There we are in Barcelona last Wednesday night, tired after a long day of touring a town in the countryside. We come up out of the underground train stop in Barcelona into the Plaça Catalunya, and the fountains in the plaza are illuminated and spectacular to see. All the more so, actually, since we were pretty sure that in the morning the water hadn’t been running in those fountains.

So, we pause for a moment — OK, for more than a few moments, actually  — so that I can take some photos. Here’s a look at the fountain at night:

Plaça Catalunya fountain at night

After I take a few photos like the one above,  we notice that the sign on the El Corte Ingles building is illuminated off to one side. El Corte Ingles is a huge Spanish department store. I decide  that this will make a nice photo in combination with just part of the fountain, so I snap a few attempts of that shot:

Plaça Catalunya Fountain and El Corte Ingles

OK, I like the overall composition of the photo, but today found myself thinking, hmm, if only I’d been standing a little more to the left, so that the edge of the sign on the left-side of the department store building wasn’t visible.

But I have the power to “retake” the photo while sitting on my sofa in Tübingen. Or rather,  I should say based on yesterday’s post, the power to remake the photo:

Plaça Catalunya Fountain and El Corte Ingles - edited

Better.

While I like this photo, it does remind me of the small problem this building caused us that night. You see, we knew that our hotel was off a street that came out next to the El Corte Ingles store. So, after I finished with my photos,  we headed toward that store in the photo in order to get back to the hotel.

But relying on landmarks to find your way around in a big city can be tricky. I learned this the hard way years ago in Tokyo. I managed to get myself hopelessly lost there one day when I’d noted only that to get to a particular office, I needed to exit out of the nearest subway station, make sure that there was a McDonald’s restaurant on my right, and a florist shop on my left, and then I would go 4 blocks to a dry cleaners, turn left to get to the office.  There are no street names in Tokyo, so I also wrote down landmark-based directions like this to find my way around.

What I hadn’t realized was that at that particular subway station in Tokyo, there was a similarly situated McDonald’s and florist at both the North and South exits. But no corresponding dry-cleaners 4 blocks away if you went out the wrong side – wrong in the sense that the office building was on the other side of the station.

Ah, memories.

But I digress.

I bring this up, though, because that night in Barcelona, we quickly discovered that there was not one, but two El Corte Ingles department store buildings on the Plaça Catalunya.  Not difficult to distinguish between during the day, but at night they all look alike. And the plaza is big enough you can really tell what the streets are like from a distance.    The street we were looking for next to “our” El Corte Ingles was a street that was blocked off to most auto traffic.  We had to circumnavigate the whole plaza to find the correct department store before we got our bearings and found the street we needed.  unfortunately, neither of us remembered the name of the street we needed to be one. Why would we? It was next to the big El Corte Ingles store, and that was going to be super easy to recognize, right?

Luckily, though, there’s only car-restricted street off the Plaça Catalunya near a El Corte Ingles store. Otherwise, we might be still wandering around Barcelona, trying to find out hotel. 😉