Very cool, my wife and I are going for a week the last week of October. Writing all this stuff down!
Looks like there will be some overlap. If it wasn’t meant to be a romantic honeymoon I’d recommend a meetup!
I’ll second going to the Nou Camp for a Barcelona match. Some of the most hardcore fans there, and there’s a strong friendly vibe there, that united and kicked out the fascists.
Another day trip idea is to head up to Figueres. A pituresque little village with a nice square with cafés surrounding it. But it’s main attraction is the Dali museum. It doesn’t have a lot of his time/4th dimension stuff as I think that’s all in New York, but it has a good smattering of all his other works. It’d take a good two hours to get around it if it was empty. With people there you’ll take about three hours. Most tour companies will have a bus that’ll drive you up in the morning, give you enough time to let you do the gallery thing, and have a nice lunch, before dropping you back in Barcelona in time for a rest in the hotel and on to night time activities. There was also a great small music shop when I was there eight years ago. Good collection of Spainish music, contemporary and classic flamenco and guitar stuff and a great collection of metal.
Something else to do would be to travel out to a smaller city for a night and catch the Sardana (it was either Sunday or Saturday nights it was danced in the place I used go to, I can’t remember exactly.) It’s a weird little dance. People dance in circles, alternating directions and with an in and out step. I remarked when I was about five that it was like the hokey pokey. It’s danced in Barcelona, but from what I’ve heard it’s become a bit touristy there. The place where I used to see it had a strange unwritten ceremony to it. Usually it was started by older people, then the older people would invite the younger people in and start teaching them to it, as the circles got larger they would split off to smaller circles. It has strong cultural ties because of what it stood for during the time under Franco. According to some it was banned under him (others maintain it was allowed, but it doesn’t really matter either way.) What is indisputable was that Catalan (the language) was banned, and there was a huge effort to stamp out Catalan culture, as it was seen as a potential seperatist from the Franco state. What the Sardana became was a “fuck you” to Franco, and the Guardia Civilia (military police who were the strong arm of Franco) and the other national police forces. In fact there’s still a strong disregard for the state police forces in Catalonia, where the local police, established under local government and Catalonian jurisdiction are the ones most people will go to. One thing to note about the Sardana though, is DO NOT JOIN IN! It may look fun and inviting, but for a lot of people, especially the elder it’s strongly tied to who and what they are, and it is not a tourist attraction. They don’t mind people watching and listening to the music, but the Sardana isn’t some quaint attraction meant to get accepted everywhere Dollar brought into their little backwater village, it’s a thing of pride at the core of their identity. If you’re invited, that’s another thing, and in general you should feel honoured to be invited, because where I used to go, it was very much a locals only thing. But this could all have changed in the past ten years since I’ve been there, and even when I was there, the people in the village, and the guy who told me all this said Barcelona was using it as a tourist piece and not how it was originally imagined.