Barcelona

This past weekend I travelled to Barcelona with my friend Bre. I´d been looking forward to this trip since we booked our tickets in the middle of February. I´ve been counting down the days for weeks. I´ve dreamed of going to Barcelona for years. La Sagrada Familia, Parc Güell, all of the other buildings by Gaudí, Parc Monjuit, the plaças... all of it has been calling my name for a long, long time. This weekend was a whirlwind, to say the very least. We really got to know the city well even though we were only there for 72 short hours. We mastered the metro system, sharpened our navigation skills, and squeezed everything we could out of our time there.

Día 1 - Parc Güell, La Sagrada Familia:

So, our plane landed at about 10am on Friday morning and we just went straight to the hostel so we could put our stuff down and get our hands on a map. A quick sidenote - We only had this hostel for one night, because we picked a very busy weekend to go to Barça. There was a soccer game in the city on Saturday night, and because of this, ALL of the hostels and hotels were completely booked for Saturday. We had sent out couchsurfing requests, but so far no one had accepted us. So, we just kind of went knowing (or hoping??) that something would fall together. Our absolute last resort was a hostel/campground that was about 30 km outside the city. But, anyway, we ended up getting a couchsurfing acceptance at the last minute so everything worked out. Sorry, Mom and Dad, I left those details out to spare you the worry. :) We´ll plan better next time, I promise.

Anyway... so once we had our map we figured out that Parc Güell and La Sagrada Familia were both within walking distance from the hostel. So, we unpacked our stuff, put on some sunblock (nothing says "tourist" like a bad sunburn, haha!) and set out.

Parc Güell is a park in the northeast part of the city. It was designed by the Catalan architect Antoní Gaudí and built between 1900 - 1914. It was originally intended to be a private estate/garden for the upper class, but it was unsuccessful and eventually converted into a public garden. We spent a few hours wandering through all the paths and exploring.

Next we went to La Sagrada Familia, Gaudí´s famous (and still incomplete) masterpiece. If the views of this church don´t wow you, it´s story will. Construction of this church started over one hundred years ago (in 1882) and it has yet to be completed. Gaudí intended for the design to be for the glory of God. During the architect´s lifetime, work progressed slowly, as it relied on private donations for funding. On the subject of the tedious progress, Gaudí said, "My client is not in a hurry." When Gaudí died in 1926, only about a quarter of the project was finished. Further set-backs came during the Spanish Civil War, during which the church was set on fire and suffered tremendous damages (1936.) Progress resumed on the church in the 1950s and I´ve heard that it is tentatively scheduled to be finished in 2020, 138 years after it was started. In November of 2010, Pope Benedict XVI consecrated the church and proclaimed it a Basilica, due to its size and artistic value.

The exterior of the church will have 3 main façades: The Passion façade, The Nativity façade, and The Glory façade (which has yet to be completed.)

The Passion façade

The Passion façade depicts the Stations of the Cross, and the doors that lead to the interior are etched with the gospels of St. Matthew and St. John, which recount the last days of Jesus´ life.



The Nativity façade

 The Nativity façade is probably the most famous image of the church. It shows the birth of Christ and is meant to depict how every part of the eath (the animal kingdom, plants, and geology) are connected and contribute to the glory of God. There are statues of the Holy Family, birds, trees, and stalagmites/stalactites mingled together on the grand façade of the church.

The interior of the church... can´t accurately be described with words, but I´ll try. From the exterior, I was expecting the interior to be dark to be really intricately sculpted. I was right on one account - the details on in the construction are surreal. However, I was surprised by the amount of light that floods the main nave.

Inside La Sagrada Familia

The altar

The ceiling

The pillars throughout the nave vary in wideth and branch out at the tops, creating the image of a forest. Through the 2 hours that we spent going through the church, I was in awe of the creativity and innovation in Gaudí´s designs that have propelled this church. I can´t wait to go back when it´s finished to see the end result.

I´m going to post just this part right now, because I have to run to class. This section of the post is by far the longest and took more time than I anticipated. I´ll finish the rest tonight and post the whole trip´s album on Facebook. Thanks for reading! Wish you all could have been there with me. :)

BARCELONA, DAY 2 - Museu de Xocolata, Museu de Picasso, Las Ramblas

On our second day in Barcelona, we took the metro to a new area of the city to do some more exploring. We went to the Chocolate Museum, which was really cheap to get into and our entry ticket was a little bar of chocolate - so cute! Anyway, we just spent about an hour there; it was mostly history and how chocolate is made, but at the end they had these sculptures and stuff that were really fun. Mom, I thought you might like these -

After that, we walked a few blocks to the Picasso Museum. This museum houses one of the most extensive collections of Picasso's works, with almost all of them being donated by friends of Picasso (his good friend Jaume Sabartés, from whom the original idea for the museum came, donated 574 sketches, paintings, and drawings that Picasso had given him) and the artist himself. The permanent collection includes about 3,500 pieces. The museum opened in 1963 and is the only Picasso Museum to have been open while the artist was still alive. My favorite section was The Blue Period. Sorry, though - no pictures allowed. You'll have to go check it out for yourself. :)

Let's see... After that we went walking some more and found the Mirador de Colom, which is a statue of Columbus at the point where he first landed back in Spain after his first trip to the Americas.

Columbus pointing to the Americas

After that we went walking on La Rambla, which is a really big street through the city with lots of shopping and restaurants. Later that night we went to Parc Montjuïc, where there's this fountain that has a really cool light show at night. We waited around for a long time, but there were other people there too, so we figured the show must be starting soon. 9:30...10:00...10:30...finally we asked a man, and wouldn't you know it - we were there the one night that there wasn't a show. But we went up the hill to the courtyards of the Contemporary Art Museum and saw a great view of the whole city at night, so it wasn't a total loss.

Like I said before, this was an amazing weekend in Barcelona. I'm going back in a few weeks with my roommates, so that'll be a good chance to see some of the things we missed. Maybe I'll get to see that damn fountain. :)