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The Bus in Passeig de Gracia

I found Barcelona immaculately beautiful and yet intimate and non ostentatious. Staying at Passeig de Gracia in Hotel Majestic, the life around seemed colourful and sublime. The octagonal design of buildings gives the intersections a lot of space and the side walks are broad with colourful people all the time. There are benches in which invariably very old couples sit down and chat. each street and lane is also clearly named with the names written at a certain height at each crossing, so that the name stays with us.

the first thing I did was to take a round of the block in which Hotel Majestic is situated. The hotel faces the south on to Passeig de Gracia. To its east is Carrer de Valencia which is fairly loong. To its north is carrer de Pau Claris and the west has Carrer de Mallorca.

The Hotel Majestic block has all the big designer shops like Chanel, Gucci, Chopard, and Armani on the south side. On the side of Carrer de Valencia there are shops like Roberto Verino, eden Lun, Lactucaetc. What is very interesting is that in the block there is a small lane called Passeig de Camps Elisis, perhaps it is named after Champs Elyssees of Paris.

Most of the streets have Maple trees which are pruned from time to time. Unlike Kew gardens, where in the pavements there are massive maple trees, the trees in Barcelona are trimmed. This made the buildings visible, Going further on carrer the Valencia to circumambulate the block, one would find shops like Vodafone, Orange, R. Marisqueria, Lustres, Foto Prix etc. On the side of Pau Claris there are establishments like Pepe, Matel, Santaeu Laria, Moto Armada, Ameteller and Cantander. On Carrer de Mallorca there were names like Caja de Badajoj, Globbe Treasures, Maison Decor and Iber Caja.

The maple trees have circular guards of platforms and within, there are marigold flowers which add a lot of colour. Friendly pigeons keep on ambling around, very relaxed. They know that they are very much a part of the panorama around.

minato-ku

Lovely.
Many people enjoy the Barcelona street life, and I guess we don't mind what we've in this city.
Thanks a lot! :hug:
Where do you come from?

a10! :runaway:

Merci Minato-ku!
:wink2:
C'est bien lire cela que écrit un personne laquelle habite à Paris, une des villes les plus belles du monde.
:yes:
(J'était là le weekend dernier)
:)

I immensely fell in love with Carrer de Gran Gracia
with out understanding why. You could enter into this beautiful road from Passeig de Gracia by crossing the majestic Avinguda Diagonal.

The first thing that surprises you is the intimacy of the road because it is narrow. The balconies and casements on either side are so beautiful that it is difficult to move forward. The rows of houses close in on you like an warm embrace.The designs of railings of the balconies and the coloured glasses used on the window panes are variegated. One has to look skywards to see the buildings as the narrow street does not give you the vantage point.

The second reason is that the road moves uphill, which gives one the feeling of going to a sacred place, going forward on a pilgrimage. I ask myself, " Is there Mother Mary atop on a hillock by the end of the road?"

The third and perhaps the most important reason is that on both the sides of the road we have innumerable shops: dresses, super markets, vegetable stores, sleek wristwatch stores, ice cream parlours and what not. Even the undergarment stores are arranged with artistic beauty. I remember especially one store called "Intimissimi", which has left an indelible mark on me. There is also a cute McDonald on the Carrer in the left side while moving uphill.

The right hand side has small lanes with names that remind you of the experience of pilgrimage: Carrer de Jesus, Carrer de Sant Domenec, Carrer de l'Angel, Carrer de Santa Rosa etc. Going through the narrow lanes at midnight, I came up near the Monastery of Order of Santa Rosa.

Unlike the symmetrical octagonal blocks of Passeig de Gracia, in the Carrer Gran de Gracia the buildings are heterogeneous with different shapes and sizes. Since the plots of lands are relatively small, each building has some unique features. At the end of the road I expected to see a majestic church, but it ended up in a modern road with lots of construction near Placa de Lesseps. There was no end to the pilgrimage really, as it happens in real life.

I visited this lovely road many a times. I was a stranger, no one was known to me, and yet each passer by belonged to my consciousness, my reality. There were parents taking children to school, suddenly some people would come by in bicycles, there now, two very old couple would be walking as if they had all the time in the world! I don't know why, but Gran de Gracia reminds me of an ever-flowing river.

It was only later that I learnt that Gran de Gracia was the main business road of the old district of Gracia. An experience like mine might have prompted Paul McCartney to write in LONDON TOWN:

"People passed me by on my imaginary street,
Ordinary people it's impossible to meet
Holding conversations that are always incomplete.
Well I don't know.

Oh, where are there places to go?
Someone, somewhere has to know.
I'don't know.

Out of work again, the actor entertains his wife
With the same old stories of his ordinary life.
Maybe he exaggerates the trouble and the strife.
Well, I don't know."

