Visiting Barcelona for just three days is not enough. Three days offers no more than a few ticks on the travel checklist, should one actually have such a thing:

√  Check out Gaudí

√  Eat tapas

√  Stroll Barceloneta Beach

Then move on. It’s frustrating and exhausting and exhilarating. In three days you can’t be a traveler, you can only be a tourist and who wants to be lumped in with that crowd? I’m told by others that I should be grateful even to have three days and I am, really, but I can’t help the desperation that rises within to see it all, hear it all, feel it all. My head swivels and my eyes bug out until the thousands of impressions make my brain soggy. Being a tourist reduces me to a caricature of my former self.

At the end of the three days I close my eyes and let all those impressions swirl like the coloured wax in a lava lamp. (Some call it exhaustion but I prefer to think of it as a creatively restful state.)  Slow, heavy, breaking apart, realigning, changing colour: images of jamón ibérico roil with Catalan wine as trencadís salamanders sparkle. I repeat – this is not exhaustion. Or anything stronger. It’s an indulgence of the senses.

But it doesn’t mean anything.

This line was famously said by one of the von Trapp children in The Sound of Music, with reference to music notes. And it’s true; taken individually, all my impressions are as meaningless as a single note. I could just list them, or put them in a slideshow to bore my relatives, but that doesn’t give me a story. I need to find the music of the memory.

I want my story to be about architect Antoni Gaudí, with his crazy chimneys, bassoon-playing angel and unfinished masterwork, La Sagrada Familia. But thanks to a malfunctioning sensor, my memory of him has become the story of his death. This one impression obliterates all the rest, no matter how hard I try to bury it. It’s like a terrible song that I can’t get out of my head.

Here’s how this came to be. When you only have three days you have to take advantage of time-saving tourist aids. In my case, that was the hop-on, hop-off bus. Barcelona has cleverly installed personal audio systems at every seat, and the audio is apparently triggered by sensors on the roadway. One block before a famous sight, the system tells you all about what you’re going to see. Get stuck in traffic and the audio waits patiently with you. It’s a great system except when it malfunctions. Up near the stop for Parc Güell, the audio sombrely announced that at the upcoming intersection Gaudí met his death. He was run over by a trolley, which is a sad fate indeed. Two blocks later Gaudí again met his death by trolley. Four intersections further along, he died again. The malfunction would have been funny had it not been for the fact that we were talking about a man’s death. Please, please, I thought, don’t let it happen again!

So now, all my memories of Barcelona keep getting run over by a trolley. I want to remember the sheer genius of Gaudí’s work but then BAM! There’s that darn trolley again. And I remember that a great man died and I think of his legacy and I look around at the art and architecture that are the crown jewels of this city, done by the many artists that tried something new because Gaudí showed them how and…I had my story.

That malfunctioning sensor sang a terrible song, but it provided the music for my memory. It will forever remind me of the man who gave this city its heart. Whether it’s the food, the beach, the buildings or the people, it’s a city that knows how to colour outside the lines. And that’s because Antoni Gaudí once lived there, before he was run over by a trolley.