The end result?
I like Barcelona a lot. It's an absolutely beautiful city.
And a major part of that is Antonio Gaudi, an architect who lived around the turn of the century and made really really wild buildings.
This is the Sagrada Familia, which, on my first day in Barcelona I made the mistake of walking to. I happen to hate metros if there are other ways to travel, and I like to walk in new cities anyway. In Greece I was a master walker. I
always knew where I was within a few days of arriving and I was never daunted by the walk from our hostel to the Parth
enon or other sites. Barcelona defeated me - I walked from my hostel to the Sagrada Familia that first day. It took an hour and a half, and it wasn't even halfway across the city; I may have walked a third of the way across the city. It was a beautiful walk, but I took the train back.
Anyway, the Sagrada Familia. It's a cathedral that's doing it's best to prove that all our ideas of having faster building methods today than we did in the Middle Ages are ridiculous. The first stone for this building was laid in 1882. All those cranes you see in that picture? They're there because this building isn't even closed to finished yet. The estimated finished date is 2030.
But it's beautiful already.
Honestly, I could try to give you the background and reasons he made the building like this, but I keep getting lost for words. It's so pretty! I will say - the columns are supposed to res
emble trees (they even have knots before they branch out! Look!) and that Gaudi was pretty much always
inspired by nature in hi
s shapes and his colors.
But I'll try to give a quick recount of my trip. I'm no travel writer though. Here goes -
Day 1 - Saturday - Bike tour of Barcelona. The most exceptional thing about this was careening around tiny streets packed with people. It was one of the scariest things I've done in a while. Barcelona is beautiful, but don't believe the packet that says "travel the way natives do - by bike!" because it's a lie. Barcelona was not built for bikes. But then I went on my fateful walk to the Sagrada Familia, which completely took me out of commission for the rest of the afternoon. That night I joined up with a girl I met on the bike tour and we went to the Magic
Fountain (cheesy, but fun; how often do you get to see a fountain dance to "I want to break free" and "Every breath you take" in the same night?) and then to a bar to watch the Madrid/Barcelona soccer game.
Day 2 - Sunday - The Madrid/Barcelona soccer game might not have just ended with the end of the game. So I slept in. That afternoon I switched hostels and then went to explore Park Guell. Which is simply amazing. (And was design
ed by Gaudi, in our theme for the post.)
After spending hours there, I went back to the hostel, where I was instantly invited to join a wicked game of Spoons. It got competitive. There was bleeding. Also felt bad because I realized at one point I was the only non-German speaker in the group, therefore they were all s
peaking English because of me. But German? Awesome language. And, FYI, "spooning" is "spooning" in German (translated directly I mean, as in word-for-spoon+some form of verb ending) (and in Dutch it's "little spoon little spoon"). At least I hope these things are true. I'm repeating what I've heard. But so few things translate like that, it always makes me happy when they do.
Day 3 - Monday - Warning, this day started off like many of my days in Barcelona - Lost as hell. I don't know why I had such a difficult time finding my way around, but I
did. Searched for the tour group visiting Gaudi's buildings, couldn't find it in time. Searched for the National Museum, but when I did find it I realized they weren't open on Mondays. So instead spent the day exploring the Gothic Neighborhood which is also wicked. And ended the day by going here -
The Cathedral!
This place is really cool. Inside you walk from alcove to alcove where they have beautiful beautiful art from all the different eras of religious art. And they have GEESE!
Also made it to the Dali Museum, which was set up really strangely (appropriately enough, it's Dali). There were several places that you just walked through curtains to get into tiny, ill-lit rooms to look at his art. And a couple that didn't even look like other rooms, they looked like wall hangings, but you'd realize somebody had disappeared through them... Wildly cool.
That night at the hostel, the in-house nutritionist (yeah, that's right) made us a traditional Spanish meal of goat cheese and olives, gazpacho, fish noodles, and fabulous chocolate. And a bucket of sangria. He also told us the "national secret" for making sangria. Fanta. Half orange, half lemon fanta. Classy.
Two more days to describe, but the office is closing and I have things to clean before my family dinner tonight.
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