The magic is slowly washing over us. Lisa is fully immersed in the spirt of Europe. I am getting there, but part of me is still hesitant. This part of me, I believe, is waiting for Rome. I’ll explain, but first I’ll digress.

The day began with us trapped in our room. Disney had told us to have our bags ready to be picked up from our room at 8 am. We scheduled a wakeup call for 6 am despite our desperate need for sleep. I rose, Lisa did not, her stomach queasy from the previous night’s overindulgence. Most of the packing was the electronics I had unpacked to charge anyway, and I left the insane amount of toiletries to her, even though she was slowly (and loudly) dying. We got everything done in time, but 8 AM passed, then 9 AM, and after a quick trip downstairs to see what was going on only to be brushed off with several staccato “Is OK”s, the bags were finally picked up at 10:20. We made our way downstairs, as we had some time to explore before 11:15 arrived, when we had to pick up our keys from the Disney desk.

We made our way back over to Diagonal Mar. Lisa had purchased a large, expensive makeup kit from Sephora to take on the trip and then accidentally left it at home. Thankfully for her and woefully for me, a Sephora was among the countless stores in Diagonal Mar, so we had the opportunity to purchase it again, only this time more expensive. I say this with faux bitterness because in reality I have slipped into the dangerous but oh-so-familiar vacation-induced state of “money’s no object” despite the fact that money is a very real object that’s threatening to crush us under its obscene weight. I was more than happy to sit outside the store as she shopped, watching the Spaniards shuffle through their mall as aimlessly as we do in ours.

We made our way deeper into Diagonal Mar, which is huge, hoping to find an exit to an interesting street we could check out for the few minutes we had. One exit had a dog sitting all by itself in front of it, its owner, if it had one, nowhere in sight. It stared longingly through the perpetually-open doors and our hearts went out to it immediately, as its silence and unwavering gaze conveyed a deep sadness that logically cannot be expressed by a dog but felt very real nonetheless. A security guard felt the same as we did, and he went out to stare with the dog as a show of companionship.

We made our way to a different exit, unwilling to subject ourselves to ignoring the puppy, and briefly considered making our way to the park across the street, but were waylaid by the fact the air smelled like rotten eggs. We decided that we should head back to the hotel and get our keys.

Our keys, of course, were not ready. We had brought the computer in a bag with us, as well as some toiletries and medication we needed until the last minute and their combined weight was enough to keep me from wandering out again. Lisa was still tired and nauseous, so she agreed. We sat down on the couch to relax and were immediately pounced upon by a lady from the Barcelona tourism board armed with a Tablet PC and a survey whose length implied that by the time we were finished, our answers to the first questions asked will already have been codified within the infrastructure of Barcelona. She spoke only a little English and spoke mostly to Lisa, who was the subject of the survey, in Spanish, despite knowing full well that she had no idea what she was saying. Lisa nodded dutifully, but despite the fact that each question was presented with an English-language version onscreen, she couldn’t answer even the simplest questions by herself. I tried to avoid the situation altogether but was constantly dragged in to help her identify her gender and how old she was. This ended just in time to find out that they weren’t able to print our room keys and that we’d have to get them from the Supervisor’s desk at the port.

There was good news, though, our ride was ready 45 minutes early, and since there were only two others besides us at the hotel, we’d ride in a private car instead of a bus or van. Our driver was a statuesque woman whose past you would question if you saw her driving a cab in the US but who seemed to be driving as if that’s a perfectly normal thing for a woman like her to do. We shared the ride with Rose and Chris whose son was recently married in Disney World, which gave us plenty to commiserate about. They’re from Milford, CT, not too far from us and had in fact taken the exact same flights as us, making the exact same frantic dash for Gate A67. Their experience so far had mimicked ours almost exactly, although their disappointing initial tourism saw them getting on the Bus Touristic on its last run of the day, so that none of the better connecting routes were operating (our route was basically transport to the other, larger routes inside the city, but it still had a few stops along the way) and so they made a two hour circuit for nothing, only to be dropped off nowhere near where they began. They were forced to walk back to the hotel, ignored by taxis, so that they got in at 11 pm from a simple tour. We lucked out by only going to a mall and having a mediocre lunch. Our conversation must’ve been fascinating, as our driver zoned out and drove us almost the full way to the airport before realizing her mistake. It just gave us more time to talk, though. We arrived at the port around 12:20 pm and made our way through security. We searched for the Supervisor’s desk, which didn’t exist, but found a Supervisor who took care of us promptly.

