How to get to La Sagrada Família on a six-hour Barcelona layover

After Clara and I booked our recent trip to Rome, the airline changed our flight times and we ended up with a six-hour layover at the Barcelona airport on our way back. This airport is beautiful and calm and not a bad place to spend six hours if you want to get some work done*, but on this particular trip we wanted to make it into Barcelona proper to see at least one sight: Gaudí's masterpiece basilica, La Sagrada Família.

Our first leg landed at noon and our second was due to depart at about six pm, so we had almost exactly six hours to make it to and from the city center. The internet was not very helpful in telling us how to get there, so I'm sharing what we learned in hopes it will benefit someone else. What follows is how we spent our time, hour by hour:

12:00-12:30: Get off the plane and follow signs for public transit.
We were aiming for a bus, but found ourselves at the metro: this turned out to be a great discovery as the metro connection to the airport seems to be relatively new.

You'll need two Aeroport-metro tickets per traveller: one for the way there and one for the way back. As of this writing, each ticket costs €4.50.

12:30-1:30: Take the metro to the Sagrada Família stop.
To do this you can take the L9 Sud line all the way to Collblanc, where you ascend an infinite sequence of escalators to transfer to the L5. Take this line to the stop called Sagrada Família. We found it helpful to pass the time with games and snacks.

1:30-2:00: Eat lunch.
We got cheese, bread, fruit, nuts, and chocolate at a grocery store about a block from the Sagrada Família metro stop and ate it on a park bench. For two people for lunch it was about 10-15 euros, not bad and very speedy!

2:00-3:00: Bask in the amazing church.
You don't want to skimp on this step.

3:00-4:00: Return on the metro the way you came.
Take the L5 line to Collblanc, then transfer to the L9 Sud and go all the way to the terminal where you originally entered: For us it was Terminal 1, the last metro stop on the line. It's extra important to hold onto your metro ticket for the return trip, because you'll need to feed it into a machine both when you enter at Sagrada Família and when you leave at the airport.

4:00-6:00: Your two hours at the airport before departure.
Congratulations! You've made it there and back again.

What made this possible: We entered the basilica via the very short timed-ticket line by booking our tickets in advance. The tickets are for fifteen-minute entrance windows (we selected 2pm, so could enter anytime between 2:00 and 2:15), so we did some serious calculating trying to figure out the earliest time we could be reasonably confident of being there. Our flight was actually a half-hour late—we were supposed to have a 6.5-hour layover—so we're glad we included as much wiggle room in our estimate as we did.

*We know the Barcelona airport is so nice because our voyage to Rome had the same six-hour layover. Clara filmed one of her videos there in a spacious and nearly empty waiting area with amazing natural light, and I got a lot of work done on my applications.

Utah in July

—guest post by Owen

I'm spending the month of July at a giant once-every-ten-years conference in Salt Lake City, my first time back in the United States since moving to the Netherlands almost two years ago.  There have been experiences in every quadrant of the pleasantness/familiarity square:

• pleasantly familiar: choice in grocery stores!
• unpleasantly familiar: terrible-looking asphalt roads.
• unpleasantly unexpected: lack of shade on the University of Utah's wide-open campus. 

Not pictured: the sun beating down relentlessly on every living thing.

But nothing has been so unexpectedly pleasant as the scenery.  Having heard about the Great Salt Lake, I imagined the environment of Salt Lake City to be the geographical equivalent of hard-water stains in the sink.  But it is actually quite beautiful, as I hope this photograph-laden post will convince you.

At a high elevation, there's not much atmosphere protecting you from the sun's rays, so it's easy to burn in the overhead sunlight.  A thin atmosphere also means, however, that it gets quite cool in the morning and evening, so a lot of people at the conference took the opportunity to hike up into the mountains on whose foothills the university rests.  Here's what we saw on one such trip:

From up here you can make out the Great Salt Lake in the distance.

This is the view looking the other way along the mountain ridge.

