On Sunday, this band was playing in the plaza in front of the cathedral.

They made a unique sound, being made up of eleven players, most of whom played instruments I'd not heard before. This uniquely Catalan band is called a cobla and is missing one of its normal complement of exactly twelve players, the effect of which I felt not at all. I mean, what exactly is a cobla supposed to sound like, anyway?

This young man is playing what appears to be the world's longest, loudest oboe. It resembles a shawm, an ancestor of the modern oboe, but his instrument evolved for outdoor playing. To say it has a piercing voice would be understatement.

The band contained four of these woodwinds, two tenoras (like the one shown in the photo) and two soprano instruments called tibles.

Four other players had familiar instruments: two cornets, a trombone and a double bass, so we can dispose of them without further comment. But the remaining three were wierd. This man is one of the two fiscorn players. A kind of trumpet on steroids, the fiscorn is a relative of the flügelhorn, if that helps. (God, I loved writing that sentence.)

The fiscorns sounded loud, brassy and unrefined, as you might expect from their appearance.

True wierdness, though, is reserved for the band leader. He is playing two instruments: the flabiol and the tabal.

The flabiol is the one-handed flute he's holding in his left hand. The tabal is the tiny drum hung on a strap around his neck and supported by his flute arm, freeing his right hand to strike the drum with that dinky little wand.

The reason the cobla is playing today, as they do every weekend day, is so that people can dance the sardana, Catalonia's national dance. Passers-by drift into the plaza and form rings of as many as twenty dancers and, holding hands, spontaneously begin dancing.

When one ring gets too large, another one forms, until the whole plaza is filled with rings of dancers.

The sardana is a slow, graceful, but intricate dance, containing as it does 76 steps performed in groups of four. It requires intense concentration to know where you are in the sequence and what steps to take next.

More than focused, though, the dancers seem to be transported, as if they move onto a higher plane while dancing.

This is not some cheesy reencatment of a folk dance done to entertain tourists. Ordinary citizens come out to the plaza for their own personal enjoyment. They don't care if you watch them or not. Because of this, what you are seeing has solid authenticity, and is all the more moving for that.

Sooner or later, somebody had to do it. For centuries prior to 1500, Europeans had been visiting the Americas, unaware they were in the vicinity of a continent or two. They were just looking for good places to fish, or to get out from under the thumb of the King of Norway. But in 1492, it was Christopher Columbus who made the official ambassador-level call on the citizens of the West Indies. He brought them a load of trouble, and he brought loads of trouble home, too.

In Barcelona at the foot of Las Ramblas, stands a monument to Cristóbal Colón.

Why? Well, Columbus's voyage was not formally complete until he reported to Fernando and Isabel, who happened to be in Barcelona at the time. After all, they were the King and Queen. It wouldn't be seemly for their royal selves to travel to see Chris and besides, his home port was the crummy little burg of Cadíz, a place too poor to provide royalty-grade accommodations.

So Columbus, tired and hungry, sailed all the way around the south and east coasts of Spain to deliver the good news to his backers. And that's why Barcelona erected his monument on the waterfront: because Columbus's journey was completed successfully here.

Columbus pointed the way and now Spain had an actual colony to plunder besides those dinky Canary Islands. They were playing keep up with the Portuguese. Columbus made sure the Spanish claim to the lands he discovered would be legal by holding a ceremony in which the West Indians supposedly agreed to become a Spanish colony.

All those depictions of Columbus planting the flag and kneeling in the surf while the inhabitants looked on—in grade school I was taught that this was a noble event, when in fact, it was just a real estate scam. As Woody Guthrie said, "Some men rob you with a six gun and some men rob you with a fountain pen." Columbus returned to Spain with notarized statements of witnesses claiming the West Indian natives accepted colonization.

In less than fifty years, New World gold and silver was pouring in, setting off currency inflation that would ruin the Spanish economy, not to mention funding endless and pointless wars in Northern Europe and Italy. Inflation worked its magic of transferring wealth to landowners and noblemen while impoverishing merchants and smallholders. Industrial development came to a halt. Why make when you can buy?