Rose and Chris’ bad experience with the Bus Touristic combined with our limited time allowed off the ship led us to book an excursion through Disney last minute: a panoramic bus tour of Barcelona. Lisa was disappointed that she wouldn’t get to see her beloved Olympic Village at Montjuic, but something was better than nothing, especially since we had come a day early in order to tour.

The line to board the boat was lengthy, but there was a separate line for guests staying at the hotels, so we were able to bypass half of it, going to directly to the point where your picture is taken. The line isn’t truly separate, though, it just appears to be, and the attendant who checks your Key to the World card for the proper identification (a three letter code on the bottom left indicating which, if any, hotel you stayed at) walks down with you, holds his arm in front of the people who are next in line to get their picture taken and escorts you through. After your picture, you rejoin the line to board the boat, so needless to say: awkward.

We took a silly amount of pictures on the line for the boat, giddy with the prospect of cruising again. The Disney Magic has a certain look that demands hundreds of photographs be taken of it, despite its existence being well-documented elsewhere, including our own collection. We rekindled our long tradition of self-portraiture and annoyed those around us by extending our arms in front of us, camera facing us, taking picture after picture blind until we get a good one. The nicer people, who are just doing their best to stand in line peacefully, will offer to take our pictures only to get politely refused. When a stranger takes your picture, you’ve got the minute of fumbling with an unfamiliar camera, followed by the blurry photograph of whatever important thing you were trying to capture. With the advent of cameras with preview screens, you’re expected to check the picture first, but much like when someone asks for the time, your eyes momentarily glaze over and you can either make up a response or wait for normal cognitive functioning to return. I inevitably say whatever picture they took, even if it clearly appears to be their thumb, is perfect, and thank you, and would they like me to take their picture? As a result of doing it on my own, nearly all the pictures of us here were taken by one of us with an extended arm, and nearly all of them have 50 variations that contained either too forced a smile, too much oversized head covering the background, too much out of frame, or too much something else. I never get annoyed by having to take so many pictures because if I’m doing it it means I’m somewhere I genuinely want to capture as much as I can.

Boarding the Mediterranean Cruise is certainly one of those places I wanted to capture. The excitement grew more palpable as we progressed down the line, despite the fact that the red carpet they laid out was no different from one end to the next, with the exception of some Purrell stations to ward off the Norwalk virus. Our passports were inspected for the last time and we were swiped onto the ship. We took the elevators up to Deck 9 (the pool deck), the only deck open at that point, with a family of four. We talked about our gameplan (head to Palo and try to snatch up a brunch) and the father chimed in that I had competition. I informed him that I wasn’t afraid to throw some elbows if I had to. They announced our arrival to a corridor of cheering and clapping cast members, which was nice, but they were letting everybody up on the wrong side of the ship! As we made our way to Palo, we turned around to see the giant screen over the pool and, lo and behold, everyone they were announcing was shown on it. You can’t see it from where they’re announcing you, so you only know it happened because you see someone else do it.

Palo Brunch was all booked up, but our tablemates Andy and Laura had gotten one in. Lisa knows Laura (well, both know each other in passing) from the Disneymooners (the Illuminati-like cult of Disney Brides and Disney Brides-To-Be) and the DISBoards (a messageboard for planning all things Disney). This is their honeymoon, and in an effort to not sit with screaming kids, they opted with what they thought was a safer choice (since we also got married in Disney and coincidentally they also got engaged on Martha’s Vineyard, at least we’d have something to talk about for the first night). Little did they know what they were in for. Since they linked their reservation to ours in order to secure our table, Disney assumed we were doing everything together. The cast member (Disney refers to all their employees as cast members) dutifully began changing their private Palo brunch to include us, something I put a stop to immediately, but not before Lisa tried to convince me that they wouldn’t mind, such was her desire to brunch at Palo.

