminal A. So, we decided to wait at the arrival door and hope that we caught Judy before she wandered off to see Mr. Hertz. This all worked very well and, thanks to the advice of the helpful people in the tourist cubicle, we caught the transit bus the few kilometres into Barcelona.
Our destination in fact was the first dropping off point, at the Placa d’Espanya, and a couple of hundred metres walk and we were there. Our instructions for the apartment had said we had occupancy from 4.00 p.m. but that we should ring the caretaker to arrange a meeting there with him, he’d hand over the keys, and we would hand him some cash as a security deposit. We rang from the airport and had some difficulty getting through, but eventually did so, and were advised that the cleaner was at the apartment and would let us in. Everybody was most helpful. The caretaker arrived later in the day, expressed alarm at our lost baggage, and indeed later on fielded a couple of phone calls from Air France and called back again to tell us that our bags had arrived and would be delivered late in the afternoon. They were. Undamaged - and all that remained was to carry them up the eighty-two steps. It was wonderful to be able to get into a change of clothes. We’d had freshening showers earlier on, but getting back into the same undies is not in fact a freshening experience.
We’d left Melbourne at four o’clock on Friday afternoon and here we were in Barcelona at around four o’clock on Saturday afternoon but an additional nine hours had transpired through the time difference. Say thirty-three hours without a proper sleep and it was going to be a few hours yet before we turned in. To avoid jet-lag, we’re told, it’s best to adjust yourself to the time in the destination country.
- - - o O o - - -
As I speak and resume this diary it’s again four o’clock on Saturday afternoon, but a week later, and I’m in Paris, and I’m sitting in the Pere Lachaise cemetery. Pere Lachaise, at 43 hectares (105 acres), is the largest of the three cemeteries in central Paris. (The other two are Montmartre and Montparnasse.) Its steep setting, mature trees, and diverse funerary architecture - and its great numbers of famous inhabitants - make it a popular visiting place. Some of the famous: Abulard and Heloise, Honore de Balzac, Hilaire Belloc, Sarah Bernhardt, Georges Bizet, Maria Callas, Jean-Francois Champollion, Frederic Chopin, Colette, Camille Corot, Eugene Delacroix, Paul Dukas, Isadora Duncan, Stephane Grapelli, Ferdinand de Lesseps, George Melies, Amedeo Modigliani, Moliere, Yves Montand, Jim Morrison, Adelina Patti, Edith Piaf, Camille Pissarro, Marcel Proust, Gioacchino Rossini, Georges Seurat, Simone Signoret, Gertrude Stein, Emile Waldteufel, Oscar Wilde. The cemetery is named after Francois d’Aix de Lachaise (1624-1709), a Jesuit priest, and confessor to Louis XIV, who had considerable influence at court.
Our flight from Barcelona to Paris was quite uneventful [this time it really was uneventful], and our journey to the Barcelona airport was made very easy by the fact that our apartment was no more than two hundred metres from the Placa d’Espanya and the bus stop for the airport bus. We had plenty of spare time so the slow check-in was of no concern, and then half-an-hour to kill before departure time and our farewells to Judy Rowe. Judy’s flight to London didn’t go for another hour or so, so she was going to catch up with her reading at the airport.
While departure from our Barcelona accommodation was easy, the arrival at our Paris accommodation was not. There had been a mix-up - which we knew about - in that we’d thought that our stint at the Paris apartment started from August 30 but in fact we were booked in only from August 31. So, prior to leaving Melbourne there’d been hasty organising of a room for one night at an Ibis Hotel - as it happens in the same street as the apartment that we’d be occupying for the next week. Number 80 the Ibis, number 43 the apartment. The Ibis is a strange makeover of a former apartment house I should think, five floors, but on each floor there seemed to be no more than five or six rooms. So, a very small-scale small cost operation. No particular facilities other than the ability to have breakfast downstairs. That pleasure awaits us in the morning.
