Barcelona: Part Three

Side note:  Our new camera is great, but wow, 14-megapixel-shots will eat up the free storage space on Blogger quickly!  But don't worry, I bought an extra 20 GB of space and turned down the resolution on my photos a bit, so I shouldn't have any more problems in the near future.

Anyways, on Wednesday, we had a vacation miracle: sun!  It was very windy and still chilly, but I couldn't care less because it was sunny.  Since it looked like this would be our only sunny day in Barcelona, I decided to head out to Parc Güell, which sits on a small mountain in central Barcelona, so it has great views.  This park was also designed by Gaudí and was originally meant to be part of an exclusive real estate community, but it never was completed, so the city took it over and turned it into a public park.  The park has a lot of walking paths and different things Gaudi designed.

There's a walking path on top of those pillars

Gaudí designed this church

There was at least one house in the park, though I don't know if it's occupied

Practicing my photography skills

The park had a great view of Barcelona, but I made the mistake of going to the park in the late morning/early afternoon, therefore the sun was right in my face when I tried to take pictures looking towards the water.  This meant that the pictures of downtown Barcelona are kind of washed out.

Looking towards the Mediterranean, another picture of Sagrada Familia from far away

If you look in the opposite direction from the water, there is another mountain called Tibidabo, which strangely has a large church and a small amusement park next to each other.  See the red roller coaster track on the right?

I had started at the top of the hill from the parking lot entrance of the park and worked my way down to the main entrance of the park.  The main entrance is between the two white-roofed buildings you see below.

The most popular park of the park is the open area that was meant to be the marketplace for the real estate community.  If you walk past the two buildings from above, you can reach the marketplace area by walking up these steps that are shown below.  The marketplace is above the columns.

Couldn't get good pictures here because of so many tourists

The marketplace area, which is now just for tourists and peddlers

Below the marketplace where the columns are, there are fantastic mosaics on the ceiling, like this one below.  Again, I just love Gaudí's use of mosaics and bright colors.

Great mosaics at the park

The sign on the wall just outside the entrance

After I visited the park, I headed back to the downtown area to get some lunch, to enjoy more sun, and to take pictures of the sights I saw on Monday.  While walking around, I ran into this protest/demonstration?  I have no idea what it was about.  Can anybody read Spanish/Catalan?

Everybody's protesting these days, but these people seemed really happy so maybe it was a rally?

I went by the Santa Maria del Mar cathedral again since it was open this time and did my best to take pictures inside with the low lighting.

The inside of Santa Maria del Mar cathedral

I'm proud of this picture of one of the stained-glass windows, it's so sharp, even with lots of zoom and low lighting!

I then headed over to another public park called Parc de la Ciutadel where the 1888 World's Fair was held (thank you World's Fairs and Olympics for fantastic public spaces).

Lovely fountain in the park

Did you know Spain also has an Arc de Triomf? Main entrance of the 1888 World's Fair.

After the conference was over that day, Darren met me at the Sagrada Familia, which is the cathedral that designed by Gaudí, but was never finished in his lifetime and is still under construction.  It costs $18 per person to go inside, which is rather expensive, but it is worth the money.  It is so fascinating inside and the cathedral is only funded through private donations and entrance fees (not clear on why neither the Catholic church nor the city of Barcelona don't contribute...).

There are a lot of design details, history, and symbolism involved with this cathedral that I don't want to delve into here.  I will just briefly point out that construction on the cathedral began in 1882, but Gaudí did not become the architect until a year later.  The church was never finished, I think, because of poor funding and several civil and world wars.  Construction began again in the 1950s and only just last year, enough of the inside was completed to add an organ and allow for services to be held there.  The cathedral was dedicated by the Pope just last November.  I will now just describe what you are seeing in the pictures below and feel free to read up more about Sagrada Familia here.

This newly constructed side of the cathedral focuses on the death of Christ

The inside of the cathedral

The "front" of the cathedral, with some great color filtering through the stained-glass

The older side of the cathedral focuses on the life of Christ

After the cathedral, we went to the Picasso Museum, which features some of his works since he spent a lot of time in Barcelona, but we thought the museum wasn't that great.  We had some mediocre food at a touristy restaurant for dinner, then headed back to our sketchy apartment to rest our tired feet and get some sleep.  

