Barcelona Trip, 16-20 May - Part II

... in which we leave Gaudí and go for dinner. And then we go back to Gaudí.

Being in awe makes you hungry. So we checked out our Lonely Planet (the Barcelona only version from 2006) to see if they could recommend somewhere nice on our way home from Park Güell, which was a good half hour or more from our hostel. And they could. We wanted tapas! We quickly put together choices involving a lot of meat and heavy stuff (tortilla, albondigas, croquette etc), and so we wanted something green to balance things out. And for the record, it wasn't only Mona who wanted that....

Anyway, the menu had something called 'ensaladilla rusa', which it said was vegetable salad. Sounds good, let's get that! The first thing the waiter (very nice guy, I think I scored some points doing my best to speak Spanish with him) brought us was this mayo-smothered dish with a single wee bread stick poking up in the middle.

At first we thought that maybe it was a complimentary dish or something. Then we asked the waiter. 'That's your ensaladilla rusa, girls'. Oh! He must have gotten such a good laugh at the looks on our faces at that moment. We certainly laughed ourselves silly. So, no greens for us! But lovely lovely tapas with lovely beer :)

Next day, Thursday, we got up around 8ish, and got ready to go find some breakfast. I ended up having a waffle smothered in chocolate, which turned out not to be near as sickeningly sweet and heavy as the first bite had led me to believe. Yumyum! After that, we set the course for La Sagrada Familia. What can I say? It's a bustling building site - you can totally see why Gaudí himself said it would take 200 years to build! Nothing comes off a conveyor belt! The sheer monumental attention to detail, the craftsmanship and the knowledge that went into planning everything is just astonishing. You could spend a day here, checking out all the meanings of every statue or inscription, even though there's so little of it finished. Mona and I have already decided that we're coming back once it's completed in 2020-something.

Here's a picture of the cathedral from the Passion facade. There are going to be 3 facades, dealing with the birth, the death and the resurrection of Christ. The first two are done - the Nativity and the Passion of Christ. The Passion facade looms like a massive cave out of the belly of the building. Fro some reason it reminded me of mammoths as well - probably the trunk-like columns.

The inside is mostly a mass of scaffolding, but you can get an idea of how huge the space is going to be. They are building the central and side naves at the moment. I just want to take a moment to apologise in advance if I get some of this church part terminology wrong. I have no real idea what I'm talking about, hehe. So there. Anyway, here's a picture from the inside.

You can go up into the bell towers on either finished facade - we went up on the Passion facade side. I don't have a problem with heights usually, but this journey I'm pretty sure I will only make once, even if it was very worthwhile, and I'd recommend it to anyone who doesn't have actual acrophobia (ha! I had to look that up :D) You take a lift up to a certain point app. 60 m above the ground (the tallest tower in a pair is 100 m tall). You can then walk upstairs a bit in the other tower, and back down either all the way on your own two feet or you can get back in the lift. We chose the stairs.

Now the towers, being bell towers, are hollow inside, and the outer wall is full of holes (purely intentional ones at that). Everything is solid stone, including the stair, so it's not so much that it doesn't feel safe. It's just that it's very narrow and you keep getting wind gusts in the face, which meant I went very slowly, even if I knew I couldn't actually fall out of the tower, unless I made a real determined effort to do so. The views were fantastic, and we absolutely loved it, but I also really liked it when we came back down. Here is a picture of one of the lovely fruit mosaic clusters on the side nave:

There was a cleaning guy who overtook us and vice versa several times. The last time he was having a wee break in an alcove and he saw me fumbling my way down clutching the rail and asked me why I was afraid, and I didn't know the words to explain. Once we were down we went out on the Nativity facade side, which is chock full of little details, where the Passion facade is more stark and sparsely decorated, but no less majestic:

Stay tuned for Part III, in which we go looking at pictures at an exhibition.....