The room was ready but the bags were not. We dropped our bags off and saw that our Castaway Club gift was a leather travel wallet with the Castaway Club logo engraved (I’m sure there’s a better leatherworking term) on the front of it.

The room itself was quite nice, not much smaller than a Verandah room thanks to the bed laying against the wall, facing the door. We haven’t bumped into each other much yet, but we’ll see if that holds up. The loss of a second bathroom hasn’t caused any problems either, but we’ve yet to get up to shower at the same time, so I can’t say the Category 12 room is perfect for us yet, but we both like it so far.

There was plenty of paperwork left for us, including pamphlets on every port that we would make our way to, but there was no time to explore if we wanted to lunch in before the tour.

We got lunch at Topsiders, the buffet restaurant on Deck 9. There was an impressive ice sculpture as always, but for the life of me I couldn’t tell you what it was, my mind was focused only on food. I overfilled my plate and secured us a table, waiting for Lisa, who was still contemplating various foodstuffs in the middle of the line, only a token moment before I dug in. As Lisa sat down, an interesting piece of universal justice unfolded out of my sight. A teenager sat down at the table behind us to save the table for his family, who were making their way through the line. A man who had just gotten into line and had seen the lack of available seating in the crowded dining room, went over and lied to the kid, saying he was holding the table for a party of 8. He had made no previous attempt to save it, there was no visible sign that anyone had been there since it had been clean, plus I saw the guy come in out of the hallway. The kid, it turned out, was mentally disabled, and when confronted by this lying stranger immediately yelled “DAD!” at the top of his lungs, so loudly that it drowned out the ships horns. The man folded in on himself, knowing full well what he had gotten himself into but frozen in place by the sheer uncomfortability of the moment. The dad rushed over, bewildered, unaware of what was happening, and the kid repeated, just as loudly as he yelled for his father, the lie the guy had told him about saving the table. The father looked at him incredulously and the man could only sputter a few words of apology mixed with a half-hearted lie about how yes, this was his table but they could have it. They both returned to the line, but one had lost his appetite.

We rushed our way through lunch: it was 1:10 pm when we got there and we had to be down at Studio Sea on Deck 4 for 1:45 to check in for the Panoramic Bus Tour.

Studio Sea was buzzing with chatter about how tired everyone was, how tired everyone will be, and how tempting it would be to nap on such a pleasant bus ride. We would be divided into three buses with a driver and a tour guide for each. We made our way like cattle to the back of the ship, down and off. It had started to rain, drizzle really, and for a moment we all feared the possibility of an open-aired double decker bus, but were comforted when it was revealed we would be in a tour bus with disproportionately large windows.

Our tour guide was a short, genial woman who was candid and frank about everything she described, which made the more dry aspects of the sight-seeing more enjoyable. The port has a wonderful view of Montjuic, so named because it was home to a jewish community some time in the past. The craggy face visible from the port housed a cemetery whose elegance confused us into thinking it might be a living community with its large, opulent mausoleums. There were far more mausoleums than there were tombstones, so that what little there were seemed to be some kind of religious lawn ornamentation. The mountain had been used as the site for the 1992 Olympic Games held there and would be the last stop of our journey, but for now it just stood majestically in the distance as we crossed the bridge into Barcelona.

Most of the tour was conducted from within the confines of the bus, which wasn’t what we had in mind for our own touring, but served its purpose admirably except when the bus drove next to something so close that the side of the bus not sitting next to its window were only able to enjoy the 10 or so visible feet of it without leaning onto the people across from them. This proved problematic for Casa Batllo, which is meant to be taken as a whole but we drove right next to. Our first pass-by, though, was the Placa del Portal de la Pau, home of the monument to Christopher Columbus, the Monument a Colom. Our guide informed us that Columbus’ gesture to the sea is somewhat ridiculous, since he crossed the Atlantic and not the Mediterranean, but the designers felt more people would be confused if he was gesturing away from the water, over land, to his true destination.

The tour along the coast took us past the Face of Barcelona, a sculpture created, like a lot in Barcelona, for the 1992 Olympics. All I remember about it is that the ceramics used liberally in its creation were a tribute to Barcelona’s favorite son, Antoni Gaudi, who used a lot of ceramics in his famed architecture.

