Barcelona!

Spring break here falls during Holy Week, or Semana Santa here, so I have been on break since last Thursday.  My friends and I decided we would do a big trip the first half of Semana Santa, and then head back to Granada to enjoy the processions and traditions that you only find in Andulucia.  So Thursday we took off for Barcelona, in the north of Spain.  Our plane landed in Barcelona around 8:30 P.M. and we had to be at our hostel for 11, so our first taste of Barcelona was a bit chaotic and stressful.  However, even with the running around and stress of not knowing where we were going, I knew I was going to love Barcelona.  The people were very friendly and the city seemed like a beautiful mix of old and new.  We ended up finding the hostel, and realized that for an hour we had been about five minutes from it.  It was my friend Jennie’s birthday and we had been planning on going out to dinner to celebrate, but ending up feasting on cookies and candy bars from the vending machine in the common room of the hostel and heading to bed early.  One of the guys staying at the hostel that night was from RI and we talked to him for a while.  It was fun to talk to somebody with the same accent as me, and not be the only one in the group who knew what Del’s Lemonade was, or to understand how tragic it was to go four months without an Awful Awful.

Friday morning we had a slow start.  Sharing a room with 11 other people isn’t very conducive to a good night’s sleep, so getting up in the morning was tough.  The hostel worker who had checked us in the night before had told us about a free walking tour of the Gothic center of Barcelona.  We met one of the employees of the lobby and she brought us into the city center where we met up with a few other people for the walking tour.  The tour lasted about three hours, and we got a brief history of the city.  Barcelona is in the area of Spain called Catalonia.  The culture there is very distinct and all its own; they even speak a different language, Catalan.  The tour brought us to two different Cathedrals.  One of them was built by the people of the city, and therefore was built over many years when there was funding.  In front of this Cathedral there is a monument with an eternal flame.  The flame represents the spirit of the people of Catalonia.  Many times the people have rebelled and fought for independence.  The monument commemorates the last battle of one of these wars for independence; even though the soldiers knew they were going to be defeated, they came out of the city gates fighting the much larger army waiting on the other side.  The date of the battle is now Catalonian day. 

The tour also brought us to a bar, 4 Gatos, where Picasso, Gaudi and other famous artists and architects would drink.   We also walked by the Palau Musica Catalana, or Music Palace, which was very colorful and decorated with statues and stained glass.  We also walked through many plazas, one of which had many buildings that showed marks from bullets and bombs from the Civil War and Franco’s reign.  The tour was a great introduction to the city.  It gave us the history of the area, and also gave us an idea of where things were.  The three hours flew by and we were very interested the whole time.

After the tour we grabbed some lunch and then headed back towards the Head of Barcelona, a large statue near the beach. We walked around in that area, enjoying all of the boats docked nearby.  There is also a monument in honor of Christopher Columbus.  When it was built, the statue of Columbus at the top of the monument was intended to point towards the Americas.  However, an error was made and he now points proudly in the direction of Libya.  In the same area is a large mall.  The mall was built before the Olympics when the Industrial area of Barcelona was converted into a beach area.  The mall is “floating”, somehow built on the water.  

After walking around the mall we stopped at McDonalds for a quick snack (McFlurries) and then decided to walk Las Ramblas.  We had walked on the street the night before, but in our haste to find the hostel we didn’t get to enjoy it.  Las Ramblas is a very wide street and in the middle is a walkway where hundreds and thousands of people walk and enjoy the newsstands, and stands selling art, souvenirs and other things.  It is colorful and fun, and there is a great blend of cultures there.  People from all over the world were walking up and down Las Ramblas, and it is a very fun place to just hang out and people watch.  Garcia Lorca (an author from Granada) said that Las Ramblas was 'the only street in the world which I wish would never end'.  Off Las Ramblas there is also a huge market, called Mercado Boquería.  We walked around in the market and enjoyed the smell of the fresh fruit, and tried to ignore the stranger items for sale, like the whole pig's head.  

 Saturday we woke up early and took the metro into the city center for a day full of Gaudi.  We went to Sagrada Familia first, a large Cathedral designed by Gaudi.  Construction of the building began in 1882, and continues to this day; they are hoping to complete it by the middle of this century.  The two completed entrances each tell their own story: one portrays the Passion, the other the Nativity scene.  The towers of the cathedral can be viewed from many points in the city, and are overwhelming up close.  The size of the cathedral and “Modernisme” architecture combine for quite the experience.  The inside of the cathedral is just as amazing as the outside.  The stained glass windows and the details are absolutely beautiful.  They also made a room with information regarding Gaudi, and explaining how everything in his architecture drew from elements of nature.  Outside of the cathedral was a school building that Gaudi had designed for the workers and employees of the cathedral’s children.  In the last few years of his life, Gaudi lived on the construction site in a hut, refused to accept a salary, and begged for money to fund the building.  He apparently was a very devout person, and saw the Cathedral as a way for art to give back to religion.

Next we did a walking tour of our own that I found in one of my tourist books.  We saw a few more Gaudi houses, and other architecture by Modernisme architects.  After the walking tour we set off for Parque Güell.  The park had been designed by Gaudi, intended to be a housing developments of sorts.  After his death, the area was turned into a park, full of Gaudi architecture and sculptures.  It was very interesting and really fun to just walk through and take in all the strange elements and details.  My friend Jennie and I were also very excited for another reason.  A few years ago, “America’s Next Top Model” traveled to Barcelona, and the final runway show took place in Parque Güell.  We found the “runway”, and much to our delight and the confusion of other tourists, put on our own fashion show.  After a few hours at the park we were pretty beat, so we headed back to the hostel for an early night.  We were only halfway through the trip, and wanted to make sure we didn’t burn ourselves out too early.  More on Barcelona to come!