This past Saturday, several of us rode the earliest possible public transit to get to the Mt. Olympus trail.  The trail is only 3½ miles long, but none of us realized exactly how steep it would be: in fact, Mt. Olympus is the mountain to the left of center in the picture above!  After a few hours, we decided we hadn't brought enough supplies to make it all the way up, so we turned back after taking a group picture at the height we did attain:

The walk back to the bus stop was long and hot in the midday sun, but stopping to rest gave me the chance to photograph this guy, who is about as long as my index finger:

I want to close by showing pictures from two of the local attractions: Red Butte Garden ("Butte" is pronounced like "beauty" without the "-y") and its next-door neighbor, the Natural History Museum of Utah.

Red Butte contains so many different types of gardens, the two times I went I didn't see anything twice.  There's an herb garden, a rose garden, a medicinal garden, a five-senses garden especially for kids... all with signage that succeeds at being simultaneously informative and discreet.  There are places to wander on trails and places to sit under boughs of wisteria.

Some of the plants blew me away with their beauty, like these Blue Glow Globe Thistles:

And these miniature delights of whose name someone will have to remind me:

Then there's the natural history museum: it's located in a really well thought-out space, with interactive exhibits dedicated to the history of the earth (and especially Utah), the flora and fauna that are native to the region, and the indigenous peoples whose culture is still alive today.

But the star exhibit is the collection of dinosaur fossils!  I have never seen so many complete skeletons arranged in such stirring poses.  Some even swayed with the subtle currents in the air.

The fossils suspended in plates of rock are also beautifully arranged:

Several exhibits tried to give you the flavor of what it would be like to participate in an archaeological dig.  Here's a photo of a room where you could try to match cards to the grid squares beneath you, as if mapping an excavation.

I leave to fly back to the Netherlands on Saturday.  I'm so glad to be getting back to the home that I love, but I didn't think there would be so much here to miss too.  Thanks for reading!

Rotterdam Redeemed

—guest post by Owen

Until a couple of weeks ago, I had only negative associations with the name "Rotterdam."

• Rotterdam is the setting for the unhappy beginning of the Ender's Shadow series by Orson Scott Card. This series also led me to mistakenly believe Rotterdam was in Belgium.
• Our trans-atlantic shipment of household goods was held hostage in a Rotterdam warehouse for two months.
• Our trip to Prague fell through because our flight out of the Rotterdam airport was canceled.
• We were once nearly stranded in Rotterdam overnight because Dutch public transit stops at 8pm on New Year's Eve. (Kudos to my amazing family for being so chill through that unexpected part of the adventure.)
• And on top of it all, "Rotterdam" starts with "rot." (It doesn't actually mean "rot." In fact, the name "Rotterdam" comes from a word meaning "mud.")

But none of this is Rotterdam's fault. So I'm pleased to report that our latest intra-Netherlands excursion (incursion?) has lifted the mental stigma I've attached to Rotterdam in the past.

It started when a friend of Clara's noticed that one of the entries on a list of beautiful libraries was in the Netherlands. "Have you been?" she wanted to know. No, we hadn't, but a little digging turned up that it wasn't too far away, so we filed the idea away for later. A couple weeks ago, we had a Saturday free, and decided to go.

Photo from bustler.net

This amazing library—the Boekenberg, or "book mountain"—is in a suburb of Rotterdam called Spijkenisse. Here are some pictures from our trip:

Our first trip on the Dutch metro system we didn't know existed. It goes all the way from the Hague to Rotterdam!

The outside of the Boekenberg.

The top floor is a study area where we read Our Town together.

The inside of the mountain has rooms for reading, like this children's section.

Elsewhere in Spijkenisse, we saw our first example of yarn-bombing in the wild.

We also caught this beautiful rainbow.  Our cries of "Kijk naar de regenboog!" did not seem to excite passers-by, though.

We explored a bit of downtown Rotterdam as well.  The cranes are so beautiful.

The architecture is beautiful too.

That's it for today! Thanks for reading. Have you ever been pleasantly surprised by a place you'd put off visiting?