And so Spain became the trust-fund kid of Europe, dripping with pricey goodies, but with no skills for survival when the money ran out. What once was the intellectual and artistic heart of the continent lost its leadership role. Over the long haul, Spain didn't benefit from its American holdings; it was destroyed by them.

And what about the West Indians? We all know the story. Columbus brought with him diseases that essentially caused genocide. The bulk of the population died out from measles, various poxes and venereal diseases, and had to be replaced post-haste with sturdy Africans, inured by centuries of contacts with Europeans and Arabs.

All over Spain and Mexico, I see statues of standing, fatherly Spaniards, either in monk's robes or armor, succoring kneeling Indians. Enlightening the heathen. Only after I became an adult did our view of relations between indigenous people and the colonialists come to recognize the terrible truth. Contact between east and west was an unmitigated disaster for westerners. And as it turns out, it sparked a great deal of misery in Europe as well.

(Some scholars, particularly Catalans, think Cristóbal Colón was Catalan, not Italian. It's interesting to note that Colón, with the accent over the o, is neither a Spanish nor an Italian word. It is a Catalan word and it means "pigeon.")

This kid came whizzing past me, his face so delightful I had to photograph him, despite my concern that his mother might feel threatened.

I wish I was always that happy. Oh, I'm sure he has his melt-downs, but he's clearly in the moment in a way I've long forgotten.

After I caught this image, Jean, never shy with strangers, marched up to the mother and asked if we could photograph her child. She said OK and called him over, explaining I wanted to take his picture.

Oh, jeez no, Lady! Don't make him pose. Aaahhh. Too late.

He solemnly posed. I kept on snapping off shots, mostly to show appreciation to his mother for allowing me to.

Not wanting to photograph the top of his head, I stooped down. Instantly, he stopped posing and engaged me in a crouching game. Success! He's not posing anymore.

What a cutie!

When the movie The Third Man came out in 1949, I was only eight years old, too young to see it. But I remember the haunting sound of Anton Karas's theme song playing on the radio. It was the first time I'd heard a zither and I've loved the sound ever since.

The only time I heard one live was in the Officers' Club at Moffitt Air Base where I had gone for dinner with my mother-in-law. Being widow of a pilot, she had base privileges. I enjoyed the zither playing in the dining room, but I enjoyed the 25¢ drinks more, and in the end I didn't remember hearing much of anything, even my mother-in-law.

Walking near the Barcelona Cathedral, I heard some Bach being played on one. I turned the corner and saw these two women.

The acoustics in these narrow medieval streets are wonderful, making the music ring, sustaining the notes. After the Bach, the women played The Windmills of Your Mind and more, one crowd-pleaser after another.

They were playing hammer-zithers, also called cimbaloms. These instruments are associated with folk music but produce beautiful renderings of any music with a sort of sad melody.

Zither-players seem to be singularly focused on their instruments. The women didn't react to applause, didn't interact with their audience. They rarely looked up and they never smiled. No dramatic movements like your concert pianists or lead guitarists. Zitherists are quiet, inward-looking people.

Less than a half-hour later, we ran across this man. Zither-O-Rama!

This guy was out today simply to enjoy performing. No CDs on display, no basket for coins, just him in his suit and tie, sitting on a fold-up stool, his instrument perched on a milk carton. A quiet, cautious man, perhaps a bookkeeper, the corners of his zither case carefully reinforced with steel angle brackets, his tuning wrench close at hand, a virtuoso of old Hungarian tunes.

On Las Ramblas, that beautiful, broad, tourist-filled boulevard that runs from the port to Plaça de Catalunya, a small store has managed to survive for decades despite what must be, these days, sky-high real estate values.

Casa Beethoven sells mostly sheet music, mostly for piano, but some for other solo instruments, voice and even full orchestral scores. You know it's a serious music lover's place because it has busts of classical composers and boxes and boxes of music for you to take home and play.

A hundred years ago, the most common way you got to hear music was to perform it yourself. Actually, the bulk of classical music—a vast heap of sonatas, rondos, trios and the like—was written for performance by amateurs.

The twentieth-century advent of recorded music changed all that. Many in my generation still took obligatory piano lessons, and also learned another instrument for the school orchestra—mine was the clarinet. My children picked up guitar (what else) on their own. What will their children do?

