Barcelona

The idea of going to another country for the weekend still seems so odd to me, but that's what I did. Rachel and I left for Barcelona on Friday. I went in for half a day on my day off so that I could leave early on Friday. We got in to the city late, so we went straight to the hostel and called it a night. We stayed at Itaca hostel, which is right by the Catedral in the Barri Gotic area, the city centre. It was actually nice, we picked it because it sounded clean, and it was.

Saturday morning we got an early start. The weather was gorgeous all weekend, but especially Saturday. It was in the 60s & so sunny. First we went to the Catedral de Barcelona. There were tons of statues all around the church. I lit three candles: one for Dad, one for Mom, and one for Joey. We went up to the roof for a great view. After that we went to the Museu Picasso. The wait wasn't too bad at all. We went through the whole museum and looked at works from all of the different periods Picasso went through (like his Blue period). It was really interesting to see so much of his work. They had a lot from his Cubist period. There was one painting by another artist that he rendered several interpretations of. And by several I mean a ridiculous amount. Next was La Pedrera, which is also known as Casa Mila. This was the first work of Gaudi's that we saw. There's a museum inside as well as an apartment set up for people to walk through. The really exciting part was going up to the roof to see all of the chimneys. I don't know how to begin to describe them, so I'll have to let the pictures do the talking. Also on Saturday we went to Park Guell, another Gaudi design. The park is just gorgeous. So green, but there's lots of mosaic everywhere as well. We walked around and went all the way up to the top of the park, which overlooks the city. When we sat down at the top we picked a restaurant for dinner: vegetarian for the both of us.

Once we were done with dinner, we went back to the hosel to recoup a bit. We looked through our guidebooks and found this place called the Harlem Jazz Club that we decided we wanted to go to. After we changed, we set out to find it. It was pretty close to the hostel. Since it was early there was a comedian (not so funny when you don't understand the language) and once she was done, almost everyone left. So many people smoke and almost everyone in the club was smoking, which did not bode well for me. We decided to try to find somewhere else to go for a while, and we wound up finding a bar that had milkshakes too. So I had a nice strawberry milkshake, a nice change from cranberry or orange juice. At 11:30, when the salsa band was supposed to start at the club, we left but decided not to go to the club since we would have had to pay to get in and we were both exhausted. Instead we went back to the hostel for some sleep.

It was another early morning on Sunday. Our first destination was Sagrada Familia (Gaudi). Everyone at work who had been to Barcelona talked about it, so we decided it should be one of our stops. It's still under construction, but you can go in and see everything. The only thing hampered by the construction when we were there is that the stairs up to the roof were closed. Instead there was a lift, but since the like was 90 plus minutes long we decided to pass since there were other things we wanted to do before leaving. We went to Las Ramblas, a long shopping street full of street performers. It ends almost at the waterfront, so we went and looked at boats. After lunch we wandered around until we found a beach. Even though it was slightly overcast, it was beautiful. While Rachel wrote postcards, I went and walked along the water. Then we wandered around Barri Gotic a bit more before leaving for the airport.

All in all it was a great trip. The architecture in Barcelona, even normal buildings, is gorgeous. It's so hard trying to do it in a weekend though. We were so exhausted ... I'm still trying to get rested. We didn't get back until 2am & I went in to work for 9am, as usual. I was actually the first person to get to the office. Luckily I have flexi-time to take off, so I knocked off around 3.

I've neglected my blog lately, so I have some catching up to do with what I've been doing in London. I'll take care of that in an entry or two hopefully this week.