Barcelona: Last Days

For New Year's Eve, we slept in a little bit, explored the lounge and had a lotof coffee and tea (I mean, who doesn't love free caffeine?), explored the hotel grounds, and discovered this would be a super fantastic place for a warm-weather vacation. I mean, the beach, the hammocks, the palm trees…? Beautiful stuff.

 

When we finally got our day in gear, we went down to Las Ramblas, which is basically a giant shopping-district street in Barcelona. We didn't do a whole lot of shopping, but it was definitely fun to see all the people, the art, the food, and the giant market halfway down the road. The market had everything from gorgeous chocolates to dead fishes. There were also skinned rabbits, turkeys, and chickens involved. Nothing like an open-air market with raw meat just hanging out on the counter, right?

We bought some grapes for the New Year, because the tradition in Spain is that you eat a grape at each stroke of midnight. At midnight we realized they were seeded grapes… which makes them considerably more difficult to eat in 12 seconds! We watched the midnight festivities on the TV (Puerta del Sol in Madrid instead of Times Square in New York), tried to eat grapes, and watched the party scene from our hotel window. If you can identify every song being played in the bars from the 8th floor, you might be near bars in Spain on New Year's Eve. There were also fireworks shows put on by a couple restaurants and hotels, which the 8th floor gave us a pretty sweet view of. Happy 2013!

On New Year's Day, we decided to go explore the Olympic Village from the '92 Summer Olympics. Unfortunately, even though most of it is just a pedestrian tour ground, the gates to the cool buildings were all closed because of the holiday. It was fun to see, but would've been cooler if we could get closer. But it was a nice way to explore the city and pass the time for New Year's Day.

 

Plus there was a cool playground…

 

And we got tapas for lunch at a place called TapaTapa, which I picked out just because I really like saying the name. Saying it super super fast. It's fun. Try it. You know you want to. 

After lunch, we went to the hotel and I finally went down to the gym–it's a pretty sweet deal for a hotel gym. And finally getting the chance to work out this week has been fantastic–even if I've been super sore when we have to climb the stairs of the Metro… Still worth it! 

I think we're about ready to head home–we got Chinese food for dinner at one of the first restaurants we ran across when we went to go forage for food. It's been a packed couple weeks! And I am very excited to be back stateside. I'm writing this from the train back to Madrid to catch my flight to Denver, and while I'm so sad that this experience is over… I'm really looking forward to things like seeing the Flatirons and having access to mac & cheese! 

Barcelona: La Sagrada Familia

12.30: Here's the thing that I have wanted to see the most in Barcelona since I started learning about Barcelona in the first place. The Catedral de la Sagrada Familia is Gaudí's biggest creation, but unfortunately it's still unfinished because a) Gaudí died halfway through the construction (he got hit by a tram) and b) they ran out of money for a little while.

But even though it's not finished, it was worth the line that wrapped halfway around the city block to get in. Plus, this means we got to see more of the outside, where once again Gaudí used a lot of references to nature to decorate the cathedral, from fruits and vegetables atop the towers, to shells and lizards decorating the walls, to a giant tree atop the main façade at the front of the church.

The façade on the opposite side, where visitors enter, was sculpted after Gaudí's death, but depicts the story of Jesus, excepting his birth. I don't know a ton about the Bible, but the Last Supper, Betrayal of Judas, and Crucifixion are all there, along with several other important chapters. Over the doors are carvings of the Greek letters Alpha and Omega.

Inside, the ceiling looks like flowers, supported by giant stone pillars that branch out to look like a forest.

Another one of Gaudí's trademark style points is the use of natural light. The church is covered with what will eventually be about ten sets of stained-glass windows on each side. 

The main altarpiece of the Cathedral was designed by Gaudí but sculpted by another artist under Gaudí's direction. The backside of the altar is surrounded by a series of chapels where the stained glass is finished, and the metal organ reflects all the colors that come through the windows.

Above the altar is the largest skylight in the church, the top of which is capped by a circle of gold to symbolize God.

The church is expected to be finished by the middle of the century, and will eventually have four middle towers and one giant tower in the absolute center. For now, they're working on the four surrounding towers, but the ones along the outside are finished.

Also, a lot of the museum exhibits (this one is inside the school Gaudí designed for the children of the workers and local kids) were about the physics and mathematics of putting the church together… which Cordis the engineering bro took as an opportunity to try to teach me advanced math–so here's Cordis the "schience!" teacher.

 After seeing every little thing in the church, we went to get a snack–ice cream!