In the 19th Century and earlier, they had recorded music too. But the technology was primitive.

Casa Beethoven sells music-box movements. They have 60 on display for you to try. Turn a little red crank, and out comes chimey music.

The selection is eclectic. Check out some of the titles:

– The Internationale (the Communist anthem)
– Luces en la Ciudad
– Happy Birthday
– The theme from Doctor Zhivago
– El Golpe
– John Lennon's Imagine
– Elvis Presley's Love Me Tender

What Casa Beethoven doesn't sell is CDs. If you want to hear it, you have to play it yourself. Even if that means only turning a crank.

Barcelona seems to have more than its share of graffiti. Along the railroad approaching the city, literally miles of concrete retaining walls are completely covered with paint, some of it quite arresting. That Catalunya is home to so many artists and contains so much public art may inspire the spray-can-wielding little delinquents.

Favorite canvases for taggers are garage doors and the roll-up steel doors used to protect shop windows and entrances.

Here in Ciutat Vella, our neighborhood, some shopkeepers have taken to preempting graffiti artists with graffiti of their own.

Taggers apparently respect the work of other spraycan artists. They leave doors like these alone. They'll sometimes tag the porous granite wall right next to one, but they won't spray the door itself. The key seems to be that the work must be done by artists whose vision and methods are the same as used in graffiti.

They certainly look better than gang tags, even if they aren't exactly what you might have in mind for a 1000-year-old neighborhood. And when the doors are rolled up or swung open, you don't see the designs anymore. A clever solution to an intractable problem.

Posing in front of a door thoughtlessly left blank by its owner, here is an intrepid blogger in full field gear...

... wondering how pickpockets so readily single him out.

The 100-year-old Mercat de Sant Josep, commonly called La Boqueria, is one of the world's great food markets. The façade reflects Barcelona's architectural style that emerged in the late 19th Century.

The view of the stained-glass arch is partly obscured by netting, placed to protect it from damage during renovation of the building next door. We ran into situations like this everywhere we went, there's so much reconstruction going on. I don't know; the city is already jammed with tourists. If they make it any spiffier, everybody will want to come here.

Step under the arch, you're confronted with an explosion of fruits and vegetables. I don't think I've ever seen so many varieties in a single glance.

Displays were artful and prices weren't always sky-high—surprising in this expensive city. The strawberries in the pyramid are priced at €1.49 per kilo—about 90¢ a pound. Cheap, but these are the same strip-mined strawberries you get in U. S. supermarkets, the ones with texture and taste like cardboard. Hardly worth eating.

Didn't they introduce fish genes into strawberries some years ago? To improve shelf life?

We do a little better as we penetrate farther into the interior of the market. This fruit cooked in sugar syrup looks exquisite—a far cry from Del Monte canned peaches.

Have any of you run into dragon fruit? Apparently they are appearing in markets around the world. Everywhere except Mexico, that is. Mexico hardly needs another fruit, thank you very much. We've got more than enough wonderful local-grown produce of our own.

The Spanish know how to do preserved meat: chorizo, salami, and especially, ham. Acorn-fed ham, dry-cured, aged a couple of years. This stuff redefines what ham is.

Ham is sliced to order—by hand. It's sliced longitudinally, parallel to the bone, and each ham must be approached individually, to optimize the pattern of fat and red meat.

Porters race around with hand trucks, replenishing the stalls. That young man has the kind of job I would have loved when I was his age.

Barcelona is a major mediterranean fishing port, and seafood is rushed to La Boqueria. In contrast with the fishy compost pile in San Miguel's Gigante or Mega supermarkets, these fish are shiny, with clear, bulging eyes and a sweet odor. Europeans won't buy rotten fish.

But they will buy preserved fish, and none more so than salted, dried cod. Check out the prices on this stuff. The thick, boneless fillets are pushing $20 per pound!

Once you've bought your fish, you have to season it, and after paying those prices, you're not going to want to shake a jar of Schilling paprika on them. Here, you can give spices the sniff test before buying a baggie or two.

