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!