The big surprise is how close both places are to Pere Lachaise. I visited this cemetery on a previous trip to Paris. I’d arrived late in the day, couldn’t find my directions, and had barely half-an-hour to spend. It was high on the list of things to do this time, little knowing that our apartment would be no more than three hundred meters from the main gate.
So, I’m sitting here at the moment doing a catch-up diary, being viewed with a degree of interest by the passing tourists and Parisians - not looking around the tombs but merely making use of the park bench as a place to recall the events of the week past.
As I was saying, the entry into Paris wasn’t easy. Through the large railway station at the airport. We had instructions that there was a standard ticket from Charles de Gaulle to Gare du Nord (“station of the north”), and from there we should travel by Metro, with one change of train, to the station nearest to our accommodation. And it was possible - so we were told - to book a ticket direct from the airport through to that nearest Metro station. But our first problem was with the ticket vending machines - they took cash, but coins only, not notes, and since we needed approximately fifteen euro it was not really likely that we’d have that much with us in coins. The next problem was that although the machines took credit cards they rejected both of ours, and rejected the card of the chap in the queue behind us - my guess a Swede - who was taking a great interest in our difficulties and not surprised that he had the same problem himself.
We were directed to the ticket office where there were large queues of people, not all for Paris - as you can imagine people arriving at the airport were heading in all directions in France and not necessarily going to Paris itself. The assistant dealing with the complaints at the vending machines had said that there were five windows selling tickets to Paris. In the event there were only two. And then, to my surprise, the price of the ticket through to our local Metro station was identical to the price of the ticket to Gare du Nord only as shown on the face of the vending machines. So, with some concern that we wouldn’t be able to get beyond Gare du Nord without buying additional Metro tickets, we set off.
Everything went fine. The tickets worked, and our only real problem arose when we arrived at our Metro station, the station of Voltaire. We had no instructions to the Ibis Hotel but we knew it was in the same street as our apartment, but the instructions to the apartment abandoned us at the Metro. We had to ask a couple of people, and eventually set off in the right direction. Remember that every Metro has multiple exits and when - as with the Voltaire Metro - the location is under a large square it’s possible to emerge absolutely on the wrong side from where you want to go. We got it more or less right but it was a long way to the Ibis and unfortunately the street curved around three sides of the square so we, in travelling the length of the road, covered a lot more distance than we needed to. Our suitcase on four wheels, which is soft and holds a lot and on the face is easy to handle, in fact had to be carried. It was packed badly - wasn’t properly balanced - and tended to veer to one side; and coupled with the fact that the pavements were uneven and that in any case I’d left the pull strap inside the case itself, it was a heavy load to carry the distance......which, I guess, would have been about three hundred metres. All this while carrying a heavy knap-sack; and Anne towing the other case and a heavy bag over her shoulders as well. Hence Anne is recovering her strength and her composure, and I’m sitting in an avenue of marvellous chestnut trees. Pere Lachaise is full of them.
The other thing to mention is the weather. Our week in Barcelona had been hot, almost unpleasantly so, especially at nights, and we’ve arrived in Paris on a mild day with intermittent rain. It seemed to be raining quite heavily as our plane landed, but it certainly wasn’t raining after we emerged from the Metro. But now I might be forced to abandon my bench because it’s started to rain lightly.
Barcelona is a wonderful city [population 1.8 million]. It’s modern, it’s exciting, it has culture up to its eyeballs, it has extraordinary architecture, and it has a sort of self-confidence. Not the self-confidence of highly talented people, not bragging about how clever they are, but just conscious of the fact that they’re good and things are easy for them. We’ve never seen such attractive people although I must say the focus is strongly on the young. The young women are simply gorgeous. I know it’s silly to generalise and even more silly when so many of the people in the streets were visitors to Barcelona like ourselves, but certainly the abiding impression that we had was one of beauty and glamour.