Our last full day in Barcelona and the last day of the conference was Thursday.  I didn't go out and see much because it was pouring down rain and I thought I had covered everything that looked interesting to me.  We did decide to check out the Barcelona Aquarium before dinner since it got good reviews.  Well, it wasn't as great as the reviews said, but we tried to have fun anyways.

After that, we had a great end to our Barcelona trip by eating a delicious meal at Cafe de l'Academia.  I would recommend this place to everyone!

Barcelona: Part Two

Though it was still chilly on Tuesday, it did not rain much, so I was able to take pictures.  Darren went to his conference in the morning, but he planned to skip the afternoon session since the talks didn't apply to him, so I tried to do some sightseeing near the conference center.  My intent was to go to an open-air museum built for the 1929 World's Fair that recreates a Spanish village using architectural styles from all around the country.  The museum was near the conference center on a small mountain in the city called Montjuïc.  This was not only the site of the World's Fair, but of the 1992 Summer Olympics.

I got off the subway at the conference center stop and wow, there were a lot of people there!  They weren't kidding when they said 50,00 people were attending the conference.  I didn't get a shot of the entrance because I figured Darren would, but he didn't either, so I only have pictures of the back, which you will see in this post.  The subway stop and the conference center was at the base of the mountain, so I walked up to the top of the mountain where the Museum of Catalan Art is (and where supposedly the architecture museum was) and took some pictures along the way.

The Sagrada Familia, which was miles away, brought to you by the awesome 35x zoom on our camera

Water fountains on Montjuïc

The Museum of Catalan Art

The view of the city from the steps of the museum with Sagrada Familia in the center

The shot below is of the conference center and the space around it from the steps of the museum.  The two brick towers in the back were where the entrance was and where the subway stop was.  Normally, you can walk straight through the brick towers and up some escalators past the fountain to reach the mountaintop.  Well, all of that space was taken up by the conference and it was blocked off. 

I spent the next twenty minutes trying to figure out where this architecture museum was.  All the signs were pointing to places that were blocked off by the conference, so I finally figured out that the conference must be using the museum space and I couldn't go in.  With another hour to kill before I was supposed to meet up with Darren, I just went to the Museum of Catalan Art instead.  Barcelona is the capital of the Catalonian region of Spain, which merged with the Castilian empire to create a unified Spain in the 15th century.  Catalonia has a rich history in arts and culture stretching into the 20th century, so the museum featured art starting from the 14th century all the way to the modern works of Antoni Gaudí.  

Unfortunately, not many of the descriptions in the museum were in English, but I mostly just enjoyed going at my own pace, not having to worry about speeding up or slowing down for anyone else!  It was quite lovely.  I was not able to get through the whole museum in an hour, but I saw the works I was interested in, including Gaudí and Juan Míro.  

I met Darren outside of the museum and we headed back to the city center so Darren could see some sites I had been to the day before.  We walked down La Rambla, which is a mile-long avenue filled with shops, restaurants, street performers, and generally the most touristy part of Barcelona.  It was interesting to see, but we didn't spend a lot of time there.  I'm sure it is nice during the other seasons when the trees have leaves on them.

At the end of La Rambla is a monument dedicated to Christopher Columbus.  It was the newly united Spanish empire (ruled by Ferdinand and Isabella) that funded this Italian's voyages to America.  The monument features Columbus on top supposedly pointing the way to the New World (he's actually pointing east) with sculptures around the base depicting Columbus's interactions with the king and queen of Spain (Did you know Spain celebrates Columbus Day, too?).

Monument to Columbus

Base of the monument

We walked over to the Santa Maria del Mar cathedral, which was built in the 14th century to commemorate the conquest of Sardinia by King Jaume II.  It was closed at the time, but I took pictures of the inside the next day, which I will show in the next post.

Santa Maria del Mar

First "people" picture!

We came across this funny store by the cathedral called Happy Pills.  Can you figure out what they are selling?

They are selling candy!

 After a short break back at our apartment, we then walked some more to see some Gaudí architecture.  Antoni Gaudí was a Catalan architect from the turn of the century who designed several famous locations in Barcelona.  I really didn't know much about him and didn't understand the all the hype surrounding him, but I really enjoyed the first house we went to designed by Gaudí called Casa Batlló.  We couldn't go inside because it was closed every afternoon for private events that week (probably for the conference), but it was still interesting to see from the outside.  I really like his use of mosaics and lots of color here.

