A Finde in Barcelona: All’s Well that Ends Well | Cool Museums Pt.1

Hola! My name is Sunny, and I’m majoring in Spanish at Colby College. This is my first time in a Spanish-speaking country. I’m currently studying abroad with PRESHCO and will be updating the fun times that I SPAINed here! Bievenidos!

Day One

Museum of Illusions, Erotic Museum, Addams Family Museum

Morning Planning

Like I may have mentioned in the last post, Edilia and I had no time to plan the trip AT ALL before coming. Back on my first solo trip to Toronto, I was so paranoid that I’d have nothing to do that I planned out a detailed itinerary up to what I’d be doing every hour for the entirety of those 10 days. I visited a lot of places at my own pace, but it was also a little exhausting. After having traveled for a bit by myself, I wanted to let go a little bit of the excessive planning and let myself get lost in the city for a bit.

Sadly, we’re not in the city city. We’re in the MOUNTAINS. So it’s not exactly realistic to just go out there with data and a phone at 20% (my phone had problems charging) and expect to run into something amazing. I mean, nature is great, but we’re in Barcelona for the modernity. I personally am not interested in going to the most touristy touristy places, so I opened up atlasobscura.com - an eccentric website for people with eccentric taste like me. It is a community-powered platform that lists places of interest around the world that you wouldn’t normally see in tripadvisor’s “Top 10 places you must visit” list. Not that I’m trashing tripadvisor, but after having traveled for so long - I wanted to see something UNIQUE in each place.

I locked down a couple of interesting museums on Google maps and figured out that they cluster in pretty much the same area - Plaza de Catalunya, which means that we could probably visit them in one day if time and energy permits. After revising the list with Edilia, we planned out our trip for the two days.

(It was already 11am by then, so off we went down the mountain to take the train to city center. Ah, yes, we did take a while deciding if it was more economical to buy a 2-day ticket or just buy single tickets or a zone 1 ticket. After careful calculation - we decided to buy the single tickets, because we are only gonna take the train to a certain place each day and then walk around.)

Museum of Illusions

Pictures are worth a thousand words, so I’ll write less in this section and let our pictures speak for themselves. It is really a great place to take fun pictures because of all the 3D images, and I have not yet uploaded all of them to my social media accounts. The admissions was only around 10 euros, and you will leave with various quality photos! It’s really worth a visit.

Erotic Museum

Despite its name - it’s actually an educational museum for the history of sex around the world. It sits La Rambla, the street in Barcelona with a lot of street markets. While looking around at the peculiar commodities in the street markets, you could look up and see a “Marilyn Monroe” beckoning you from the balcony above. That is an actress from the Erotic Museum. I will also not elaborate too much on the exhibitions in the museum since the content is a little #NSFW…

Addams Family Musical

While we were looking for the streetcars last night, Edilia saw a poster of the Addams Family Musical and mentioned that she wanted to see it. Since our planned activities end right around one of the showing times of the musical, we decided to see it. However, we couldn´t buy the tickets online, so we decided to play it by ear. We went to the theater a bit earlier to get tickets, and got them for around 28 euros. A lady was desperately standing by the door trying to sell her ticket which she bought “sin querer”, unintentionally, so I decided to help her out by buying it off of her.

My PRESHCO theater professors mentioned that musical adaptations from Broadway are gaining prominence in Spain recently. There are more and more emerging works translated from English musicals into Spanish. The plot reminds me of the Disney movie “Hotel Transylvania”. The Addams Family consists of vampires, ghosts, Frankenstein, and some other monsters which I couldn’t identify. The daughter falls in love with a human, and intends to marry him. The story then unfolds around how such an eccentric reunion reveals some deep, dark secrets in each family. But don’t get me wrong, it’s a comedy.

The adaptation also reminded me of my project in Intercultural Translation class, where I´m focusing on analyzing the translation of the lyrics in the movie “Coco”. Although I’ve never seen the English version of Addams Family, I could still identify cultural references that must have came from adaption and addition. E.g. when the daughter came out dressed in all yellow, the dad said (in Spanish) “OMG, why would you dress like that, you look like a mailbox!” (Mailboxes in Spain are yellow); or, when they made references to the current political climate which I will not go into too much detail…