I Love Barcelona

I've just got back from a long weekend in Barcelona. Carbon guilty. And we flew with Ryanair, which makes me doubly guilty, as not only does Michael O'Leary treat the environmental issues associated with flying with contempt, he treats his customers and staff in a similar fashion. I hope never to fly with them again - it's worth the extra expense of travelling to a different airport and flying with a mid-cost airline just to have nothing to do with his miserable low-rent business.

But apart from that:

Dozens of hearts! Tons of graffiti! Hell for vegetarians!

Barcelona is a fantastic city, and one I hope to go back to soon - there is way too much to see! I photographed hearts outside Joan Miro's gallery, around the huge ghost-town of the Olympic buildings, on the subway, in the lift to our apartment, on several streets and in several parks, and even inside Gaudi's Sagrada Familia! Graffiti in a church! Crazy!

It is the first city I've been to where I was actually shocked by the amount of graffiti - they7 really do have a problem. The type of graffiti I photograph tends to be small and innocuous, though I do enjoy the artistically stunning 'illustrations' that can be found here and there. What I can't abide is tagging - fair enough, you can write your name, but why write it on the shutter of every shop in a street? If you want to prove you have a bigger cock than the other guy, get it out and show him - nobody else is interested! One of the largest tags on the motorway out of the city was in the shape of a coathanger. Maybe coathangers are cool in Spain - I don't know.


The people everywhere were fantastic - we'd read all sorts of warnings to be wary of taxi drivers, pickpockets, bag snatchers, muggers, but we found people went out of their way to be helpful. I want to learn the language now, too - possibly to help out with plans for a trip to Cuba... Food was a problem - we took a list of vegetarian restaurants in Barcelona, but they weren't often in the same place as we were, and even self catering is hard as food isn't labelled very well. Had we been there for longer we would have found it easier I think, but the Spanish have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to catering for people who care about what's on their plate. I think that's why people have opened specifically vegetarian places to go - to compensate for the lack of understanding of 'sin carne' elsewhere!

Enough about my holiday... I plan my trips now around places where I think a heart or twelve might be found. I fly to New York in a month... I alone will be responsible for an extra degree of global warming. My children will have every right to curse me. I'm going to look at carbon offsetting the whole lot (I know it's knocked, but it's better than doing nothing) though surely being vegan counts for most of it!

The picture above was taken in Joan Miro's park, which was suprisingly run down and rough, but due to be refurbished. I found the face first, and the light on it was delightful, then I looked for a heart. I was determined to find one as I was so pleased with the 'landscape'. This stunning little carving was on a bench right beside the stone ball, as it turned out. It was only later (and too late) that I realised that the camera was still set to 1600 ISO after photographing the Magic Fountains the night before, so these images are very noisy, close up. If it were grain, I'd be happy, but noise adds some ugly colourful speckles. I need to do a test print to see how it looks at full size... and then I'll pretend it was deliberate. Don't tell anyone!