The services we render to our family and friends can run in all different kinds of ways: watch their cats. Water their plants. Help move a couch. I’ve done all of those more than a couple of times. What I’d never been asked to do was to take a day trip to Barcelona to collect something and bring it back home to Braga. It’s nice to experience new adventures, right?! So what, you may ask, happened? (By the way, the picture is a total cheat from another trip to Barcelona, because I barely stopped to take any pictures.)
So, Lisa’s mother is an artist who has worked in numerous mediums and formats throughout her life. One of these is photography; we had her work hanging in our home for years and years (only stopping because of the great divestiture before moving to Portugal). Somehow – I do not know this part of the story – she developed a relationship with a gallery in Barcelona: Fotonostrum and they have displayed at least three of her photos as parts of exhibitions. However, at the conclusion of the exhibitions there have been attempts to ship the photos to her home in San Francisco and it just never seems to happen. Recently, we were told that the latest exhibition that included her work had come to an end, and they needed to leave the gallery by the end of May or they would “go into storage.” Yeah, storage in a nice farm upstate. Rather than try and sort out mail or courier options that had been fruitless for months, we decided to try a different approach.
And thus it was that I took the most curious ramble yet. I started by catching a 6:30AM bus for Porto. If you haven’t cottoned to it, bus travel in Portugal as compared to the US is a lot like the differences in train travel. Here, it’s relatively inexpensive, widely available, and generally a clean and pleasant experience. The next segment of the trip was my favorite, for reasons other than the amenities. I caught a direct flight on Vueling, a low-cost airline I had never heard of before. They were about the same as the others, with cheap base tickets that get more expensive pretty quickly if you add features, and flights for which “no-frills” is a pretty reasonable description. So what was my excitement all about? For the first time since we moved here, I finally took one of these flights with no additions. Normally we’re at least traveling with some luggage, and maybe care about what seats we’re sitting in (like, two seats next to each other at a minimum). But all I had this time was a backpack that fits under the seat. And it’s just me, put me where you want. It was great! The fifty-euro ticket actually was a fifty-euro ticket.
Barcelona airport is easy enough to navigate and I hit the curb with little difficulty, and caught a cab. (I would have gone public transport but I was on a schedule and, shockingly, the signs were in a language I understand even less that Portuguese.) Then the hose kinks start appearing. Fotonostrum was changing locations soon, but the address that I harvested from the email signature of my contact person was for their new, still-unused location. Who does that? Well… Spanish artistic types do, apparently. So, a second cab is hailed and the old location is achieved. Interesting side note: Barcelona is still a city of taxis. I don’t know if they’ve got laws limiting rideshare services but this was classic, New York-syle cab hailing and it never took much effort. I was pleased and surprised.
There’s a clock ticking in the background. I have a 3:30PM reservation for a train, but if I get my business tended to I could catch an earlier, 1:30PM, train. That appeals to me greatly. Why a train? While two of the photos are rolled and in a tube, the third is mounted and can only be transported flat as-is. We just didn’t trust baggage handling (or overhead compartments) to preserve the photo, so settled on the train as a viable alternative.
So, tick tock. Even with the delay of an extra cab ride it’s still only about 12:15 and the gallery is approximately 20 minutes from the train station. It takes me an embarrassingly long time to figure out where the door to the gallery is, despite having an accurate address, but eventually I get in and speak to a nice, artsy Spanish youth…. who explains to me that my contact is currently conducting a press conference(!?) and nobody else knows what I was talking about. In their defense (and my amazement), a press conference actually is going on in the gallery, which impressed me. Good on the Spanish for lavishing such attention on a little gallery of no particular import that is discussing their move to a new space.
My hopes for a timely exit dwindle, and I rummage for a place to eat. I settle on Pizza Local where, despite the name, what I had was a “straciatella with burrata” that was mind-blowingly good. Sadly the photo is “nom medias res” but the idea is a layer of burrata that covers the entire plate evenly, then drizzled with oil and seasonings. This is used as “dipping sauce” so to speak for fresh-baked flatbread. Woof. Post lunch a very nice woman at the gallery promptly hands over the tube and the mounted photo… at about 2:00PM. Alas. We’ve been to Barcelona Sants train station before, although this time I’m just passing through. Boarding the train was easy enough, and as a high speed train we were flying through the Spanish countryside at just under 300kph. Wheee!
The next kink in the hose is that my train terminates in Madrid and I catch another one to get to Vigo. That train goes out of a different station, but the train operator’s website implies that they have purpose-made transfer busses between stations. Whether that’s a lie or just the signs were in Spanish is up for debate; what I know is that I couldn’t find the bus, my train had been running about a half hour late, and I had 45 minutes to figure it out or I’d be spending the evening in scenic Madrid. Several “what the hell let’s see what happens!” decisions later, I sit down in my seat with about 3 minutes to spare. Fun! Fortunately, after this the only adventure was when there was only one seat left on the bus from Vigo to Braga and they didn’t take cash, so I had to scramble to get a ticket on their website. As I am writing this in my office in Braga, you can guess how that turned out.
All told, the trip took about 19 hours, which is honestly not that bad in my opinion given how much was packed in. The photos made it safely and now await the arrangement of the last leg of their journey, back to the United States.
