Barcelona makes amends

well, first off, let me assuage any fears about the swelling of my hand. There were a few questions about it (none from family members, ironically, despite their dominance of the ´comments´space), so I´ll clear it up. I got a bunch of bug bites at Pietro´s and one on the palm of my left thumb got really really huge, and when I woke up in the morning, my palm had swelled up a lot. I should´ve taken a picture, but I took some aspirin instead and it went away. Not really that exciting.

So I think I left you Saturday afternoon in Barcelona. We walked around for a while and eventually made our way to La Rambla, the big street in town. It´s big because they used to sell flowers there, and somehow this made everybody stand around having intellectual conversations. I don´t quite get the connection, but it´s the happening spot now, and it was quite busy on this Saturday night. It´s a bit like Bourbon Street in that you just walk the road people-watching, then turn around and do it again. That and dinner is about all we did Saturday night, but it was a good time. A Saturday night in Barcelona is a good time (probably would´ve been a better time for most of you.)

On Sunday our hotel was ridiculously slow getting around to serving lunch, so we didn´t head into town, via taxi this time, until around 1400. We wanted to see the Olympic village from the 1992 summer Olympics, and it really turned out to be very worth seeing. We saw the basketball arena where the Dream Team won the gold medal and the Estadi Olimpic, originally built for the ´36 Olympics that were moved to Berlin due to the Spanish Civil War and remodeled for the ´92 version. There´s also a big needle-like thing that stretched into the clouds. Not sure what it was, but we were intrigued by it.

The Olympic Gallery is closed weekends (does that make sense at all?), but we had seen a baseball field, since baseball was an Olympic sport, so we wandered down to it. Now it is my belief that no baseball stadium outside of the major leagues is impenetrable, but these Europeans know their security, so I wasn´t sure we´d be able to get in. But the gates were wide open and there were two teams warming up. So we sat and watched for a while, conversing with the only other spectator - a Japanese guy who had spent time in the U.S. and struck up a conversation. We had a great time, and it turned out this was a playoff game. Which is comical because the home team was horrendous (I could have pitched) and the visiting team was from like five hours away. We could only stay for half an inning, but it was entertaining.

So we headed to the FC Barcelona match in the Estadio Camp Nou, one of the biggest stadiums in the world. We weren´t sure where to pick up internet tickets, but we just waited in line with everybody else. I fretted the whole time, and Joe tried to tell me not to worry, but in the end it worked out ... par for the course. The stadium is truly huge, immense, vast, and everything else. And the field (rug, Joe says, since all the fields here are laid down) was in by far the best shape of any we´ve seen. We saw all different types of fans, including two old ladies next to us who were hilarious. There will be pictures to prove it.

Anyway, I´ll try to be brief about the match. Barcelona dominated Real Sociedad 5-0. Ronaldinho has to be the best player in the world, and all five goals were world-class. Ronaldinho set up Mark Van Bommel for a sort of scissors-kick volley for the first goal, then caught everybody by surprise with a 30-yard blast for the second goal. There were brief light problems around halftime, but Ronaldinho turned out the lights (figuratively speaking, of course) with a free kick goal in the second half. Captain Carlos Puyol added a flying header, and my favorite Barca player Henrik Larsson added the last goal, to the delight of a row of Swedish girls wearing shirts to spell out his name. All in all, a perfect atmosphere.

After the game we headed toward a Metro stop with the rest of the world but stopped in a restaurant for dinner. I was surprised it wasn´t totally full, but we had fun. We´re still not exactly sure what Spanish cuisine is ... they´re big on omelettes, which suits me ... but we had fun nonetheless. We checked out La Rambla again, but it was relatively dead, so we headed back to our hotel.

This morning I thought we were catching the early bus, but we were 45 minutes too early, so we took a taxi to the train station, missing the train by about 15 minutes. So bad timing all around, and the next train isn´t until 1206. So here we are.

Next stop: today (hopefully), Andorra la Vella, Andorra
Next game: Wednesday, Champions´League, Stade de France, Lille v. Manchester United (ESPN2)