Barthelona

Barcelona (Oct 25-28)

So, we finally got to Barcelona and we find a payphone to call... wait, what?  Katie didn't tell you?  OK, let me go back to Paris for a second.

So we jump on the train in Paris headed for Figueres, Spain (which is a short train ride from Barcelona).  An hour or two into the train ride, the conductor tries very hard to explain what we're about to experience, but her English is only slightly better than my Spanish, and French isn't getting us anywhere at all.  Well, it turns out there's a strike on the rail system so the train that we're on, headed for Spain won't actually go past Montpelier, France.

The upshot is that while we're trying to figure this out, we meet a very nice couple from Brazil who are also headed to Barcelona and so we kind of threw in together to figure out how to get there.

 

So we get to the station in Montpelier and the only people there are trying to explain in various languages that we can wait for a bus or take a cab or stay in Montpelier for another day waiting for the strike to end.  So the four of us jumped into a cab about the size of a Jetta with our two backpacks and their very large suitcases and drove the ~1 hour 20 minutes from Montpelier to Figueres (if you want to get a feel for who fast we were driving, put that into trip into Google Maps.  Our new friend (pictured below) told our cab driver to "be careful" as he passed 140 (kph) to which he responded, "no, no, it's OK, the limit is normally 120.").

So after arriving at the train station that is actually completely shut down and driving across town to the one that is still operational, we grab a couple more trains from Figueres to Barcelona, part ways and arrive in Barcelona earlier than we were set to arrive initially.

So we get to the train station and I'm supposed to call the company that I booked the room with when I get there, since it's more of an apartment than a hotel and there's no reception desk.  Well, there's no payphone at the train station, and we have to switch metro lines to get where we're going anyway, so we popped out at the Sagrada Familia station to look for a payphone.

Oh yeah, the Sagrada Familia station is named after a nearby cathedral.

So when we called, the guy who was going to meet us there needed a little bit of time to get there, so we had a beer and some fried squid and looked at the cathedral.  Katie was very happy.

So our hotel was really more of an apartment, with 7 different bedrooms.  Since they weren't fully booked, we got a bump to a room with a balcony, which was nice.

Also, the cheese whiz made it safely.

We headed downtown for dinner.  We started at a place called Tapa Tapa that served (shockingly) tapas.  It was a little touristy but still very good, and just across the street from one of Antoni Gaudi's famous buildings called Casa Milla (Sagrada Familia being another).

We walked around looking for a bar Katie had been to in college called L'ovella Negra (The Black Sheep), but couldn't find it, so we walked into a place called Ra on a whim.  It turned out to be very good, we had some tapas and sangria (a theme for our stay in Barcelona) including the patatas bravas, which are basically fried little chunks of potatoes with various sauces on them, and cerviche.  So that was delicious.

The next day we headed back to Sagrada Familia to actually go inside, but the line was stupid long, stretching approximately 2 city blocks, so we decided to leave and come back later.  So we headed back down to Las Ramblas, the main drag in the old town, to get lunch.  We also walked through La Boqueria, which is essentially a giant food market, and the oldest continuously operating market in Barcelona, dating back to the early mphl-50s.

We caught lunch at a little restaurant called Elizabeth's nearby where I found the entrance to the Ministry of Magic.

And found out that Barcelonans might be surprised to find out what other uses their houseplants might be put to.

We also walked around Barri Gotic, which is the oldest part of the city.  It dates back to at least the first century CE when the Romans built a city wall and aqueducts (some of which is still there).

Since then, a number of other structures have been erected, including a couple of churches and various other buildings still in use today, including this really pretty courtyard where we hid from the rain for a few minutes.

I also continued my recent streak of seeing cats!  Hooray cats!

This one is clearly happy to see me.

Later that day we headed back up to Sagrada Familia and went inside.  This place is amazing.  I'm just going to post a few pictures, but it really is the most beautiful building we've been in this whole trip.  It’s actually really hard to shoot in, because the lighting is generally quite dim and the architecture really pulls your eye all over the place, so it’s difficult to capture anything particularly completely in a given picture.

It’s currently unfinished and is expected to be complete around 2020.  We’ll be coming back then.

It was designed by Antoni Gaudi and he oversaw the beginning of construction 100 years ago.  Walking down the aisle of this cathedral is like walking into some kind of sacred wood.  The whole building is a work of art and unlike any cathedral we’ve been in this trip.  It is truly a masterpiece.

After we got kicked out of the church, (while they were kicking everyone else out of the church) we went down to the basement where they have many of the models and sketches used in the design and development of the church, from concept to execution.  Gaudi took much of his inspiration from nature and seeing the progression of the work was really amazing.  Here is an example of some of the design work, he hung a series of strings and weights and then flipped the result upside down to create the lines for the exterior of the building.

Afterwards we headed back down to Las Ramblas in the evening and found L’ovella Negra for a pitcher of sangria.  Katie was SO HAPPY!

Then we ended up at Los Toreros for dinner where we split another pitcher of sangria and had a mixed paella plate with chicken, prawns and squid.  It was most excellent.

The next day we decided we really needed to ship some things home before flying to Rome (our next city), so we went looking for an open Mailboxes Etc.  They were surprisingly difficult to find, but in the meantime we discovered that people play ping pong in the streets of Barcelona, so it's basically the coolest city we've been to thus far.

We finally found out that the only one open today was down in Barri Gotic, where we had had lunch the day before, so we headed down there to ship everything.

Afterwards we headed up to Park Guell, which is a Park in the outskirts of Barcelona where Gaudi lived for quite awhile.  He designed much of the park itself, which is really interesting.  It also provides amazing views of the city, including this one which really gives an idea of the scale of Sagrada Familia compared to the rest of the city.

It's about a mile and a half away and has the two towers on each end with the cranes in between.

In order to get there, we had to walk up 147 stairs, about 1/4 mile of steeply inclined side walk and take about half a dozen very long escalators.

The park itself kind of carves out the hillside so that you can get these excellent views from a number of different places.  Here are some other shots of the park, though.

Katie decided to boulder up the inside of the above installation, which feels very much like the barrel of a wave when you're in it.

 There was also a lady doing street art with bubbles which was pretty cool.

 Eventually we got hungry and headed back downtown for dinner.  The meal we had was ridiculous, the bread and cheese plate we ordered was slices of a loaf of bread with what I think were Kraft Singles-style slices of provolone.  We basically stopped half way through, left and grabbed some gelato on the way home.  On the plus side, the table we were at appeared to have the mechanism to operate a sewing machine under it, so that was kind of fun.

That night we packed up and went to bed relatively early (at least for us and Barcelona) since we had to catch a 7am flight to Rome the next morning.  So we set the alarms on our phones and went to sleep.  Not very well, though, since we were both afraid we'd be missing our flight.  So we finally get up and start getting around and are about to head to the train station to catch the tram to the airport when we realize that we're an hour behind schedule.  Somehow we had slept an hour past our alarms and were running late.

So we hurried to the train station where Katie noticed that our watches were not showing the same time as the overhead displays for the arrival and departure of the next trains.  Apparently Europe doesn't do daylight savings time on the same schedule as the US.  Our phones had updated overnight and we hadn't realized.  Hooray phones!

Next stop, Roma!