Ciao for now, next we would consider Rambla de Catalunya, my second most favourite road.

minato-ku
November 17, 07

Rambla de Catalunya has a promenade at the centre embanked by maple trees.Had not the maple trees been cropped, this promenade could have been canopied at the centre with branches. The floor is tiled and the roads are on either side. The promenade is thus free only for walking. Here again you see women and children in the morning and evening hours. On either side in the buildings there are a large number of excellent coffee houses.
I used to visit two coffee houses in the Rambla, namely Bember and El Glop. Right from morning till night the coffee houses are full and serve good quality coffee with other delicatessen. One could sit down by the bar or take a table near by in the room. Better still, one could go to the side walk and have coffee under garden umbrellas. There umbrellas with people chatting below them give a lots of beauty to the landscape and these scenes are highly photogenic.

On Passeig de Graca there is one Coffee House which is full most of the time. In the pavements also there are book shops which attract browsers all the time. These temporary structures give the roads a festive and colourful aura.

The same type of promenade is there also in the Gran Via, which has a wider central walk, again with maple trees. At different places there are excellent works of art: sculptures in marble and bronze. I found some sculptures at the intersection of Passeig de Gracia and Gran Via very attractive, especially near Edifico Vitalicio. Perhaps it has been a conscious plan to deck Barcelona with works of art over a long period of time.

minato-ku

Is that part of the Rough Guide/Lonely Planet new edition?, hehe, just kidding, well impressed with your words.

Merci Minato-ku!
:wink2:
C'est bien lire cela que écrit un personne laquelle habite à Paris, une des villes les plus belles du monde.
:yes:
(J'était là le weekend dernier)
:)

Perdóname la intromisión, pero me da que te estás confundiendo. Ese que dices es otro forero distinto, que se llama igual pero con un espacio en lugar de un guión, este se ve que es japonés xD

@minato-ku. Very interesting description, thank you! :)

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I don't remember having seen a house in Barcelona with out a series of balconies in each floor. And each of the balcony is a work of art. Innumerable designs, though many of them are small. What has been its utility or use? On occasions, yes, a beloved could stand and communicate with the lover, but in today's context, with vehicles moving on the road, such a possibility could be there only early in the morning, or may be late at night. The only balcony scene we remember is that of Juliet with Romeo below in the play by Shakespeare.

Balcony stirs up a lot of emotions in the mind of poets. One of my most favourite poems, by Baudelaire, opens up like this:

"Mere des souvenirs, maitresse des maitresses,
O toi, tous me plaisirs! O toi, tous mes devoirs!"

A rough translation in English would be:

Mother of memories, Mistress of mistresses,
All I delight in, all I venerate!

A very intimate poem indeed as it moves further. Are these balconies classified and indexed? What are its uses? Which architects have innovated in this area the most? I have taken the above photograph in Rambla de Catalunya, I hope to see more balconies in our forum.

minato-ku

Perdóname la intromisión, pero me da que te estás confundiendo. Ese que dices es otro forero distinto, que se llama igual pero con un espacio en lugar de un guión, este se ve que es japonés xD

@minato-ku. Very interesting description, thank you! :)
Tienes razón, no me había fijado en el guión.
:runaway:
Gràcies NOLKE!!
:wink2:

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Marigold flowers around a Maple tree.

What all things illuminate the architecture? We have beautiful designs, sedate columns, lovely balconies and incandescent stained glass. But sometimes, something small might put its signature to a grand design. When ever I would think of Passeig de Gracia, I would remember the platform around the young maple tree decked with the marigold blossoms. So much colour, so much grace!

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Another fond memory of the same Passeig is the play of pigeons on the beautiful hexagonal tiles of the sidewalk. The birds came very close to my feet and had no fear. Any city, whether it is London or Tokyo, one finds the adorable pigeons. But the ones in Barcelona were the cutest, perhaps because they were few in number.

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This tablet above attracted my attention, though small, it's really beautiful. Mark the sail boat and some pigeons on the right hand side bottom. All these tiny little things add up to the charms of a city.

Not to mention the beautiful Catalonian women smoking cigarettes on the benches and throwing half-smoked sticks on to the pavements. I would always wonder why they don't finish up the cigarettes. Perhaps these cigarette sticks would remind passers by like me that there were some angels around some time back!!

minato-ku

^^You have a very poetic opinion about Barcelona...
:wink2:
Thanks for your image poems!
:bowtie:

Thanks David. Poets in fact are world citizens and the cities with their larger canvas have made the poets magnanimous. As in the case of music, poetry breaks down all the barriers and enters into the human heart.

Standing in front of Antonio Machado's plaque above, I had this sense that I was standing in front of a great living soul. His devotion to his wife and the fortitude with which he dealt with the separation would move any one. I quote below a stanza by Machado:

I have walked down many roads
and cleared many paths;
I have navigated a hundred oceans
and anchored off a hundred shores.