I thought these things were just fine, but I was longing for something ancient, something that harkened back to a time before ‘92 and I got it in the form of a cathedral built into a 1000-year old all constructed in the decline of the Roman empire. The picture, unfortunately, captures more cathedral than it does wall, which is perhaps why this girl is dead asleep.

Walking around Barcelona on our own, we would come upon these steep tunnels leading underground alongside the roadways. They seemed to narrow to be used for underground parking since there seemed to be no signs indicating whether it was an entrance or an exit but it turns out that’s exactly what it was for. Barcelona was not designed with cars in mind, so those not lucky enough to snatch up the few parking spaces available above ground (or those without one of the 300,000+ Vespas of Barcelona) make their way underground to park before shopping.

Casa Batllo was the first of the famed Gaudi architecture that we passed by. Remodeled by Gaudi in 1906, the building is built to evoke the skeleton of a dragon, with bony, spinelike balconies and a fantastic roof that we were unfortunately unable to see (well, I was, Lisa was willing to elbow an old man aside in order to see it).

Our next big stop was La Pedrera, finished in 1910, again by Antoni Gaudi. It was the last thing he did before La Sagrada Familia. Its wrought iron balconies have such intricate detail that we mourned the fact we couldn’t journey to its elaborately sculpted rooftop or wander its halls. A lot of the tour was marked by promising glimpses of things we hoped to return to further explore.

Our first glimpse of La Sagrada Familia, down a courtyard, its towers reaching far above the surrounding buildings. The cranes and scaffolding were proof that this was a project still well-under construction. The excitement for this was palpable. In a city of stunning architecture, this was the building that everyone was familiar with, the landmark that’s recalled over all others and here it was, surrounded by a bustling modern city, looking grand and gothic and imposing and elaborate.

We would be taking a 45 minute break here, with a stop into a restaurant for a drink to break up the walk from the Nativity Facade on the east to the Passion Facade on the west. The bus was bustling and anxious, as the tour guide told us to keep an eye out for pickpockets and to ignore the women asking for donations for they were crooks too. I was disheartened that I didn’t have anything in my pocket to pick besides Lisa’s inhaler. The idea seemed so quaint and romantic, like being in a train robbery or hustled on a riverboat. La Sagrada Familia was better than petty theft, though, and when the doors opened we barreled down the steep back staircase in order to be the first to get a picture that wasn’t through the bus window.

The Nativity Facade was so ornate that it was hard to take in all at once and even harder to focus on any given spot. The eye darted from sculpture to sculpture, each fraught with more meaning than the next, the familiar unfolding slowly with realization and the unfamiliar inviting you for further investigation. I took perhaps a hundred pictures of it and I still feel as if I haven’t seen all of it. The talk she gave on it might have been informative, but it was lost on most of us as we gawked skyward. I do know this: the building has been in construction for 190 years (although not continuously, the Franco regime wasn’t too enamored with the project and thus the most recently completed aspect, the Passion Facade, went under construction in the 1950 after a 24 year break following Gaudi’s untimely death in 1926), and the Nativity Facade was the only side completed by Gaudi in his lifetime, in 1904. The Nativity’s three doors represent Faith, Hope and Charity, with the largest center door, Hope (I hope) showcasing the birth of Jesus. I don’t know what half the things in these pictures represent, but I’m driven to explore them further when I return home in hopes of a better understanding when I return.

The walk over to the Passion Facade was interrupted by a short break at El Porxos, a restaurant that I thought would be a tourist trap (and maybe it was) but which was actually quite charming, especially the section around back away from us noisy tourists you had to wander through to get to the bathroom. We drank Coke out of the small glass bottles and I convinced myself that this was the real stuff made with sugar, not corn syrup, mainly because I couldn’t find the Spanish equivalent to corn syrup in the ingredient list.