Now we're gonna look at the heavy hitters. The vendor didn't bother to post a price on these black truffles. If you have to ask, you can't afford them. Harvested in the wild by trained pigs, these babies are the other fruit of Spain's oak forests, after the exquisite ham. I've never seen so many truffles in one place before. This looks like a five-year supply for the French Laundry Restaurant.

Tiny little wild strawberries from the Pyrenees: you'll never look at strawberries the same way again after trying these. But again, if you have to ask...

What's amazing is that these little guys last only a day, so the vendor will have to sell them all or give the leftovers away. But if there's no more equity left to pull out of your house, forget Alpine strawberries. You'll just have to settle for some handmade candies.

There are some great food stores in the U. S. You got your Whole Foods Markets, your Central Market in Austin, your Draegers in Menlo Park. None of them holds a candle to this place. The only market I've seen that's on par with La Boqueria is the one adjacent to the Tsujiki Fish Market in Tokyo, and that one's more of a shopping area than a single market.

We couldn't find lodgings in Barcelona. A Formula One race and a futbol game filled the city with visitors. Striking out with all the hotels, I checked vacation apartment rental agencies. No luck there, either, until a nice man, Lars, called us back to say that a brand-new, never before rented apartment had opened up; were we interested?

Interested? We were desperate. We snatched the opening and rolled into town looking for the Ciutat Vella—the Old Town. Tomas, another agency associate, told us to look behind the central post office building...

... and follow the street to the left.

Triangulating by cellphones, we finally hooked up with Tomas who escorted us to our flat. As we walked, he explained that our unit was on the fourth floor. No elevator.

Hey, OK. We can use the exercise, ho, ho, ho.

So we're living in a fourth-floor walk-up, the kind of apartment you got in Hell's Kitchen after immigrating from Sicily. Except it isn't a fourth-floor walk-up; it's a fifth-floor walk-up. I'd forgotten that in European buildings, the first floor is up one flight of stairs.

Tomas grabbed the bag Jean was carrying, leaving me with my backpack and a suitcase. By the time I'd climbed to our door, my vision was blurring. But the apartment made it all worthwhile.

We have a combination dining and living room, two bedrooms, two baths, a full kitchen and a laundry, all for about half the cost of a good hotel. And we couldn't be better located. We live in a quintessential old European neighborhood, with 12th-century churches and Roman ruins steps away. Likewise, the Esplanade and Las Ramblas. We're near a metro station. We're surrounded by restaurants and shops.

One major drawback: no internet access. Ordinarily I work around this problem; I haven't had a connection in any room we've stayed in so far on this trip. But in this case, those stairs separate me from a connection. Moreover, most hot spots in Spain have proved too lame to handle a blog upload. In every case, I've had to hardwire to somebody's ethernet. And it's hard to find places that will let me do that.

One other problem: the locks are so new that it's almost impossible to open the doors, requiring much jiggling of keys and tweaking of knobs to get in. Over the last couple of days, Jean and I have gotten the hang of it, though.

This evening, a woman rang the bell to our apartment. In courtly Spanish, she explained she lived on another floor and was having trouble with her door. Jean replied, also in Spanish, that opening the doors was difficult, but that she would help the woman get into her apartment and show her the tricks. After a number of exchanges, the woman's partner came up and asked if Jean was going to be able to help them out—in English! Turns out they're from Mendocino, not far from where we lived in California. If the partner hadn't come up, I wonder if either Jean or the woman would have realized they were two Americans talking to each other.

(The apartment rental agency: www.visit-bcn.com.)

In Europe, travel by train is efficient, pleasant and inexpensive. But not in Spain.

Long distance travel from Madrid begins at the Atocha Station, a turn-of-the-19th-Century building that has barely managed to escape the wrecker's ball.

Intact is the ornately mullioned north window, the curved roof, the winged lions and globe at the peak of the façade, and the wonderful old clock surmounted by a crown. I'd love to show you the elegant belle époque wings that perfectly flank the center vault, but pulling back would reveal the detritus of a construction project. Maybe the project will include razing that awful '60s-era clock poking out of the roof.

Inside, what once was a series of platforms alongside panting steam locomotives is now some kind of tropical garden.

How many ways is this bad?