Plantin-Moretus: a Printing Museum in Antwerp

Last month Owen and I went to Antwerp. A friend of ours was presenting at a conference and had sent us a strange little "I'm going to be really close to you but there's no way for me to actually come visit you, bummer" message on Facebook, and that seemed like the perfect excuse to take a weekend trip to Belgium, and so for an extremely reasonable train fare, and a happy couple of nights in a AirBnB apartment, we had an exciting adventure and a delightful time visiting a friend from home. There are a lot of things I could tell about Antwerp: it's beautiful central markets, its enormous and exquisite cathedral, its incredible train station, the excellent bike rental system, but the thing I most want to talk about is the printing museum.

the two presses in the back are the oldest in the world

Growing up I knew more about historical printing than most children. My father is an art professor and although it is not his specialty, he has taught both typography and printmaking from time to time. More than once I helped him print etchings, an impressive process involving soaked paper, an inked metal plate and an actual old-school press which rolls the sandwich of paper and metal through sufficient pressure to press the paper into all the inky scratches on the metal plate. It's a finicky job, and requires two people, one with clean hands to deal with the paper, and one with dirty hands to deal with the ink, and I loved it.

a bilingual printed text

In graduate school I learned a lot of things about the printing process, and the sale and importance of books in the time of Shakespeare. We folded up paper into quartos and sixteenmos, listened to Tiffany Stern talk about how the paper props were likely given separately from the rest of the script to the printers. We became familiar with secretary hand, got to know different printers and their particular stamps on their pages, we even had a project where we had to write a paper making sense out of all the books sold alongside a Shakespeare play at a bookstand in London in a given year, all things we can do with even a small library, thanks to the powers of the internet, and a few good resources. I wrote my MFA thesis about the power of books, paper and stories in their world and in ours.

geeking out

With all this love of books and their printing, I was excited to visit the Plantin-Moretus Museum, but not nearly as excited as I should have been. I do not know if I have ever enjoyed a museum so much, and if you've read this blog at all you may know I take inordinate joy in museums. The Plantin-Moretus told the story of a printing family business, a friendship with Rubens, enough wealth and hubris to make anyone laugh, (for instance, gilded Italian leather wall coverings) but also careful and meticulous insight into every step of the printing process.

uncut pages with editing marks in the margins

As you walk from room to room, you enter various places of work. There's the type room (where the type is, to this day stored in careful boxes) and the room for the setting of the type, and a full of presses. The room for the editing (big boothed table by large windows for the light), the shop where the books were sold, the foundry where the type was made, and no end of beautiful libraries. You can pour over books in Dutch, books in English, books in Latin or Greek, or printed Arabic scripts. Beautiful manuscript volumes, tall, narrow account books, a five language bible in many volumes, and giant atlases. This printing house put out some of the earliest of illustrated scientific works covering anatomy, botany, astronomy all studied like never before. It wasn't just the printing presses they own, including the two oldest presses in the world, it seeing all those tools for every piece of every task, which was just astonishing. The process seems so careful, so meticulous, with so many pairs of hands involved from start to finish.

Today's tools are so much more complex, and yet also so user friendly that even though I haven't any clear idea about the workings of my computer or even of this website, things are set up so that I can click the "publish" button whenever I choose. It makes me wonder, where is craftsmanship in online writing? Does it lie wholly in the writing style? And how to the material objects used to read text today (my computer screen, or a smart phone or whatever) affect the material read? What about laying text in a blogpost? Do people have more or less control over their words now? How does range of readership affect these questions? In the last week I've had more pageviews on my blog from the Ukraine than from the US, and I am very curious: who are you readers in the Ukraine? What do you find interesting in my writing? And to anyone reading, what do you find compelling about books? About the act of reading? It's been nearly a month and I am still wondering.

Switzerland Part 4: Around Lake Geneva

—guest post by Owen

This is the last post in our series on our recent trip to Switzerland; here are part 1 (Geneva), part 2 (Lausanne), and part 3 (Gruyères and Le Moléson), but you don't have to read them first.  On the day after we ascended Le Moléson with our friends Chris and Yordan, they found a great deal on a rental car and we made a road trip around Lake Geneva past vineyards and castles, into France, and back through Geneva to Lausanne.

Just minutes outside of Lausanne, the view became this:

The Lavaux Vineyard Terraces are a Unesco world heritage site.

Chris and Yordan had to laugh as Clara and I began to repeat "It's so beautiful..." every few minutes, which we kept up for the rest of the trip.

Between cities, the road became quite narrow.

And even in the small towns, it stayed narrow and just got more twisty!  Up and down, left and right—we were so glad Chris was driving.

Who could drive onto that little ledge?  Fortunately we went off to the right.