The break seemed far to substantial as we’d only been outside the bus for 15 minutes at that point, so Lisa and I wandered down the street on our own to check things out. We stood on the corner across from La Sagrada Familia so that the Passion Facade was still hidden from us but the towers were still visible. I don’t know if Gaudi was the inspiration for the word gaudy, it seems all too convenient, but it certainly could apply. While the elaborate design of the facades seems to be in keeping with the subjects they portray, the towers, far removed from the spiritual scenes playing out below, seem to be overdoing it below. There are many things that, taken out of the context of the facades, seem just tacky. I refer specifically to the tops of the spires, which are supposed to represent the different harvests for the different seasons that are analog to the birth and death of Jesus: spring and fall. What this actually means is that at the tops of the towers are giant bundles of corn and berries and the like, in their vibrant natural colors, so that it looks like an elaborate overlay some supermarket paid for as an advertisement. Spiraling up the side of the towers was the word “Sanctus” over and over again, and although the photo doesn’t capture it, the letters were inlaid with sequins so that they shimmered in the sunlight in bright red, yellow and orange, colors you don’t normally associate with the gothic structures they’re pasted on, most likely because it doesn’t look good.

We made our way to the Passion Facade and I have to say I enjoyed this one far more than the Nativity Facade. It was stark and cold, but intentionally, its subject matter demanding it and its execution begging the question of why it isn’t always represented this way. The sculptor on this side was an avowed atheist and though I may be giving him more credit since we’re on the same team, I think it benefitted from it. This facade seems to focus more on telling the fascinating stories than to busy itself with as much reverence as can be crammed in. I was drawn able to take this one in as a whole as well as study each scene individually and most immediately evoked their subject matter and portrayed it in a fitting manner, so sad, so devoid of hope that one longs for the completion of the third facade, the happy ending, the resurrection.

One scene that was particularly puzzling was the two men kissing next to what appears to be a Sudoku puzzle. It turns out that this is Judas kissing Jesus after his betrayal. Unfortunately the snake that appears behind Judas as a symbol of temptation is kind of cut off by the iron fence blocking non-paying visitors, but you can see him on the right of them on either side of the horizontal bar. The Sudoku puzzle is essentially just that, except that if you add the numbers up vertically, horizontally or diagonally, they equal the age of Jesus when he died on the cross.

The scene of Peter’s denial of Jesus is also particularly effective, with the sadness of Peter weighing upon you as you view it. The cock that crowed three times stands behind the suspicious women on the left, one of the many symbols hidden throughout to reward the vigilant.

We loaded onto the bus again and began another tour of the city, passing La Rambla, only visible in the distance. We passed a comics shop in a beautiful building that had cutouts of Hellboy and Anime characters in the balconies above it.

We drove past the Arc de Triomf on the way to Mont Juic. Barcelona’s Arc de Triomf is nowhere near as symbolic as Paris’ and not even as symbolic the ones the Romans constructed to commemorate battles. They built it to celebrate the fact that the 1888 World’s Fair was held in Barcelona. It was here that my camera died. I was able to trick it into producing a few more photos, but only a few.

There was a car expo going on and so the Placa d’Espanya, gateway to Montjuic, was overflowing with Vespas. It was here that we learned that Barcelona has more Vespas (and other motorcycles) than people. Our tour guide lamented the pollution of Barcelona and Lisa and I smiled to ourselves, knowing what true pollution is. USA! USA!

It was here in Placa d’Espanya and into Montjuic that I was able to put a finger on the lingering hesitation to embrace Europe thus far. I had come here to be surrounded by the inconceivably ancient. Back home our history sites date back as far as the 1920s and we’ve perfected the art of evoking ancient architecture in lieu of actually having any. The Place d’Espanya was filled with this kind of architecture: evocative of another time but being clearly of this time. This is acceptable to me in the US but in Europe seems sinister, as if I was tricked into coming here to see history that never happened. One of the few buildings that dated before the 20th century was a bullfighting arena that was plastered with car advertisements and scaffolding. They were turning it into a mall.

The part of me that’s waiting for Rome appreciates the effort that was put forth into making the Olympic Village and the rest of Montjuic look as if it was centuries old, but it also won’t fully embrace it because it is not. I can get that back home, heck, I can get that at Disney World. We missed the Gothic Quarter and most other things the city had to offer that gave a sense of history and I can’t fault the tour since it was, for the most part, quite enjoyable. I just want something different from Europe and I’ll be truly happy once I get it.