First of all, what the hell do tropical plants have to do with train travel? Seriously, nobody cares about them. They're thinking about the night train to Paris.

Then there's the issue of the heat and humidity inside the building: good when you're touring a conservatory of rare plants, bad when you're shlepping a hundred pounds of luggage, trying to make your train. Hundreds of nozzles on tall poles spray mist for the benefit of the bromeliads—and the discomfort of the passengers.

Finally, with that unique logic that works only in the minds of bureaucrats, the paths through the plantings are roped off. Yep. No public access is allowed in over 50% of the train station.

Why does space matter? Let's take a look at the effect of insufficient space on customer satisfaction.

These are passengers waiting in line to buy tickets. The average wait when this image was taken was about an hour. The lines result from too few ticket windows. Because there's not enough space. Because so much is taken up by plants, the humidity and heat from which make the waiting even less bearable resulting in displays of bad temper.

You can avoid waiting in line by getting a numbered ticket for a turn at special "reserved" ticket windows. "Now serving #689." You only can do this on certain qualifying routes. The rules are too arcane for the likes of you and me, so the counter where you get your numbered ticket is staffed by an official. This expert in train schedule arcana asks you about your route, then explains your choices as to which trains you should take. Pick the right one, and you qualify for a ticket to avoid the lines. Pick the wrong one, and you're sent back to the purgatory pictured above.

Holding a ticket for your turn won't save you any time. What you have to do is watch for your number to come up on a tote board. Then you have about 60 seconds to make it over to the indicated window before your turn is given to someone else. When I took a number from the official, I asked how long before my turn would come up. He said about an hour and a half.

There's one other option. If you're tech-savvy and can read Spanish, you can beat the wait.

Before using one of these touch screen ticket vending machines, you need to analyze train schedules between your origin and destination, selecting two or three alternatives based on time of departure, number of stops and type of service. You also need to have your credit card handy, with your PIN. Finally, you have to perform a mind meld with the designer of the touch screen menus in order to comprehend the page-to-page navigation scheme. A couple thousand hours of web surfing experience is essential. All this is good, because it disqualifies 99% of ticket buyers, so there's no lines.

With these prerequisites in place, it took me and Jean only three tries to buy our tickets for the trip from Madrid to Barcelona. But it sure beat waiting in line.

I'll briefly mention two other customer satisfaction opportunities for RENFE, the national railroad company. First, we have the customer service center.

I was amazed to find this airy, uncrowded office with comfy chairs and bright-looking attendants, given the hell-hole of the ticket windows. Planning the next stage of our travels, I asked for a schedule for the Barcelona—Bilbao route:

"We don't have any."

"Where can I get one?"

"In Barcelona."

"Are there trains that run from Barcelona to Bilbao?"

"I don't know."

It became clear why the Customer Service Center was uncrowded.

Then there's the matter of the ladies' restroom.

These women were waiting with all the resigned patience of Mexicans paying their power bills. Jean, an impatient American, took one look at the line and stomped off to find another solution.

We passed through an airport-style security point and finally reached the departure lounge, where the combined cybernetic capacity of RENFE was unable to assign us a platform until five minutes before scheduled departure. An informational sign informed us that we would be denied boarding two minutes before scheduled departure. Hmmm. That left us three minutes to get from one end of the platform to the other, assuming we immediately noticed when our gate number came up on the announcement screen.

A stampede of panicky passengers ensued when our platform was announced. We formed a line which crept slowly forward, our progress impeded by an officious little prig who made a great show of carefully inspecting each ticket. He actually lisped. BarTHelona.

(Lisping in Spanish is like a 1930s Hollywood starlet, newly arrived from Possum Crotch, Missouri, speaking with a British accent. It's affected, snobbish.)

Our tickets having passed inspection (graTHias), we boarded our train for the four-hour ride.

Aircraft-style seats, a pretty good meal (better by far than the airlines) and occasionally interesting scenery—once you get on the train, it's not a bad experience. It only takes an hour longer than flying and costs about €60 less. Now if only you could buy tickets online...

Traveling back to Madrid from Marrakech took twice as long—a full day—because of a long layover in Casablanca. We were confined to a grimy '60s-era transit lounge, eating abysmal airport food and guarding our hand baggage from the horde of unwashed pickpockets and bag-snatchers.

