T-giving in Barcelona - from the road
Trip Start
Apr 06, 2003
1
64
69
Trip End
Ongoing
Barcelona,
Spain
Saturday, November 26, 2005
Hope everyone had a great T-giving. We had our 3rd pre-T-giving potluck a few weeks ago with our A'dam friends and celebrated the official holiday in the city where Columbus returned to after his journey discovering the "New World", Barcelona (being there now was a pure coincidence).
We arrived on Tues evening with Julie's parents (AKA, Oma and Opa). We stayed in a 2-bedroom apartment in the Barri Gotic, the old town. The apartment was nice and gave us a chance to spend lots of time together playing with Natalie.
Wed we visited the Picasso museum, showing his early works before he got too crazy with his Cubist stuff. The museum is housed in 5 old mansions, which really added to the beautiful paintings. Afterwards, we stopped into a great local tapas place - I LOVED it...I ate more than the other 3 combined! After lunch we did a bit of window-shopping in the Barri Gotic neighborhood, stopped by the Barcelona Cathedral, and then toured the absolutely gorgeous Palau de la Musica Catalana concert hall (http://home.palaumusica.org/segle.html - click on 'Modernist Spaces' to see some pics). Barcelona has tons of cool Modernist buildings (it's almost like walking around in Alice in Wonderland) and this is certainly one of the most amazing. We finished the day with a stop at the Mercat de la Boqueria market where we picked up some veggies, bread, cheese, and other small snacks for dinner.
Thurs we continued our Modernista building tour as we spend the day visiting some of Antonio Gaudi's landmarks. First we saw the Sagrada Familia church. It has been under construction for the past 80 years...although they think it'll finally be done 50 years from now. After a quick lunch, we went to Parc Guell, a beautiful place to walk among trees and huge colorful ceramic lizards. Next, we toured La Pedrera, another Gaudi landmark. This was built as an apartment but now also contains a very thorough exhibit which explains a lot about his genius architectural designs and how he incorporated nature, light, and ebb and flow motion into his works. Another amazing site. We finished our Gaudi day with a walk down Passeig de Gracia, a beautiful boulevard filled with fancy stores and Modernista buildings. We celebrated our T-giving with some turkey tapas (not really, but we did have some excellent tapas).
Fri we took a day-trip to nearby Montserrat to see the crazy rock formations and the basilica. We had to take a cable car up the mountain and unfortunately, it was freezing up there so we didn't get a chance to explore the mountains as much as we initially planned on but we did see the Boys Choir perform. Afterwards, we returned to Barcelona and visited the Joan Miro Museum. This is the 2nd time I've been there (1st time as a student backpacker) and I even got an audio-guide this time but I just don't get his work stuff - a bunch of paint blotches and some squiggly lines just don't make sense to me. Oh well. We finished the day with tapas along the Mediterranean.
On Sat we had breakfast at a cafe on the Rablas - yum, churros con chocolate. We walked around town for a few more hours getting our last glances of Barcelona before our late afternoon flight back to A'dam.
Barcelona was a great trip. And it was great to spend time with Julie's parents again. Unfortunately we didn't see the water, light, and music display at the Palau Nacional fountains or visit the Dali Museum in Figueras (a 2-hour trip from Barcelona) so I guess we'll have to come back - maybe in 50 years so we can see the completed Sagrada Familia!
Anyways, hope you all had a nice T-giving and we'll speak with you soon.
-Stephen (and Julie and Natalie)
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