Barcelona

For my birthday, we took the high velocity train over to Barcelona, a place we were told we HAD to see before we left Spain.  We were told that Barcelona was redesigned near the turn of the 20th century by several warring architects and the building structures are incredible.  And I must say, that the pictures don’t do justice to so much of what we saw.

In Barcelona they don’t speak Spanish, they speak Catalan.  I’m told that the whole state has hopes of independence, but that isn’t going anywhere yet.  Though most people we talked to spoke Spanish, all the signs and stores, and elevator voice all were Catalan, which is kind of a hybrid between Spanish and French.

The Plaza of Catalunya is filled with pidgeons and Kaela had fun chasing them around.  There is also a fountain there that has the story that if you drink from it you are destined to return to Barcelona.  I didn’t read that until after, so we will have to go back someday….

We climbed a giant mountain that they called the whole thing a park. On the tip top there was the olympic stadium (from ‘92) ,an incredible art museum and a view of the whole city.

      

What I will remember most of Barcelona was the stairs.  We carried that stroller up stairs and down stairs and up more, especially in the metro.  We were so exhausted, only to get to our hotel/apartment and find that we were on the 6th floor – no elevator.  Wow.  There were bunches of times that Eliora was at the bottom in the stroller and Kaela refusing to walk one more stair.

The next morning we went and saw the crowning jewel of Barcelona, The Sagrada Familia.  It is a cathedral that was started sometime in the late 1800s and is still under construction because it is really that much work and detail. The majority of the design was by Gaudi, who does “Modernist”, which translates to me as “Strange”.  Strange as it was, it was probably the most impressive building I have ever seen.  Far larger than I expected and detailed to the maximum.  There is a belief that when the building is finally finished, the world will come to and end.  This is the façade where Gaudi spent much of his life work, depicting the birth of Christ.  The next building is also by Guadi called the Pedrera, the Stone Quarry.

                                                              

Then we went to the Parc de Cuidadano where I think that everyone in Barcelona meets on Sunday afternoons to sit on the grass and enjoy themselves.  There were hundreds of people there, renting bikes and carriages, lunching, rowing on the lake…. And lots of performers.  It wasn’t street performers, but just people out practicing, showing off and enjoying themselves.  There were these three guys, motorcycle dudes, up tap dancing.  They didn’t have anything out for you to give them money, just up there to dance  We saw a tight rope walker, and juggler, and a lot of people just playing around, it was very fun.

      

This is getting way long, but we even made it to see the sun set over the Mediterranean sea.  Eliora ate the sand and Kaela and I put our fingers in the cold water.  It was a very cool visit.