Noms. After this, we went to find a park with more things designed by Gaudí–it was at this point that Cordis started making fun of the audio guide tours that praise Gaudí at every opportunity, so Cordis now refers to Gaudí as "the god-king Gaudí!" But the park was really pretty, even if we managed to accidentally enter on the wrong side and got to climb a lot of stairs and hills to get there!! It just meant we got to see more of the park–and nature is something Salamanca is slightly lacking in, so I didn't mind a few extra trees.

The true Gaudí part of the park consists of an itty bitty church, which is now a gift shop. Gotta make money somehow, I guess. 

But it made for a nice afternoon adventure!

After all of these shenanigans, we went back to the hotel to grab our luggage and switch to the other hotel we're staying at in Barcelona. Which is one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen. I'm spoiled rotten, I tell you. We're only here two nights because it burned a fair amount of hotel points to stay here, but it's so worth it! We're right on the water, and everything about this place screams hospitality. There's free hot chocolate in the lobby. It was originally built to be the Olympic Village living quarters in the '92 Olympics. It's crazy beautiful.

Chocolate in the lobby!

Munchkin's reaction to the thought of being an interior designer at this hotel...

Barcelona: Gaudí's Casa Battló

Well, I can think of no better way to start my Saturday than to wake up at 5 AM to get on a train, can you?

However, that train was headed to Barcelona, which made everything better!!

We managed to successfully navigate the Metro with the giant suitcases (doesn't everyone just love being the people on public transportation with all their luggage? Yeah, me too.) and find the hotel, which is a block away from one of the main attractions of Barcelona–the Casa Batlló, one of Antoni Gaudí's creations.

It's an amazing building, and there's essentially zero conventionally flat surfaces, except the floors. Everything is moving, with wavy outlines and random shapes.

Not everything in the house is original–it was originally built for the Batlló family, but eventually fell into disrepair and had to be restored. Unfortunately, this means the tickets to see the house are pretty expensive, so they can restore it properly, but hey, I can deal with dollar-store food if it means I get to see this house.

This fireplace is an original though. It's built so that a couple can sit on the big seat on the right side, and their chaperone can sit on the little seat on the left–since dating was a smidge different when this house was built in the early 1900's.

The building is all "sea-shapes" as the audio tour called it, like this ceiling is built to look like a whirlpool, and the windows in the room are all wavy with colored glass.

Also, Gaudí put in access to natural light in every room in the house, even the office, the smallest room in the house. There was a center light shaft in the middle of the house, which provided access to the elevator and the apartments on all the upper floors, and this light shaft is made out of blue tile that's darker at the top and lighter at the bottom, so that it all seems like the same shade of blue, even as you move down and there's less light.

The roof is pretty snazzy too, Gaudí grouped all the chimneys together so they could form a castle-like shape instead of littering the roof with random structures. And the front of the house looks like a dragon's spine.

The apartment doors are marked with letters instead of numbers, in a calligraphy that Gaudí made up himself, and the door handles are an unconventional shape, that's made to fit to your hand. 

Bilbao

Soooo here's what we found in Bilbao to do:

• eat a lot of Italian food (like way too much Italian food)
• Guggenheim museum

Not that this makes it a bad visit, but this will probably be a shorter post. Because while the Guggenheim is super awesome from the outside…

 

…and includes a crazy spider sculpture that the artist made to represent her mother (in a good way, like how they keep mosquitos from spreading disease and are both strong and fragile at the same time), the art inside the museum is a little underwhelming.

There were a few things I really liked, like the Andy Warhol print of Marilyn Monroe's face, or a digital installation that was originally put in for a fundraiser for AIDS relief. The digital installation scrolls messages in English and Spanish on the front side in red, and in Basque (because we are in Basque country, after all) on the back in blue. It's all short phrases that are basically about being human–big themes like love and loss. It's just really interesting to read them, because they get strung together like a story.

And the art inside is not bad, but after visiting the Museo del Prado, Reina Sofia, and the Vatican Museum… It's just not quite up to snuff. Very interesting art though, there is no denying that. There was a pillow shaped like a piece of pie, or some incredibly crazy large pieces of metal that were made into huge spirals that you could explore. Just unconventional stuff, which was definitely interesting and we spent a while looking at it all.

Oh yeah, and there's a puppy and a giant stack of marbles outside the museum too. Fancy art. And at the top of the hour, a "fog sculpture" takes place, something installed by a Japanese artist who's been working with fog for something like 30 years… I'll just leave you all with that tidbit.