Barcelona is a huge tourist destination, and they make use of all their attributes to capture the interest of the tourist and no doubt to capture the tourist dollar. With the guide books indicating so many points of interest we worked to two rules. The first rule was that very few of the public buildings are open on Mondays, so that’s not the best day to be visiting points of interest. And second, the very best way to obtain a panorama of what the city has to offer is to join the city tour tourist bus. There seemed to be three firms running these bus tours, all of them with open top double-decker buses, and we signed up with the Barcelona Bus Touristic, their specialty being a two-day pass and twenty or so drop-down points of interest, plus a book of coupons providing discounts and concessions to various places and/or various products. So, we rode the bus on Tuesday and Wednesday and planned our week around those two days. In fact, two of our days were spent out of Barcelona.
On the Monday, that’s the 25th of August, we took the train to a nearby beach resort named Sitgas. This was a bit of a veg out day. Remember it was very hot, and remember that Anne and Judy - especially Judy - are lovers of the beach. A pleasant place and a pleasant waterfront precinct and, all along the promenade, tall date palms. While Anne and Judy were on the beach I prowled the town, and then recorded diary. With my taping at Sitgas there was a problem, namely that the date palms cast very little shadow and, almost without exception, the park benches were situated in full sun. I could locate only one small park where the trees had bushy tops, but the seats there were occupied by the local old men having their daily chin wag. I finished up doing my recording sitting on the ground with my back to a tree and changing position from time to time as the sun moved through the sky.
Our second excursion from Barcelona was on the Thursday when we had an all-day trip to the monastery of Montserrat. Montserrat or Monserrat ("serrated mountain", also called Montsalvat), is 1236 metres high (4045 feet), rising abruptly from the plain. The Benedictine monastery is on a narrow terrace half way up the precipitous cliff. In the Middle Ages the mountain was thought to have been the site of the castle of the Holy Grail. About an hour by train, a very efficient modern train which by a lovely coincidence left from a station at our local square the Placa d’Espanya. The monastery and the many buildings that now accompany it (including hotels, cafeterias, and other tourist facilities) is located high up in rocky crags and entry - for us at least - was via the funicular railway.
A very modern facility and a fine piece of engineering. The monastery dates from the ninth century, and has had a very troubled history as has been the case with so many religious establishments, victims of both religious and political persecution. In 1811 the monastery was destroyed, and the monks were killed by the French. It was rebuilt in 1844; and it had a lot of difficulty during the Franco years when, we’re told, it was a beacon of Catalan culture and therefore out of favour with the government in Madrid. I should say that Barcelona is the unofficial capital of Catalonia, that area of north-east Spain that in earlier years was a nation in its own right, and which has retained its independence of spirit at least, notwithstanding having been merged into the Spanish nation. So much so that Catalan, the language, is still spoken in the region; and in Barcelona all street signs and public announcements are in both Catalan and Spanish - which I think the Catalonians refer to as Castilian. While we didn’t converse with the locals on the subject, it seems that Barcelonans and Catalonians in general resent the fact that a disproportionate amount of today’s wealth and production comes from their region and that they are in a sense subsidising Spain as a whole; and you get the sense that they’d be quite happy to be independent again. The Catalonians do have a degree of independence in that in 1979 Spain created the “autonomous community of Catalonia” with its own president and legislature. At a later stage the whole of Spain was divided into autonomous communities - but the transfer of power to these communities from the central government has been slow. Many Catalonians want to see a full separation from Spain .... as do the Basques. The Basque people (about 850000 in Spain and 130000 in France) are further to the west, around the Bay of Biscay, and are seeking an independent state comprising four Spanish provinces and three provinces from the French Pyrenees. The Basque separatist organisation, ETA, pursues its aims with terrorism and assassination.
During the Franco era - which was a long time as I recall, probably more than thirty years - there were attempts from the Spanish government in Madrid to water down the Catalonian influence. With help from the German Nazi and the Italian Fascist regimes General Francesco Franco led an army (the “Insurgents”) against the Republican government of Spain (the “Loyalists”) during the 1936 to 1939 Spanish Civil War. He won, and was head of state until his death in 1975 - dictator for 36 years. It’s probably a bit dramatic to suggest that there were orchestrated attempts to stamp out Catalan culture. But maybe it did verge on that, and certainly the guide books talk of the continuing influence of Montserrat in this regard as being very important.