Casa Batlló

We then walked a couple of blocks to see another Gaudí building called La Pedrera or Casa Milá, but I did not enjoy this one as much.

Finally, we went to the Barcelona Cathedral.  Unfortunately, this has been under construction for some time, so we could not get very good pictures of the outside, but we were able to tour the inside and Darren tried to get some decent pictures with the low lighting.  It is always freezing in these cathedrals, I can't imagine having to sit through a service!

Barcelona Cathedral

The inside of the Barcelona cathedral

That was everything we saw on Tuesday, more to come in the next post where we experienced the one sunny day of the whole trip!

Barcelona: Part One

We spent last week in Spain as part of a work trip for Darren.  He attended a tech conference in Barcelona during the week, but we also took a quick side trip to Madrid before returning home.  We didn't expect we would be able to travel to Spain while we are here in Europe, so it was a nice surprise to see something unexpected.  We arrived in Barcelona late Sunday night after a significant delay thanks to Spanair, the Spanish national airline.  We can't say we were really impressed with the airline, but I think their flights are pretty inexpensive, so you get what you pay for.

The conference Darren attended, Mobile World Congress, had around 50,000 participants, so needless to say every hotel room available in Barcelona was booked.  Since Darren wasn't assigned to go to this conference until two weeks before, we were scrambling to find somewhere to stay.  The only thing left we could find was a short-term apartment rental in the Gothic section of Barcelona.  When we arrived in Barcelona at 10:30 pm and walked to our apartment, we didn't really feel like we were in the best part of town.  We took a picture of our street during the day, when it looked less sketchy.  Really, after you got used to it, it wasn't so bad.

Our sketchy street where we stayed

This is our sketch door

Our tiny stairwell with poor lighting and red paint (??) on the steps

Now despite all the sketchiness around the apartment, the apartment itself was nice.  The pictures below are from the rental website since I was too lazy to take pictures.  While the green walls were adorable and the furnishings were great, don't be fooled by the pictures.  Every lamp you see in the pictures was not actually there.  And there were shutters on the windows that I could not open, so the apartment was very dark, which was annoying.  There were lots of other little things that were weird about the apartment, but we really just had a good laugh about all of it.  We were grateful we even were able to find somewhere to stay in the city at the last minute.  The best part of having the apartment, though, was being able to keep milk, juice, and yogurt in the fridge so we could have a quick and cheap breakfast every morning.

I loved the green walls!

Yes, there were separate beds, oh well

We didn't do anything Sunday night since it was so late, so we just unpacked and went to sleep.  Darren went to the conference the next morning and I went exploring around Barcelona.  I walked and walked and walked, but I don't have many pictures because it was raining.  I couldn't take a good picture, hold my umbrella, and keep someone from stealing my purse all at the same time (Barcelona is notorious for petty theft).  Don't worry though, I went back on other days and took pictures of the sites I saw, so I'll talk about them later.  

The highlight of my day was finding this cute eatery that only served chocolate and churros.  Dipping churros in chocolate is a big hit in Spain, so I had to try it.  The hot chocolate was a fantastic way to warm up on a cold, rainy day.

Not as good as Swiss chocolate, but it will do ;)

Around sunset, the rain and clouds cleared a bit to give a nice sunset, so I headed up to the rooftop terrace in our building.  It was a nice terrace and if it had been warm and sunny, it would have been a great place to sit and read a book.

View from the roof of our apartment building

Sunset

On the roof of our building

That night, we ate at a great tapas restaurant, Taller de Tapas, that was near our apartment.  This restaurant was always packed with people (because of the conference or just because it is highly recommended, I don't know) so it was a good thing I made a reservation.  The Spanish are notorious for eating very late and most restaurants don't even open for dinner until 8 or 9 pm!  And a lot of places are pretty empty at 8 pm.  It was actually a bit frustrating trying to figure out when restaurants were open for business since a lot of them would open and close two or three times a day.  Since it is a very popular restaurant, they luckily started serving dinner earlier than usual, so we only had to wait until 8 pm to eat.  I really enjoyed the atmosphere, the energy, and the food at this place and would recommend everyone to go here if they go to Barcelona.

Where we celebrated Valentine's Day, picture was taken the next afternoon

That was our first full day, more posts to come.