Saludos, avid readers! I hope the start of the week finds you well. After an extremely lazy weekend, I have an extremely lax week of classes. No marketing today or tomorrow, and no Spanish on Wednesday or Thursday. It's just as well. I need to be resting for what I'm sure will be a demanding weekend in Ibiza, which I'm told is the "party capitol of the world" (I know-I'm scared too). While there, we'll be going to a show called amnesia so if that's not foreshadowing, then I don't know what is.
For my parents' piece of mind, I will note that most of the weekend will be spent in the historic and culturally rich city of Seville. So that's good...
Anyway, onto Barcelona. On the 1st of this month, we pulled ourselves out of bed to catch a 6:45 train to barca. It went by reasonably fast, and we arrived around 10am. After dropping our stuff at our super nice hotel (right in the middle of the financial district, also known as the most expensive part of the city, though I would argue las ramblas was), we walked the city a bit with our tour guide Rota. I waited too long to write about this and now I'm having a hard time remembering exactly the order in which we saw things, so I'm just going to write about them as I remember them.
First we saw the Catedral de Barcelona, though I'd seen it before, still quite impressive to see. This time, however, I got to go all the way to the top, which has one of the best views of the city. Something that also has "one of the best views of the city" (there are a lot of good views here in Europe, I've noticed) is the Parque Guell, which again, I had been to once before, though this time around I learned a bit more. Apparently, this character Antoni Gaudi, an architect in the last century or so (okay so I didn't learn THAT much) started this project with the goal of creating a neighborhood of luxury homes. However, there were no buyers and in the end, only two of his homes were sold. They're still there today, and serve as part of the park. The park itself is situated at the top of the most gigantic hill, and I climbed to the very top. Like, hundreds of stairs to the top. You can see all the way out to the sea from there. We met a couple of south africans there who told us, to quote them directly, that you can't swim in the ocean in Barcelona, "because it's full of shit." Apparently there's a lot of pollution, something I wish I'd known when I jumped happily and willingly into the water a year ago. No wonder everyone was staying on the sand.
That night we had libre, or free of preplanned activities, which of course meant us Americans went out. Not much to be said here, in the interest of future employment and all.
The next day, we got an early start, much earlier than I would have preferred, though it was worth it because I got to see some things I hadn't seen before. Namely the casas of Gaudi. That man can turn anyone into an admirer of architecture.
He loved nature and tried his best to allow it to influence all facets of his work. It's because of this, I'm guessing, that he hated straight lines and you'd have a hard time trying to find them. One of the casas was an apartment building, and we actually got to walk through one of them. And it was HUGE! Each apartment (which are currently inhabited by, like, real people) takes up an entire floor and is about the size of 10 of my measly apartment. The other house we went to was built for one guy, one really rich guy with the means to commission Antoni Gaudi to design and build not only the house itself, but also all the furniture inside. I really like what he did with the windows inside. He loved natural light (I love I also share) and really did his research when it came to designing the size, placement, and colors of all the windows.
The next day we went to la sagrada familia, my personal favorite. Again, something I'd visited before, but because it continues still today to be under construction, there were some new things to see. This was sort of the flagship work for Gaudi, and by sort of I mean entirely. Apparently he worked on nothing else in the last twelve years of his life, but continues to dictate what's to be done with the building from beyond the grave, having left plans behind.
Anyway, this post isn't very detailed because I've already been to Barcelona and I already wrote about it. More later about the time I've spent here in Valencia.
"El mundo es un libro y ellos que no viajan leen solo una pagina"
You can't visit Barcelona too many times. I love that place and hope to go back some day. (BTW, if memory serves me, I believe there was a place where the 1929 World Fair was held. I thought it was spectacular and they have fireworks and a big light display on Friday nights. Did you see this?)
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