“From Paris to Berlin and every disco I go in…” Barcelona historical museum and the aquarium

Ian roused me at 2am to shower and dress for a morning of tripping the light fantastic! In preparation, Ian chow-ed soymilk-saturated Fiber One from a bowl-shaped disposable piece of plastic which he saved from the clutches of an Airbus-340 wastebasket. In our dancing best, we trotted down to the lobby, where the night concierge attempted to get us into a posh but regretfully informed us that it was just too late and the queue was just too long.

Undaunted, we took to Las Ramblas. Cerveza sellers and mobs of pedestrians couldn’t deter us from stumbling upon a short waiting line into Jamboree at Plaça Reial. Here in Barcelona, night crawlers were not so rowdy compared to, say, late night college kids prowling Ibor City. We did encounter a bit of a hiccup when Ian realized that he had no forms of identification on hand. We trotted our dancing shoes back to the hotel and at 3:30am reappeared at the Jamboree doors with our driver’s licenses and 9 € apiece carga de la entrada.

Inside this jazz turf-by-day turned dance scene-by-night were a downstairs and an up; music rocked both venues, but the siren-call of the first floor’s 80s music, disco ball, and stage drew Ian from the safety of the basement into the perilous, rocky edges of the DJ’s headache-inducing strobe light. Still, we managed to dance it out until closing time at 5am, enjoying such favorites as I Like the Way You Move and I Want to Break Free. After reclaiming our possessions from the coat check (we were, by the way, completely overdressed for the tee shirt and jeans assembly), we strolled, in the fresh night air, south on La Rambla, where throngs of partiers were still making their ways to and from their places of amusement.

When we arrived there, the Maremagnum was closed, as denoted by a motionless, clear expanse of water across which during daylight hours stood a traversable bridge. Now it was up, leaving us to face our reflections at our feet and the gastronomic-entertainment giantess of the Maremagnum within swimming distance. Lacking bathing suits and chutzpah sufficient for diving into Barcelona’s port waters, we moved along, ultimately discovering the long way around. As a wise movie character once said, “We walk from here.” For that chore, I kicked off my heels and pattered alongside Ian’s stride, which was stunted by a left foot ache—an unhealed wound from an earlier battle in another country with a whole other pair of peculiarly rounded sneakers. We got the lay of the land and hobbled back mainland. To conclude our Maremagnum march, we enjoyed a waterside walk, sat on a bench under a gently clouded sky, and talked by the waterside.

By 8:00am, we were hotel-home, showered, and sleeping. 1pm woke us up (just in time for siesta, had we chosen so). Ian Skyped Corey, who, it turned out, was awake at 4am Pacific Coast Time, that weirdo. We headed out with only vague ideas of which museums we hoped to visit, stopped to enjoy a tapas lunch en el mostrador (at the counter) at cafeteria-pizzeria Estruch, and landed on the steps of a former Royal Palace courtyard beside Institut de Cultura: Museu D’Història de la Cuitat, Conjunt Monumental Plaça del Rei (Great Royal Palace), where a guitarist’s amplified tunes filled the space between the buildings and tourists’ change filled the guitarist’s collection case. This courtyard was likely the same in which Ferdinand and Isabella greeted Colón.

The museum’s gate opened at 3pm, pursuant to the two-hour midday break custom. We procured tickets, secured our bags in 0,25 € key lockers, picked up handheld audio tour devices that were programmed for the Catalan-impaired (English, I’m talking about), and were on our way. After we skimmed at a few displays on the old Roman way of life, an elevator dropped us down to an excavation site containing archaeological remains of old-time Barcelona—from those days when La Rambla street was la rambla (river), separated from the Cuitat Vella (Old City) by a large wall, when aqueducts wend beneath the streets and large metal gates kept one section of the city safe from another. Fact of the day: lime and urine were once used to clean laundry, proving that Romans overestimated the power of citrus to overcome the influence of human waste liquid. Let us do not as did the Romans.

Again we revisited the Harborfront, this time to patronize L’Aquárium. While my favorite swimmers, the jellyfish, scarcely made a showing and Ian preferred those cartilage-filled menaces of the ocean, sharks, the day’s show-stealing award went to a single Humboldt penguin who playfully struggled to swim downward against the buoyant forces created by his blubber.

Advancing an international inquiry into the homogeneity of carnivorous diets in the cross-cultural spectrum, Ian conducted in situ experimentation by feasting on a rubbery, flat, salty, aquarium cafeteria-retailed burger with a sour green tomato. That “meal” was followed up with a more fitting cena on the terrace of Mandongo, a higher-up floor restaurant at Maremagnum. Breezes on this the first even slightly chilly night on the Mediterranean ushered us back to the hotel for showers (I pulled double duty by bathing not only myself but also my quick-drying laundry) and early retirement around midnight, as we hoped to align ourselves with the local time for tomorrow evening’s tour kickoff.