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Howdy, Gaudí!
Barcelona is Gaudí's city, even more than Philadelphia is Ben
Franklin's city, but B would be a great city even without
Gaudí. Wide boulevards, sea, low mountains, and thanks to
a building boom in the 1890s, gorgeous buildings with fantastic
architectural decorations. A completely elegant city but only 4-5
stories high, for the most part.
Fair warning: I'm about to gush about
Barcelona. Hyon loves it too (even after the incident), and we both believe
we could live here happily. Nice beaches.
Signs are in that pesky Catalan
language, but most
people also speak Spanish, if not English. "Fred" means "fresh"
or "cool" in Catalan, so I can't complain too much. (Side note to my
kids: Ha, and you never thought your dad was cool!)
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The Catalan art tradition (Picasso, Miró,
Gaudí, Dali) bends reality, making B a city that is predisposed
to flexibility and change. It is unthinkable that any student of
design or architecture should fail to make a pilgrimage to
Barcelona. The bars seem filled with 20-something women; where
are the young men?
There's lots of space for rent here.
Multicultural vitality, good public transportation, nice weather, and
safely drinkable tap water. What more could you want?
Readers in your 20's, my advice to you is, come here to make your
fortune. Male readers in your 20s, come here to make a fortune
and find a mate. If I were in my 20s, I'd do that (whoa, Hyon,
I'm talking about fortune, not mate). I still might. |
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Some of the entrepreneurship activity has shifted to
Madrid, especially companies needing special central government
approvals,
or a greater variety of investment services. However, Barcelona
was traditionally more entrepreneurial, and in the part of Spain that
has more interaction with the rest of Europe. (Much of the
current prosperity comes from recent sale of generations-old but still
vital family companies to multinational concerns.) The only fly
in the ointment is the Catalan secession movement, which creates a
Quebec-like uncertainty. |
On the Costa
Fortuna. Exquisite shops, but too expensive.
Actually it's called the Costa Brava, and the costa fortune joke is not
really fair (except for the incident):
Taxis are cheap in Barcelona, and so is the interesting and tasty
food. Come to B to eat (tapas at Tapa Tapa or Moon; try the
Estrella Damm lager on tap) and to look.
We stayed at the Suite
Gaudí Catalunya, just on the mountainward extension of La Rambla
proper. Affordable, clean and charming, though a bit
claustrophobic and certainly not luxurious.
An Irish girl in the
next room came into the lobby with a big bag from Zara. My
question, "Good shopping?" nearly brought her to tears; she said, "The
first day of my holiday and I've spent nearly all my money." First day
of mine, I spent almost no money but nearly filled the memory on my
digital camera.
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Center: Lobby of
the main post office!
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Mierda
de pájaro. Hyon got robbed on the
street in Barcelona. (Remember the Swiss arrest? Can't take that
girl anywhere...)
Here's how it was done. My older readers
know about the guy who fell into a cesspool, yelled "Fire!" and
explained to his rescuers that no one would have come if he had yelled
"shit!" The Smothers Brothers cleaned this up, singing about a
guy who fell into a vat of chocolate. Okay, okay, back to
Barcelona. We're walking along the street. We see a guy emerge
from an apartment house and walk in the same direction. "Oh, no,"
he says to us, pointing at a tree above, "bird poop. It's all over
you." Sure enough, there're goopy brown spots on Hyon's hair and
shirt. "I left some water in the lobby," says he, "You can use it to
wash it off." Sure enough, there's a bottle of water in the entryway of
the apartment bloc. I start on Hyon's hair with the water and some
kleenex. "Let yourself out when you're done."
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As you've guessed, that's
when he takes off with Hyon's shoulder
bag. If I give you another minute, you may also correctly guess,
first, that he didn't really live there (indeed, the lock on the front
door was broken), and second, that it wasn't really bird shit (it
proved to be a chocolate-based sauce.) The police were familiar
with
this elaborate and well-orchestrated scam. They have a mug book
of
serial fake bird poopetrators, but our guy, presumably a novice, wasn't
in it. There are variants that target tourists driving cars; there were
other tourist couples at the police station who had also been robbed.
Next challenge was fixing the
credit cards.
