We were supposed to go to three concerts last week, but we only made it to two.

Last Wednesday and Thursday Barcelona celebrated “Classical Music on the Beach,” an annual event in which the orchestras of the opera and the symphony perform for free on successive evenings in a stage on the shores of the Mediterranean. Each is a one-hour concert of selected pieces from symphonic works–no singers–intended to bring symphonic music to a “diverse and broad audience” and to show the world that BCN “promotes, leads, and is defined by classical music.”

The promotional material encouraged everyone to make a beach day of it, but the temperature was really hot so we decided to just go for the concert, which started at 21:00. Our navigator didn’t offer us any bus choices so we took the subway, which let us off about 1.5 km short. That was a painful walk: the temperature was still in the high 80s, the sea breeze didn’t kick in until the last third of the way, and my husband was carrying two chairs. At least it is light late–today, five days later, sunset will be at 21:24.

Obviously outdoor acoustics aren’t ideal for classical music and we were seated on the boardwalk side instead of on the ocean side so there was a lot of crowd chatter from people walking by. Nonetheless, we enjoyed hearing the pieces and also the waves and the seabirds. I sneaked over to the ocean during the encore for a refreshing wade in the sea.

As you can see from the pictures, the sail-shaped W hotel dominated the scene, and as its lights came on, its 26th-story restaurant was clearly discernible. I hope to see the view from there some day.

We jubilados are rarely in a rush to do anything, and by the time Bill packed the chairs, I dried my feet, and we got to the bus stop, every bus arriving at our stop was too full to even open its doors. There had been several announcements about the metro as we were leaving in Spanish, or perhaps Catalan. Were they directing us to meet the bus somewhere else? Obviously, this wasn’t the start of the route. As the heat was still stifling, we ducked into one of the air-conditioned beach-side bars for a vermut tinto.

Afterward we felt better but the buses were still packed, so we walked to the train and made a crucial decision to go back by a different route that we thought would involve less walking on the other end. What we didn’t realize was that our transfer station was closed for construction, and since the entire subway system closes at midnight Mondays through Thursdays, everyone was dumped off at an obscure neighborhood stop in the middle of Gracia, from which we hailed a cab.

The next day it was just as hot and we weren’t sure how many of those problems we had solved, so we opted out. We had learn something though: the Google navigator information about the BCN metro system sometimes includes hallucinations.

On Saturday we went to the final concert of an annual choral festival held in the Palau de Musica Catalana for which we had passes, thanks to friends who are in a chorus. We had to make a quick transfer from Scottish dancing to the venue, so this time I checked the Catalan News site and learned out that at the exact time we would be traveling there was a Pride parade in Barcelona with 62 floats that was expected to attract 100,000 viewers whose route bisected ours!

I check the Google navigator too, which didn’t know a thing about it.

We took the subway to go underneath all of that. The trip included a couple of longer-than-we-liked-but-shorter-than-Wednesday walks in the heat, but we got there in time and the concert was fascinating. Three completely different choirs performed, respectively, a selection of pieces by women composers; Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms; and five Tagalog pieces, two composed by that choir’s director. My overall favorites were two aleatory works by composer Katarina Gimon, basically improv pieces in which the chorus produced all sorts of sound effects and wandered all through the auditorium.

Regular buses, including the overnight buses, were running when we left. On Sunday we slept until noon.

Tomorrow is the first semi-final of the World Cup. Buena suerte, La Roja!