Sunday, 22 April
The metro route I had to take from the airport to my AirBnB wasn't the most convenient, so it took me a while to get there--perhaps in the future I'll choose my first place to stay partly around how many metro changes I need to make. Once I arrived, I was quite pleased--my host is very nice, my room is large and comfortable, and the location is good. (None of these things were surprises, really--the reviews on AirBnB all spoke similarly.)
I changed into more comfortable clothing (I left a cold Denver and arrived in a warm Mediterranean Barcelona) and went for a walk. Good choice. While the basic architecture didn't strike me as radically different from other parts of Spain I've been to, it's never ugly, and it's fun being back among the narrow, non-gridded streets of Europe. Every place that isn't a major road, a plaza, or a park feels kind of like a car-width canyon--look up to see the layers. I'm less enamored of urban living than I was when I was younger, but I still enjoy urban areas like Barcelona, where you can easily tell that most of the city evolved before there was such a thing as an automobile, and the scale remains decidedly human.