The American Express operator accidentally cancelled MY card, not
Hyon's, and then couldn't uncancel it. She offered to wire us
emergency cash at a stiff rate. No thanks, lucky I have other
cards and could pay for dinner (and had both our passports in my
pocket); we were sure hungry when this was all over. The
Mastercard number (the police helpfully provided local access numbers
for the card companies) left me on hold for so long that I gave up and
called the issuing bank in the Netherlands directly.
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You'd think
they'd care about getting stolen cards reported quickly. But then
you'd realize it is the merchants who hold the bag when the card is
used illicitly, and the issuers really don't care that much. The new
European cards that have pin numbers for purchase transactions make it
harder for thieves to use stolen cards, but it's still no fun to lose
them.
The conference
was held at IESE b-school at University of Navarra, one of best in
Europe. It's just 5 blocks from ESADE. ESADE is a more
high-tech-looking facility and IESE more traditional-ivy, but both are
great facilities in a gorgeous section of Barcelona. Business Week ranks IESE 7th and
ESADE 5th in the world for international business MBAs. |
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This
entrepreneurship conference was heavily
attended by academics and SME-assistance agencies from former Soviet
states. From Western Europe, the bulk were from Spain (natch),
Belgium (EU folks), and... Finland, now a hotbed of
entrepreneurship. Many interesting ideas, but in general more
elementary than US conferences on the topic. Everyone here
moaning about the sad state of entrepreneurship in France. UK is
seen as having taken giant steps in terms of entrepreneurial
environment.
While I was at the conference, Hyon visited Montserrat, the monastery high in the misty
mountains outside the city. |
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Gaudí
redux. Scientific
American or one of those magazines ran a pic of a truss bridge
that had been designed by a genetic algorithm. It handled the
same stresses as the rectilinear bridge a human designer would have
come up with, but with less material and a more beautiful, even
fairy-tale, organic shape. A hundred years before genetic
algorithms, Antoni Gaudí was building this kind of thing simply
from his observation of nature. (He wasn't a bad mathematician, either.)
There's a lot we can learn from his era. He
built with new materials. These were transported by the new
motorized carriages rather than by horse, and as new city streets were
being laid out for cars, this changed the economics of delivering
building materials, and forced some choices, e.g., of iron over
brick. Technology advanced
quickly, and new technologies were sometimes used just because they
could be used.
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Above: Even the
sidewalks...
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Gaudí abhorred the
separation of technology
from art and human purpose. He overcompensated. Though he
inspired Le Corbusier, Corby was (and we agree) "less than enamored of
some of Gaudí's decorative excesses." I wonder whether his
name was the source of the English word "gaudy," but I haven't had time
to look it up.
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Bum-bum-bum-bum BUMP bump, MY
GIRONA!
Ryan Air actually flies into Girona, an
hour's bus ride from Barcelona. So to catch our early a.m. flight
back to Eindhoven, we spent the final Spanish evening in Girona.
It's a small but fascinating medieval city, close to the French border.
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View of la Sagrada Familia from La Pedrera.
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Inside La Pedrera
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Part of IESE's campus
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View of the city from a
revolving restaurant atop Montjuik (Catalan for "mountain of the
Jews"). La Sagrada Familia is dead-center on the horizon.
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When I talk about corporations privatizing profits
and socializing costs, some of you think it's lefty pinko drivel
unbecoming a business dean. But here's a perfect example: Ryan
Air's web site, without official sanction, now calls the
Girona-Costa Brava Airport the Barcelona-Girona Airport! Hyon and
I waited at the tourist info window while the man ahead of us spent ten
minutes or more in his denial stage, the info lady patiently explaining
to him again and again that he was not really in Barcelona.
"But
I'm meeting my friend at a place ten minutes from the Barcelona
Airport!" he cried. "Sir, that's an
hour and ten minutes from here, I'm afraid," she replied, and
so on in varied permutations until he finally allowed that his
well-laid plans might have gang awry. All at taxpayer
expense. Mr. Ryan has similarly renamed the Charleroi Airport in
Belgium "Brussels South." Locals think this is a hoot; no one has
ever considered Charleroi close to Brussels. Oh well,
that's marketing.
Right: As the sun beat
down on Barcelona harbor, one Spanish family got creative.
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