The big church of the monastery, the basilica, has a splendid interior and two main points of interest. The first is the virgin of Montserrat [also known as La Moreneta, the dark maiden], a small wooden statue that according to legend was made by St. Luke and brought to the region by St. Peter in the year 50. But the guide books point out that radiocarbon dating suggests that it was carved around the twelfth century. Why let twelve hundred years stand in the way of a good story?
The statue is all discoloured and dark through years of exposure to candle smoke, and it’s placed high above the alter; and regarded as the patroness of Catalonia. Pilgrims and tourists are able to walk up the back of the alter and pass by the statue, which is protected behind glass. The queue was enormous and we didn’t feel inclined to make the long wait, and didn’t have a pressing reason to see the statue up close anyway.
The other particular feature of the basilica is the daily short performances by the boys’ choir, the Escolania, who sing each day at one o’clock and again at ten past seven in the evening.
This was worth hearing, and by twelve-thirty the church was packed. And then as a special bonus there were a couple of items performed by a visiting group. We’d seen them on our train, and walking around the area. They all wore the same t-shirts and seemed to be an á cappella group from a university. Not a name that I knew, and given that they were of a generally small physique and looked rather like South American Indians, I wonder whether in fact they’d come all the way from South America and had arranged to give their short recital at the Montserrat monastery. Anyway, their performance was scalp tingling. The principal and first piece they sang was a piece without words with the many parts sung in dissonance, and when they opened up with full volume singing off key it had the most extraordinary effect. A lovely experience for us and for the thousand or so people there to hear the boys’ choir a short while later.
From the area where the monastery and all the other buildings are located there’s another funicular railway to a point higher up in the mountains, and later we took this train and did a bit of hiking and took in the views. We were able to gather some wild rosemary and wild thyme to add into our meals Thursday and Friday nights.
Up on the bluffs above the monastery complex we were in another world. Quite alone, even though visiting Montserrat with us on that day there were thousands of people. The view looking up to the craggy mountains is spectacular, but the view looking down to the plains and the busy industry of Catalonia is just as spectacular.
- - o O o - - -
Another ten days have passed and it really is time to do some catching up with this diary. I’m sitting under two huge cedar trees on the driveway just outside the gate of our cottage at St.-Paulette-de-Caisson. This is in the French countryside, just bordering on the Provence region and about a hundred kilometres north of the major centre of Avignon. [Wrong! Just under 50 kilometres.] The town of St.-Paulette is about three kilometres away; and the house is on about three acres of land. Quite a sloping hillside; a stream a couple of hundred metres down below; and up the hill on the other side quite dense forest. And we gather that in this region and at this time of year there’s quite a bit of hunting. Indeed, there’s a notice in the house suggesting that the big iron front gates should be closed at night as a precaution against wandering feral pigs. There are vineyards everywhere - we’re in the valley of the Rhone River - and soft-fruit orchards. The house itself, and the whole location, is thoroughly delightful. The house is of stone, no doubt hundreds of years old; two levels. On the level of the gravelled yard are two bedrooms, and a laundry, and an undercover area for drying clothes when the weather is not kind. In this area there’s also a large stack of firewood; and there’s another semi-detached room which we can’t enter, but which apparently holds another couple of beds. The house is said to hold a maximum of eight people and we’re only six and haven’t been given access to the spare room. There are internal stairs, and at mezzanine level is a bathroom and toilet for the use of the two downstairs bedrooms. On the main floor, which is reached both from the internal stairs and wide steps up to the front door, is the principal living room with the kitchen area, big table, open fireplace, and some large furniture. Then a second living room, somewhat smaller, with the TV set up, and then the main bedroom. Absolutely delightful and totally comfortable.
There’s a mass of literature in the house, both about the attractions in nearby towns and places to visit, and about the house itself. And from that we’ve learned that the property is owned by Sydney people, and it’s clear that the typical tourist inhabitants are from Australia.
To be continued..........
Gary Andrews
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