We made another stop off the bus at Montjuic at a clearing overlooking Barcelona and the Mediterranean. When I wasn’t desperately trying to get the camera to take one last picture I was enjoying the breathtaking view. It was here that our guide was her most candid. Towering above the city near La Sagrada Familia was a massive obelisk that I was seeing for the first time. She hadn’t mentioned it on the tour and we never drove by it, yet it stood out like a sore thumb (as you can see, it isn’t all that nice-looking a building). Her reaction to my inquiry about it was priceless: she called it the Italian word for penis (sounded like “Suposto”) for its obviously phallic shape and talked in length about how much she hated it and what an eyesore it was. It’s the water company’s building, and since it’s covered completely in glass it uses the most electricity of any other building in the city. The architect who built the eyesore said it was a one-of-a-kind structure, but he had constructed a nearly identical building in England years before. Her disgust was so entertaining I’m surprised she doesn’t incorporate it into the tour.

The bus ride ended with a break from all the talking as we made our way back down the mountain and into the port. Most everyone who wasn’t already asleep went into a coma for the 20 minutes of free time they had.

We were back onboard in time for the mandatory safety drill, where we put on our lifevests and join everyone else on our floor in the designated meeting place. For the first time ever our meeting place was not on deck but inside the ship, in Animator’s Pallette, probably because we were in the cheap rooms and thus would be pushed further in the ship to die like rats while the verandah folks were escorted to safety. The restaurant was a sea of orange ill-fitting vests and the effect was quite comical, probably not the intended effect of a drill designed to save our lives.

We returned to the room to unpack, skipping the first night’s entertainment as we always do. For some reason, and I’d like to say it’s because of my strict packing rules for the trip, everything fit in its right place and all the luggage was able to be stowed without overcrowding. The whole ordeal took way too long, as it always does, and it carried us all the way to dinner.

Dinner was at Lumiere’s, the most formal of the three main dining rooms,where we met up with our tablemates Andy and Laura. They were really nice and at the very least pretended not to be horrified when my naked body came up not once but twice in conversation. We purchased the insanely expensive wine package, something that, knowing full well was way too expensive but was one of the few indulgences I was allowing myself on the trip, became even more insanely expensive through the addition of the VAT tax (reasonable, but still $25) and the mandatory gratuity ($60!!!). We needed the wine just to get over the price. The menu offered the standard bill of fare and a special selection themed to the port of Barcelona. I had the Barcelona menu, which consisted of

cold Sangria soup, which looked exactly and vaguely tasted like a berry yogurt. It was far more delicious than I’m letting on.
Roast Duckling with vegetables I didn’t eat. They didn’t smother it in some citrus sauce so it tastes like a Meat Orange and didn’t want to miss the opportunity to eat a baby. It was really tasty, though I wish they had crisped the skin a little better.
Anise and Saffron pudding, which I was entirely too wary about, but actually turned out to be quite good. Andy described it as a marshmallow that was over the flame a bit too long, which we all agreed was pretty perfect, and we cleared the plate.
Andy and I both ordered the backup Banana Delight dessert, which I guess was a delight if you didn’t like bananas, since the only bananas it had were hidden at the bottom of a mint chocolate chip sundae. Our disappointment was allayed when our server came over and poured a gallon of caramel sauce over it, instantly converting it to the dessert of the night.

Oh, our server! Winston, the exact same server we had on the 10 night Double Dip cruise on our Honeymoon. He pretended to recognize us and that was good enough for us since we were floored at the coincidence (although knowing Disney, maybe it was intentional). I had forgotten that he has kids, and we talked about how he talks to them over webcam everynight and they demand money for Dora the Explorer toys. Since the wireless internet is atrocious onboard (hopefully it’s better for crew members, but then again they’re not paying for it), I gave him the idea to tell them the camera was breaking up. He loved it, told me he would do just that and high fived me for the idea.

We made our way to Diversions, which was supposed to have a Pub Challenge but instead it was just the host by himself playing minigolf while other people watched sports. We got our way out of there after an awkward exchange with the guy. Lisa wanted to go to the couples mixer at 11 pm, but I ducked out as I usually would to write this, In fact, I’m still writing it the day after, battling my dedication to finally chronicling a trip with my dedication to not sleep through it. Sleep won out last night and it’s trying desperately to win right now.

It’s a sea day and then Palermo. That’s when the madness begins.