Barcelona Baby

I think I'm going to do less blogging from here on because there's just less time. Right now, I'm on the train from Barcelona to Valencia to spend a couple of days there before going on to Granada. The last few days in Barcelona were really enjoyable. I had the first half day to myself before Matilda arrived. I was orginally thinking of taking Scott's advice and stopping in Girona on my way down, unfortunately, the trains only ran twice a day from Girona to Barcelona so there wasn't a practical way to spend a couple of hours there.

So, I arrived in Barcelona and made my way over to the hostel. In this case, we had to call the folks up to get the keys and open the apartment up. The hostel was really a set of apartments. It was an entire floor of a flat, with 6 rooms, two kitchens, two baths and two common areas. it was really quite quiet during our stay.

After dropping off my stuff, I went to explore Las Ramblas. At the bottom of the main street, there's a monument to Christopher Columbus. It was the site of a greenpeace protest that day trying to get people to write to the Spanish prime minister in order to get him to do his part of climate change in the upcomming Copenhagen talks. One of the protesters talked to me and gave me the letter they wanted people to send in. It was really pretty neat.

On Las Ramblas, there were a lot of human statues plying their trade. Well, sort of. Most of them weren't actually trying to stay still for most of the time and were actively messing with the crowd. Though some of their costumes were definitely creative, I feel that if you're going to dress up like a statue, you should at least act like one for part of the time. Plus, staying still like that is much harder. Ah well. To each their own.

Further up Las Ramblas was an incredible open air market. They had everything from mangos to nuts, to chocolates to seafood to rabbit. It was fantastic. I spent a good amount of time salivating and finally came up with a plan for dinner. Since we had the kitchenette, I figured we should take advantage of it. So, I got some potatoes, leeks, boletes (like mushrooms, but woodier) and some anchovies. The plan was to grill the anchovies and serve that over the potatoes, leeks and boletes, which would be brought together with a white wine sauce.

After dropping off the stuff at the hostel, I went to pick Matilda up at the train station. He train got in late (quarter to 10), but she hadn't eaten yet so it was perfect to whip up dinner.

The next day, was historically themed. We started off by going down to Las Ramblas and then making our way over to the Cathedral. It was very similar to the other gothic cathedrals I've seen other places throughout Europe. From there, we went to the Placa del Rei and went in to the city history museum. The museum talks about Barcelona's orgin as a Roman port and goes underground to show the old roman ruins. Unfortunately, they were closing early for some reason, so they really rushed us through the museum. For lunch, we had some sandwiches at a great place nearby. Cheap and tasty.

After that, we went to the Picaso museum. This museum was interesting because it went through his early work and didn't focus so much on the stuff he's famous for. However, you can definitely see the progression from his early stuff when he was doing real portraits, etc, until slowly, his painting got more and more insane. It was kind of interesting that way. Also, they had a temporary exhibit looking at some of picasso's sketches that were based on the old japanese porno art. The whole thing was kind of screwy especially when body parts aren't anywhere near the right location.

For dinner we went to a place recommended by the guidbook as being one of the best places to get paella in Catalonia. I wonder how much it's hyped up because their counter at the front was covered in guidebooks with bookmarks in them (presumably marking the restaurant). The seafood paella we had was excellent and I think what I've done wrong in my paellas is that I haven't used a strong enough seafood broth and I havne't had enough salt. This one tasted like the sea!

The next day was a Gaudi day. We started at his famous apartment building that he built in 1918. According to the guidebook, some people didn't want the apartments because they didn't know if their furniture would fit. Going on the inside, I find that silly. The curves were very gradual and it wouldn't have been that big a deal. The roof was really cool too with all sorts of crazy spires.

After that, we walked down the street to Sangria Familia, or the unfinished gaudi church. After a bit all we had to do was follow the sound of the drums. It turned out that at the base of the church, there were a couple of groups congregated in the park. The first was a high school drumming band. The second was a miniature Star Wars convention. Spannish Rebel Squadron #501 was fulling decked out from kids in Ewok suits to a bunch of Storm Troopers to a couple of princess Leias. Not was I was expecting to see in Spain, that's for sure.

As for the church itself, it's pretty impressive with all the details and masonry work they've done. It really is like an old church considering how long it's taking to build. They think it'll be done by 2030, making it well over 100 years for construction. That's like all the medieval churches way back when. Nothing takes that long to build anymore. I did like a lot of the elements of it, especially how the columns are designed to look like trees, branching near the top to hold the ceiling. It has a very surreal look to it that's enticing.

Finally, we finished the day by going up the the Gaudi Park, which is the outdoor landscaped park that Gaudi designed. It was perhaps my favorite of the three because it combined the natural trees with a lot of organic rock sculptures intertwined everywere. It just worked so well and is a very useable space. Plus, it gave a great view of the city :-)

Dinner was in again, using up the rest of the leeks, bollets and potatoes and then adding to that some flat iron beefsteaks we got from the grocery store and bringing everything together with red wine. The only steaks we could find were really thin, so they were a little tough, but whatever. It was tasty.

In the morning, we were heading out, so first we went to the train station to put our bags in the left luggage. From there, we made our way up to the Olympic venues. They're all up on the hill to the SW of the city center, kind of off on their own. You climb up the hill (with the help of a ton of outdoor escalators) and then you can see the main Olympic stadium, the aquatics center, the indoor sports area, the baseball diamond and more. The baseball diamond is funny because there's only about 100 seats now. I suspect it's hardly ever used. The Olympic stadium was impressive in how small it was. It looked like they had just done a winter X-games or something because they were cleaning up a gigantic snow ramp even though it's about 20 degrees outside. Also, the torch which they like by arrow was ridiculously small! I do remember that being one of the more memorable lighting ceremonies.

From the sport areas, we went to the Olympic village where the atheletes stayed. To be honest it doesn't look like good housing, so I feel bad for the folks who live there now. However, the area looks like it's been built up recently. It feels like the downtown of a lot of modern North American cities with big streets, lots of patterned concrete and restaurants. It goes right down to the beach and is actually quite nice on the water.

After that, we made our way back to the train station to catch the train to Valencia, which we're pulling into now.