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Barcelona, Spain June 1 and 2, 2009

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Cliff and Paula Lazar's Mediterranean Cruise
June 3 to June 15, 2009

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cruise map with hot spots

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How is this city different from my city, Los Angeles ? Barcelona is a high density city, denser than Los Angeles , yet the traffic moves faster and more smoothly. Honking is at a minimum. It appears that over half of the vehicles are motor scooters and motor cycles. The police even use motor scooters. The effect is that more drivers fit on the same square feet of street. Motor scooters and motor cycles park in lots with hundreds of other motor scooters.

We stayed at the Hotel Colon, walking distance to everything and a great view.

HOTEL COLON**** Dpto. de Reservas Avda. de la Catedral, 7 08002 BARCELONA TEL 93 301.14.04
FAX 93 317.29.15 WWW.HOTELCOLON.ES reservas@hotelcolon.es

Here are pictures that I took in a tapas bar that tell much of the story of Barcelona.

tapas bar

Tapas bars are all over Spain . They serve drinks and foods.

I think they would work in Los Angeles .

paula in bar

Paula enjoys tapas

One of thousands of motor scooter parking lots. Five scooters park in the area that one car would take. Typical buildings have ornate accents.

There are tapas bars all over town. Tapas are small plates of meats, fish, crustaceans, potatoes, omelets and salads that cost three euros to seven euros. People in Europe smoke more than we do in California . Every table has an ash tray.

Across the street is one of the hundreds or thousands of motor scooter parking lots. You see many more parked motor scooters parked than parked cars. Many of the buildings have ornate touches: bas relief, fancy window treatments. The owners wanted to make a statement about their culture. In Los Angeles most downtown buildings are minimalist, money savers.

In Barcelona , like Florence many of the tourist attractions are within walking distance. But if you want to ride, there are buses and a subway, with stops every two or three blocks. There are numerous direction signs with maps telling you how far and what direction the next tourist site is.

So why are there so many motor scooters? Gasoline is heavily taxed, yielding prices between $5.00 and $8.00 per gallon. In Nice , France on June 4^th the price was $7.09 per gallon. At that price rational people buy smaller cars, trucks and motor scooters. Not Hummers. I didn’t see any Hummers or SUV’s. You see men in suits and neckties driving motor scooters. With higher priced gasoline you don’t have to rely on the good intensions of rational people. Rational people buy smaller, more efficient cars and trucks and motor scooters and America pays less to the Arabs, Russians and Venezuelans.

It would be self-defeating to propose raising fuels taxes $1.00 per gallon. Rather raise the prices, adjusted by inflation 25 cents each year for four years. At $.00/gallon the national debt could be reduced $420 billion a year.

Taxis and buses get to drive in set-aside lanes. The result is that the cabs move faster than the private cars and the cabdrivers get more fares in a day. They can keep their fares lower. More people ride the cabs and the buses. Everybody, cab and bus users and car drivers get to their destination faster.

In Los Angeles , the politicians fight against rational rules like diamond lanes and gas taxes, to cater to the SUV drivers, who make traffic move slower, increase congestion and make finding a convenient parking space a nightmare.

A strange behavior in Barcelona is the policing of the sidewalk vendors.

vendors setup

Vendors set up

vendors gone

Vendors disappear when cops approach

folding scarves

Scarf guy folding and arranging

In front of the sidewalk restaurants, in Barcelona Marina, the sidewalk vendors swoop in and spread out their table cloths filled with purses or belts or scarves or sun glasses. All the table cloths have strings tied to the corners. The purse guys stuff their purses with bunched up newspapers. The sun glasses guy has his glasses attached to the table cloth. In Florence the sunglasses guy uses a folding cardboard table for quick set up and quick escape. The scarf guy spends most of his time refolding and stacking the scarves.

Then, when the vendors see the police walking towards them, they pull up the strings that are the corners of their table cloths and rush away. The cops walk after them and a new crew of vendors come to the same spots and spread out. Then the cops come and they pull up their strings and move on and another group or the first group takes their place. I think it’s a game.

You see many disabled people in motorized wheel chairs and even one sitting on a two-wheeled Segway. Also there are a few people on crutches. There was a man walking who had no forearms and a man with no legs was being pushed in a wheel chair. It would seem that Barcelona is more open about disabilities. Most of the sidewalks had wheel chair ramps. Still, many of the stores were no wheel chair accessible.

The happening place is Las Ramblas, similar, but much longer than Santa Monica’s 3^rd Street Promenade. There are lots of street actors like the Angel. The Wax Museum gets tourists to check if the man in the rickshaw is dead.

Tall Street actor on Las Ramblas. Maybe she’s floating.

Tourist checks apparently dead wax dummy

When you get a drink at a sidewalk café, or eat dinner in a restaurant, or ride a cab, no tip is expected. The staff is paid fair wages and don’t rely on tips. Still the service is good. Also you can sit with an empty coffee cup and you will not be rushed to leave.

In Barcelona there are hundreds of sidewalk cafes; unlike Los Angeles where cars are king. Right now Mayor Villaragosa is pushing to make Olympic and Pico one-way streets to relieve congestion at the expense of the vendors. Why not offer to widen the sidewalks in exchange to allow sidewalk cafes and vendor booths that would draw foot traffic and help the vendors.

Gaudi additions to cathedral

The most famous architect in Barcelona was Gaudi.

Gauzy

There might be a new movement I call Gauzy.

The Daylight Moon

Here is a picture of the daylight moon over Barcelona. They ancient Greeks could see that the shadows on the moon and the shadows on a sphere, such as an orange, prove that the moon is a sphere. It’s not flat.

Intelligent observers could calculate the distance to the moon and the distance to the sun. The Greeks in Egypt estimated the diameter of the earth by using simultaneous angles of shadows from obelisks.

Thanks to the Franks, Goths, and other barbarians, that knowledge was lost for 1000 years.

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Cliff and Paula Lazar's Mediterranean Cruise
June 3 to June 15, 2009

Click on the cities to jump to that page

Barcelona Nice Florence Rome Naples Athens Mykonos Santorini Ephesus, Turkey