All over, I have seen
caravans of sadness,
pompous and melancholy men
drunk with black shadows,

and defrocked pedants
who stare, keep quiet, and think
they know, because they don’t
drink wine in the neighborhood bars.

Here below is the stanza on his loss of wife:

Lord, you tore from me what I loved most.
Listen again, my God, to my heart's cry:
Your will was done, Lord, not mine.
Lord, my heart and the sea are already alone.

Thanks Catalonia, for producing such a poet. When I was very young,I had read a poem by Rosalia de Castro, called Siesta. It's about a mother and her children. The children play around at mid day and disturb the tired mother's siesta. When the mother gets angry and asks them to calm down, the children scatter out of the room, like "the beads of a broken rosary." This image has been so powerful that it has remained for the last 30 years with me. Could any one put the poem in these pages, in any language: Spanish, English, French or Galician?

I have requested some of my friends in Spain, but no one has been able to help.

minato-ku

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The Most Beautiful Image

The above photograph happens to be the most beautiful image I captured in Barcelona. It is on the promenade in Gran Via near the Gran Via-Passeig de Gracia intersection. On the background one could see the Edificio Vitalicio, a magnificent building.

To put such a beautiful sculpture on the promenade for all to view is a generosity which is rare. The face of the image reminds me of Diego Velasquez's Venus at her Mirror (1644). In this Venus of course we do not see the face, we see it reflected on the mirror held by cupid.

If and when my friends go to Barcelona I would advise them to see the image. On a similar occasion the poet Ezra Pound had advised T.S.Eliot to see the sculpture of a girl in Italy. After seeing the sculpture in Italy, T.S.Eliot wrote a very beautiful poem on it called La figlia che piange. It is reproduced below:

La Figlia Che Piange (The Weeping Girl)

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair -
Lean on a garden urn -
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair -
Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise -
Fling them to the ground and turn
With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

So I would have had him leave,
So I would have had her stand and grieve,
So he would have left
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,
As the mind deserts the body it has used.
I should find
Some way incomparably light and deft,
Some way we both should understand,
Simple and faithless as a smile and a shake of the hand.

She turned away, but with the autumn weather
Compelled my imagination many days,
Many days and many hours:
Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.
And I wonder how they should have been together!
I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
The troubled midnight, and the noon's repose.

-- T. S. Eliot

minato-ku

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The image above is placed at the intersection of Avinguda Diagonal and Rambla de Catalunya. Its very impressive and seems a lot like a baroque sculpture. perhaps it is a giraffe. Whether its on the roads or in shops, I found lots of interesting sculptures.

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The image above is a very beautiful fountain in which the water springs from the top of the head and goes down to the pebbles around the neck. Very ingenious indeed for a sculpture.

minato-ku

Your words are very beautiful :), they make me proud of my city.

But Antonio Machado is not catalan, in fact he was from sevilla but his poems about the castilian fields are his best known verses. He died close to Catalonia, though, just across the frontier in a french beach. As you may know, many spanish refugees were interned in camps at the end of the spanish civil war. The situation of the refugees was terrible, Machado saw his mother die from hunger and illness, and only three days after, in a beautiful village called Colliure.

Thanks Henry. Machado has been a very strong claimant to a high pedestal in world poetry. his loneliness and solitude apart, he has also had an European status being exposed to the great French poets at the fin de siecle like Paul Verlaine and Mallarmé etc. Seville, Madrid, Paris, Barcelona and then, crossing in to France to depart finally in 1939. My regard for him stems from his intense attachment to his wife.

I find his life very similar to someone like Shelley, the English romantic poet. In a city's architectural firmament, the invisible monuments are perhaps these artists and poets who might have spent a short time in their sojourn in a city. While walking through Rambla de Catalunya, I was always reminded of the incredible genius of Salvadore Dali as his father had come over to the city and was staying in ahouse in the street.

Thanks for your comments

minato-ku

There is an ultra-modern face of Barcelona with glass and chrome, many of these structures have come near the Airport. I found the starry ceiling of Hotel Renaissance very imaginative and fascinating:

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Even on the floor the starry effect is given:

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These new things really surprise us and yet these are beautiful.

minato-ku

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A Restaurant in Barcelona

Restaurants are fabulous in Barcelona and eating is an experience in slow motion. You have all the time in the world, and everything is to be shared; not only the food but also the thoughts, experiences and opinions.

Dining is a reverie which opens up an window to the future- the life ahead with its challenges and its plans.

The immediate is also important; the food on the table, the children around, the sounds and voices from other tables which is meaningless and yet the emotions come through with clarity. So much to share and so much to imbibe.

minato- ku