One fun thing to do pretty much anywhere is to go to a local market. The Mercat St Josep is a huge building filled with food stalls, selling all kinds of fish and meat and veggies. Generally things are much less packaged than you might see at home, so you get closer encounters with fish and whatnot. Plus, there were entire stalls devoted to organ meats. One guy was selling, among other things, skinned heads of some medium sized animal, perhaps lamb. He didn't want me to take a picture, though.

Mushrooms	Rabbits	Hocks

On thursday, we went to Montserrat, an hour or so outside of town. There's a monastery at the top of the mountain with lots of interesting history. The road to the top has been closed for weeks now due to rockslides, so the only way to get up is via a vertiginous gondola ride, which Jackson absolutely loved. Katy was less impressed.



The view from the top is impressive. Unfortunately, I had the camera on ISO 1600 without realizing it, so most of the photos are really overexposed. A few came out ok.

We had a lovely little hike to a cross out on a viewpoint. The most entertaining part of that was probably the cat that was out there. Montserrat has tons of cats that eat the tourist detritus. This cat was absolutely convinced we had goodies for him, so much so that he followed us all the way back to the monastery, a 20 minute hike.



Then we went into the church to see the main attraction, the Black Madonna, a reliquary statue of Mary and Jesus that dates from the 12th century. The legend is that it was discovered on the hillside and not made by someone, and that when they tried to move it it grew so heavy they decided to build a building around it instead. It's shielded in plastic, so photos are hard to get.



Friday, we took the train to Madrid. Train travel is such a pleasure compared to airplane travel. Security x-rayed our bags but didn't require deshoeing or laptop removal or liquid bans or any of the other ridiculousness that characterizes airline travel. We stuck our many bags on the train 15 minutes before departure, because we're paranoid americans afraid of missing the train -- everyone else got on with 5 minutes to spare. The trip was two hours, one stop in the middle. Jackson even slept the last third of it.

One thing it was not, though, was cheaper than air travel. Our tickets were €210 each, one way.

We're staying at a much higher end hotel next door to the Prado museum in Madrid. It will be nice to be downtown, as opposed to the conference hotel in Barcelona, where nothing relevant was within walking distance.

I will summarize the travel parts as follows: SF0->Frankfurt, 11 hours, of which Jackson slept less than 2. I slept not at all. Frankfurt->Barcelona, two hours, Jackson slept 45 minutes, I again did not sleep. Exhaustion level on arrival: high. However, we made it until 6:30, slept for a few hours, ate, then slept through to the morning. Jackson slept straight through.

Since then, he's gone to bed at 7 or so, woken up at 10:30 for a couple hours, then slept again until 8 or 9. So that's really not bad as time change transitions go.

Our hotel room has an unfortunate layout for having a baby, though. The bathroom area is not separated by a door, though the toilet and shower each have their own doors. And, bizarrely, when you stand at the sink, you are looking through a full window where the mirror would normally be at the bed and the rest of the main room. This means that any light anywhere lights up everything, and there's nowhere to go that's acoustically even a little separate. This sucks when your baby sleeps for 12 hours at a time, since that's a lot of time to be quiet. At least reading lights don't bother him, so we can have *some* light.


So, Barcelona! The main attractions in Barcelona are the weird Gaudi architecture, and the lovely Ramblas, the walking district downtown that includes the waterfront and the old medieval city. Let's start with Gaudi (sadly not, as I had believed, the origin of the english word "gaudy").

You can't talk about the guy without talking about the Sagrada Familia. This thing has been under construction for 125 years, pretty continuously, and is scheduled to be done in 2020. There are eventually going to be 18 towers according to Gaudi's plan, and they're apparently still following his plan. Crazy. He worked on the thing for 40 years, including exclusively for the last 15 years of his life. They fund it entirely through ticket sales and donations, which partly explains the length of the project. Though, as our guide pointed out, 135 years is not exactly an uncommon length of time for a major European Catholic church.

One thing they have changed is the construction techniques. You can see the dark stone that dates from the early construction of the thing, paired with the lighter concrete from more recent construction. It's a little jarring, actually. The style of the statuary on opposite sides of the building is also wildly different. We'll have to come back in a couple of decades to see what the finished product will be like, and to get to take a look without all the cranes and scaffolding. It's hard to imagine someone starting a project like this today.

Here's a pic of a pair of gables, or whatever those are, one built in Gaudi's day, and one built in the 70's out of modern concrete:



Gaudi did lots of other stuff, too. I like his complete hatred of straight lines. Also, tons of his work is covered with broken tiles, which I think is an interesting look:



Ok, enough about Gaudi. The Ramblas in the center of the town are lovely, full of performers posing as statues, some of whom will move if you tip them. Evidently the area is also full of pickpockets, as multiple guidebooks and various members of the travel agency have told us repeatedly. There are also people running the ever popular shell game, which somehow still attracts marks despite being a centuries-old scam.



I can't look at those guys without wondering if they're going to get skin cancer from wearing all that paint all day every day. They do a tremendous job of staying perfectly still, though.



The medieval city is lovely and quite big. It's now full of little shops and tapas bars and even a couple of museums, including the Picasso museum. The streets are tiny and twisty and full of old european feel, and provide a remarkable contrast with the wide Ramblas and the open harbor that surround the city.

Today, I'm at WSDM, the conference which provided the excuse for the trip. Listening to the talks is interesting, but not nearly as fascinating as I think they would have been if I still worked for a search engine. Most of the papers are on some little idea that will never impact me as a user, so it feels a little... academic.

I did feel bad for one guy, though, who had a really unfortunate stutter. I am impressed at his bravery in getting up in front of an auditorium full of people and fighting his way through, as in, "When a user enters his query into a search, search, search, hm, search, search... engine!" and so on. He also had a really excellent irish accent, if you'd like to picture him in all his linguistic glory.

We have a couple more days in Barcelona, then a train ride to Madrid and 5 days there.