We, and all of our possessions made it without incident to our hotel in Madrid—a triumph. We're staying at the Hotel Mora, a clean, rudimentary place for only €70 per night—another triumph in a city where it's easy to spend €300. Better yet, the Mora may be the best located hotel in Madrid for art lovers, situated as it is on the Paseo del Prado, almost exactly halfway between the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and the Museo del Prado. An OK hotel, but no internet access. If you stay there, insist on an outside room with the pretty view of the Jardín Botánico. Inside room windows open onto a grim stairwell and fire escape from which anyone can break in.

Art is everywhere you look. Naming streets after historical figures is one thing; including their portraits is quite another.

I love the old Spanish symbol for DE, the combined letters D and E to make the character Ð. I'm reminded of the old way of writing the in English: Y^e.

The sign for the Taberna La Delores has a wonderful fin-de-siècle look.

Delores knows how to entice men to patronize her bar, with her bare shoulders drawing your eye and her arm reaching, offering a beer. And the look on her face: it says "If you're a good boy, sailor, things could get serious." Hard to say no to her.

Madrid, like most cities that the Allies didn't completely flatten, is full of monuments. Here's one just to illustrate the point.

Naked bronze people with winged horses. Just screams "Agriculture," doesn't it. Still, I love these sculptures; important ingredients in European cities.

Now, we'll spend a moment contemplating the ugly.

The little cretins have spraypainted the unpolished granite facing of this building that faces the Reina Sofía Museum. The damage is permanent; you can see where attempts at cleaning have failed to completely remove the writing. Usually taggers restrict themselves to concrete canvases that can be repainted or left as is, depending on location.

Whenever I see this stuff, I think uncharitable thoughts; a test of my spirituality.

Then there's state-sponsored ugliness.

These abysmally ugly elevator housings were slapped up against the classical façade of the Reina Sofía Museum. Looks like an oil refinery. What were they thinking? The authors of the Fodor's Guide call them a "playful pair of glass elevator shafts." The authors are jerks.

This museum of 20th-Century works is anchored by three Spanish modern masters: Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and Joan Miró. The galleries are chronologically ordered so you can follow the development of modern art. I particularly enjoy the works of Dalí, which, while woefully underrepresented here, nevertheless contain some brilliant pieces.

The centerpiece of the entire museum is Picasso's huge canvas depicting the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. The museum guide calls it the "greatest modern painting." I don't think so. It isn't even Picasso's greatest—it's not in the same class as works like Three Musicians. But for Spaniards, it's a patriotic piece, and much-loved.

Perhaps the greatest art museum in the world is the Prado. Colonial-era Spain used New World gold and silver to commission works by Europe's greatest artists. Which explains how such an incredible collection came to this country. The Prado, like the Reina Sofía, centers on three great Spanish painters: Francisco Goya, Diego Velásquez, and El Greco.

I learned about Goya's daring portraiture of King Carlos IV and his inbred family.

What at first appear to be stately portraits, turn out on closer inspection to be caricatures.

Carlos's vacuous expression clearly shows the effects of generations of inbreeding on intelligence, and of pampered isolation on character. What, me worry?

Meanwhile, Queen Maria Luisa clearly is in the catbird seat. Hers is the nasty smile of someone who has clawed her way to the top and who dominates everyone around her. Only the pride and cluelessness of his subjects would have allowed Goya to get away with these satyric official portraits.

Given such a wonderful collection, the Prado fails on two accounts. First, the written and audio guides are sparse and unenlightening. The works hung here invite investigation, but their deeper meanings are glossed over. You'll not get your art history education at the Prado.

The other deficiency is poor lighting, evident in this image of Goya's The 3rd of May.

But these defects barely detract from the experience of viewing these superb canvases. Everywhere I turned, I ran into another painting I'd only seen in someone's coffee table books. I expect to return to these museums several more times during our stay here.

(Turns out you're not allowed to take photographs in the Prado or in the Reina Sofía, a regulation of which I was unaware until an angry official confronted me and demanded I erase any images I had captured. A little sleight-of-hand allowed me to conceal the few I've shared with you.)