We stopped to get out in Vevey, where there was an inter-city boating event and an associated fair on the waterfront.

Chris, Yordan, and Clara set off to sample the food.  Chocolate chip waffles, anyone? Yum.

We strolled along the waterfront enjoying the scenery.  The view over the water showed the next leg of our journey: around the tip of Lake Geneva and crossing into France.

Apparently these rocks have holes drilled in them so that in the warmer months there can be chairs.

The border crossing was totally uneventful, and we stopped in a park in Évian to eat our picnic lunch and look back across the water at Lausanne and Vevey:

Évian is the source of the eponymous bottled water.

From there, we continued to Yvoire, a little old town on a pointy peninsula.  We were expecting something like this:

What we were surprised to find, was this:

Apparently Yvoire was having its own festival that day: people were in costume head-to-toe everywhere you looked, and you could buy your own carnival-style mask as you entered, if you wanted to join in.  The town was even quainter than we'd expected though, with flowers and old stone walls defining a maze of pedestrian-only streets:

From there, the rest of the road trip passed quickly.  We rounded the other end of Lake Geneva by passing through Geneva itself:

We'd just been there!

It was strange to whiz through a city we'd spent hours in a few days before and would be taking the train back to a couple days later.  But onward we went, and returned safe and sound to Chris and Yordan's apartment in Lausanne.

It probably looks like this every evening.

Thanks for reading this series on Switzerland!  Been on any fun road trips yourselves recently? Anywhere we must go or anything we must see next?  Tell us in the comments!

Switzerland Part 3: Gruyères and Le Moléson

On Saturday we went to Gruyères, the small town known for its exceptionally delicious cheese. Our friends came with us and since they had already explored the old town, they enjoyed a mineral bath while we went to the castle. This post is mostly going to be pictures, but just so you don't get lost I'm dividing it up into two sections. PART ONE: old town and castle.

The old town is exceptionally cute.

 

With exceptional views.

 And this delightful castle!

We spent a really long time in the castle. First because we didn't realize how much it held, and then because everything was so much fun to see we couldn't stop looking. 

Including every view out of every window

And dramatic pieces of history!

This center courtyard is just beautiful

The interior was also really spectacular, parts of it still decorated from various centuries. For a while the castle was sold to a bunch of 19th century artists of the Romantic era, so one of the rooms is covered with flowery pastoral murals. This room (the knight's room) has instead violent historic murals.

With a big table for feasting. Or discussing the next battle.

How the ladies of Gruyères drove away the attacking armies with flaming goats

PART TWO: Going up Le Moléson. If we were tough people or in better shape or owned hiking boots on this continent, we would have climbed up the mountain, but we didn't. We took the funicular train, (which is basically like the first part of a rollercoaster, a little train that goes straight up the side of the mountain), and then a cable car (for when the angle is just too steep).

Getting into the funicular!

And I'm gonna try to go easy on the pictures from the cable car, but it's tough, as Owen was the one snapping pictures, and I was falling over myself looking out the continuous windows of the glass box we were inside. 

Why am I this happy? 

Because this is what I get to see.

When we got to the top of the cable car there was still a bit to climb and I was eager to make it to the very top, so I raced ahead of everyone else. 

taking time to look back across the magnificent views

I was already eating pretzels by the time everyone joined me. I think I've eaten pretzels at lower altitudes on airplanes. Our sweet friends were disappointed about the clouds on our behalf, saying "the peaks beyond those clouds are much higher than we are here, shame you can't see the whole view." Owen responded with, "so you're saying the clouds are conspiring to make us feel like we are on the top of the world? That's okay with me." We had been afraid the heavy morning clouds would prevent us from making a trip up at all, so we were absolutely delighted it became so clear. 

A hiker took this picture for us.

After soaking it all in for a while, we headed back down. Cablecar to the midway point, and then on foot the rest of the way down.

Dutch cows have less developed leg muscles than the Swiss. 

Owen's written the other three blog posts, so I just want to say what a pleasure it was to spend time with our friends in Switzerland. It doesn't seem at all fair, and we don't feel like we deserve it but we are heavy with gratitude for all the opportunities we're having. Thanks for coming along for the pictures. If you'd like postcards from our next adventure, let us know!