Where You Going? Barcelona. Oh. The Next 2 Days...

The past two days have been a whirlwind, as I guess the rest of our stay will be, too. Yesterday we went to the Gaudi ‘Sagrada Familia’ Temple, which was a project that was started over 100 years ago and has yet to be completed (Gaudi, the architect, died by the time the first tower was built). I sort of conned my mom into walking the whole mile by saying that the metro was just coming up, but actually, while I did mean that, I also realized that the church was merely a couple more blocks further. Once we finished taking in the work in progress (project completion date: sometime in the 2020’s), we all agreed that the best way to take in more sights was to get a 2-day bus tour ticket that stops at almost every point in the central city.



We hit the Catalan National museum of Art, passed by some big monuments (the Happy Lobster, the Tower of Calatrava & Roy Lichtenstein’s “Face of Barcelona”- guess which one is which) and went to the church of Blessed Mary of the Ocean (Santa Maria del Mar for those of you in the know) and the Picasso Museum, which was amazing for the sheer expansiveness of his early years- it’s obvious the man was a genius but he had his photo-realistic technique down before he was out of his teens.


By the end of the evening, we all were super tired from the walking (especially my mom), so we had dinner and then took a taxi back to the hotel, me missing the 10:30 curfew for using the hotel’s computers and checking emails. I ended up passing out watching a DVD of Angel, Season 2.


Today, I actually overslept (by not updating the time on my Palm Pilot) but we made it back to the tour bus before noon and headed up to Pac Guell, which was another endeavor of Gaudi’s architecture. Turns out, the place is at the top of a steep hill (some would say small mountain and Roz (my mom) was having none of that. Well, actually, she did but we stopped a few times along to way to help her rest. This park was beautiful with the architecture complementing the nature surrounding it as well as the way mosaics were used. After getting a picture with the mosaic dragon, we grabbed a nosh and took a taxi down to the base of the hill back at our bus stop.


After that, we ended up in the Barri Gotico (Gothic Area) and wandered around, going to the Cathedral (Geese in the courtyard- CRAZY) and then walking through shoppes and the Royal Plaza (which was kind of a let-down- a big area with a teeny fountain. At the other side, though, was the center of the Ramblas- the famous area full of restaurants and shops where we stopped and had dinner. By the time we finished, there was no time to hit the other areas we planned, so we got into a cab to find out about transportation to Montserrat in the morning and a little more shopping at the Corte Ingles before getting back to the hotel and getting ready for the next day...