Barca! (Jeremy)

Anyway, we successfully got to Barcelona Wednesday morning and had ~48 hours until Becky’s plane left. We made fairly good use of the time, walking around much of the downtown area: seeing the various Olympic sculptures and structures left over from 1992 (I think), ancient architecture including the Gaudi cathedrals, the busy shopping district, and various parks. The most exciting event however, was the European soccer championship game the first night we arrived. FC Barcelona was playing Manchester United in Rome and everyone was very excited. We were told to go down to the central Place de Catalunya to see a public viewing of the game (rather, we were told to be careful if we decided to go…). So we got there a bit before the game started and despite a rather big screen and some live music, people just seemed to be passing through. After some confusion, we ended up following the vast majority of the people who were headed down the famous Las Ramblas towards the sea. Once we got close, we realized that there was an even bigger public viewing in another public area. We, along with tens of thousands of others, traversed the bridge over to this area and packed in like sardines to see a huge jumbotron showing the game. By this point, we were a few minutes late, and Barcelona had already scored one goal.

For the rest of the first half, we watched at a poor angle, pressed against the huddled masses yearing for a better view, but were able to move up quite close for the second half. Barcelona proceeded to score another unanswered goal and we crowned the champions. Needless to say, everyone was very happy about this and we got swept up in the enthusiasm as well as cheers in catalyn that we did our best to follow (I think we got the one that went “beep-beep beep-beep-beep beep-beep-beep-beep Barca!”). Making our way back downtown, we joined the hundreds of thousands of fans that converged on Place de Catalunya from all corners of the city for a good ol’ fashion riot. Things were mostly under control, with the possible exception of people throwing fireworks down on the ground in the middle of the mob of people, requiring everyone to quickly push away so that no one got hurt when it went off. Otherwise, everyone was happy and nothing destructive appeared to be happening. Police had closed off most of the downtown streets and appeared to be ready just in case with lots of those black riot vans parked around, but for the most part, they let everyone celebrate. After navigating the riot downtown, we moved out to non-closed streets which were full of cars honking and celebrating. One truck had a couple trombonists, lots more had people hanging out of windows. One guy was just standing in a public fountain throwing water on passing cars with his hat. All in good fun.

(Image below is lifted from a Daily Mail article about the riots. Possibly a copyright violation to use it here, but it's a good example of what we partied through.)