Lickable Wallpaper

Well it’s been a while! It’s been over six months since we’ve been anywhere of note so we haven’t updated this blog as we wanted to keep it travel related. Things are a lot different than this time last year when we had almost seven months of straight travel ahead of us. Now it’s the occasional holiday, shorter days and Bord Snip cuts that lie ahead, different times indeed! It’s not all gloom though, since coming back to Ireland we’ve moved to Strandhill in Co. Sligo, got married and found work (ish). Our wedding plans kept us going though the winter and everything went perfectly, it was a fantastic day. We felt we’d be pushing it if we went somewhere far afield on honeymoon, so we booked a trip to northern Spain, somewhere that neither of us had been before, and got immersed in Spanish and surrealism for a wonderful week.

We started our trip in Barcelona where we’d prebooked the Jazz hotel for three nights. It was pretty good value (about €100 per night) and had a high rating on trip advisor, but we were a bit disappointed when we got there because it was a bit worn and had a sterile, ‘businessy’ feel about it. We’d stayed in some real hovels when we were away, but wanted our honeymoon to be special so the first thing we did after eating some dodgy tapas across the road was look up some decent hotels and change our booking for the next two nights to the Abac. Good decision.

After a much needed full nights sleep, we went for a stroll around Las Ramblas, one of the main drags of Barcelona. Like the main drags of most other european countries, there wasn’t anything too exciting to see until we got to la Mercat de la Boqueria, a great food market just a stone’s throw from the main street. We wanted to get some real tapas after the previous nights attempt, so headed for the stall with the biggest concentration of locals (it was called Bar Boqueria). After a lot of dishes and a mooch around the other stalls (markets are somewhere we can both spend hours looking around, even when they only sell food!), we got a taxi up to the Zona Alta to our fancy new (expensive!) home for the next few nights, the lovely Hotel Abac.

The Abac is a fifteen room boutique hotel that was built to provide rooms for customers of its two Michelin-starred restaurant; it’s a haven of white and wood and the kind of place you don’t really want to leave when you’re there. It took us a while to figure out how the room ‘worked’, there was only one solid wall for instance, the rest were made of glass and had remote controlled curtains to give you your privacy. The remote also controlled the lighting and heating. The bathroom didn’t have a shower, or so we thought until we found out that the entire ceiling was a rainforest shower. All of the electronic equipment in the room was Bang and Olufsen, the toiletries were Hermes. I’d never been in such a place before, it was a techophiles dream :-)

We ventured down to find the underground spa that we’d read about and found out that it was for the exclusive use of two people at a time. We lounged about on the hot seats, the pool and the fart seats that Riona found a button somewhere for. It was bliss. I could have stayed inside that hotel for the rest of our week and went home happy!

We did get out an explore more of Barcelona though and bought a two day tour bus pass. I didn’t realise how big a city it was, not somewhere you could explore on foot unless you have lots of time. We took in most of the highlights, were a little bit disappointed with Gaudi’s Park Guell but blown away by La Sagrada Familia. We also managed to do lots of good eating – it was one of the aims of our honeymoon. Friends had prearranged dinner for us in a great seafood restaurant, La Bota Fumeiro as a great wedding present and we had a delicious asian tasting menu in Con Gracia that consisted of about nine courses in all, with different wines accompanying a lot of them. After a gluttenous three days in Barcelona, we picked up a rental car and headed north for Emporda, our second port of call.

We’d managed to get this booking right. We’d made a reservation for Castell d’Emporda based mostly on its website and it didn’t disappoint. We paid around €100 per night bed and breakfast which was excellent value. The hotel is a restored castle in the middle of the countryside, about ten miles from the coast. The grounds overlook a beautiful green countryside, something that didn’t meet my sterotype of a dry, arid Spain.

The biggest attraction with the Emporda region is the amount of medieval towns scattered around the place, just waiting to be explored. Most of the ones we came across were almost deserted, it was like being in the south of France without the crowds or the expense.

The north west region of Spain around Girona is probably best known for it’s most famous son, Salvador Dali. We were on the edge of the ‘Dali Triangle’, a trio of museums in three different towns in the area. We managed to visit two of them, his muse Gala’s house castle, Castell de Pubol and Dali’s own museum that he opened himself in 1974 in Figueres.

Castell de Pubol was a place that Dali created for Gala that he put off limits to himself unless invited. The furniture and collections of paintings and other tat are fantastic, they reminded us of a cross between Pablo Neruda’s house in Valparaiso in Chile and Willy Wonka’s Chocolate factory. Gala herself is buried in the crypt of the castle, overlooked by statues of a giraffe, some horseheads and a human torso.

Dali’s Thatre Museu in Figueres contains more of Dali’s work than Gala’s castle, but a lot of other art that he collected also. Because we were running out of time, we visited both museums on the same day which I wouldn’t advise as it’s a lot of weird shit to take in in one day especially with all the giraffe-ladies and doll-heads.

An example of one of the rooms in the museum is the Mae West Room. you can see that the room is laid out as her face, but when you climb up a ladder at one end of the room and look through a large lens, all of the elements come together to give the real effect. It’s pretty cool!

We had a great week in Catalonia. Spain is somewhere that we both want to return to, there seems to be some much to the country once you stay away from the tack and trouble of the resorts. It was nice to practice our Spanish again too. If you’re looking for somewhere that’s reasonable to get to and full of rich culture, great food and fantastic scenery, you can’t go wrong with Catalonia.

Tags: abac, barcelona, castell d'emporda, catalonia, dali, figueres, honeymoon, Spain

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 6th, 2009 at 10:33 pm and is filed under General, Spain. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.