Barcelona Trip, 16-20 May - Part IV

..in which Eskild and Polpo go sightseeing...again.

I've forgotten to introduce the two little 'pets' that we had with us. Mona has a cute little teddy that she brings along on her travels- he is called Eskild. (This is a Danish name, and the 'd' is silent, when you say it).

Polpo is Spanish and means 'octopus' and that's what he is. I made him for little Isabella (who would be going to the wedding as well), because the first octopus she got was stuffed with cotton wool, which meant you couldn't wash him. So I made her a new one with washable stuffing. Yay!

Anyway, here they are in our hostel, looking forward to their Spanish adventure:

On Friday morning, after the sangria the night before, did we drag ourselves out of bed as planned, or did we stay in bed? We got up and were ready at the entrance of Casa Batlló at five past nine. Not bad, huh! Well....it was just around the corner....

I am glad we saved this for last. It was chockfull of whimsical details and breathtaking beauty. Gaudí can make wood and stone flow like water, it's really amazing. I'm not sure how I would feel if I actually lived in Casa Batlló, but I will recommend it to anyone who goes to Barcelona as an absolute must-see. There are simply no straight lines anywhere - check out this picture from the living room:

I have no words......

It's relatively expensive to go and see this (16.50 euro, I think), but it's worth every cent if you ask me. The following pictures are from the roof, which are full of colourful mosaic chimneys. Also, the front top of the roof is shaped like a great dragon, which of course is right up my street, and the tower with the white cross on top is just lovely.

Eskild and Polpo were not the least bit afraid of the dragon, and had the audacity to sit in its eye:

I guess it helped that they had already made friends with a big turtle at La Sagrada Familia. Some of the pillars of the Nativity Facade (I saw two, but am not sure if there are any more) rest on the backs of turtles (well, one turtle and one tortoise, to be absolutely exact). This refers to an old legend that the universe is actually carried around on the back of a turtle.

For those of you that know Terry Pratchett and the Discworld - that's where he got the idea (not La Sagrada Familia, but the old legend). He just modified it a bit, in that the Discworld rests on the back of four elephants, but the elephants are carried on the back of a great Turtle.

So here are Eskild and Polpo and the turtle at La Sagrada Familia:

Stay tuned for Part V, in which we say goodbye to Mona, who has to go back to Denmark, but hello to Yolanda and the merry revels in the mountains in Montseny.....

Barcelona Trip, 16-20 May - Part III

Well, after all the wonders of La Sagrada Familia, we needed something a bit closer to earth (just a tad closer, as it turned out). After lunch on the square in front of La Sagrads Familia, we made our way down to a metro stop to go to Montjuïc, the promontory by the port, which houses several museums as well as the Olympic village. We went there primarily to see the Fundació Joan Miró. Apparently there was some big party taking place, because there were security everywhere, and lots of people carrying glasses and tables and chairs and stuff.

Anyway, I liked what I read about Miró himself, passing through the museum, and reading the little blurbs about him in each room. I also liked some of the paintings (my favourite was 'Constellations: The Morning Star'). Then we got to the top floor where there were a few large triptychs on display. One of them (the title said something about a hermit) annoyed me no end. It was three pieces of white canvas, with a thin black line snaking across each in extremely higgledy-piggledy fashion. That was it. Another triptych was called something like 'man approaching death' (I've tried to find out online what the actual titles are but I've had no luck. If anyone knows which ones I'm talking about, ping me). Each canvas had a fat black curvy line that got longer (or shorter depending on which one you looked at first), a squiggly blob of a primary colour (red, blue or yellow) and some black-grey grass-like scribbles along the bottom. Mona and I sat down to look at this last triptych, because we wanted to rest our feet rather than because we were struck with awe. I started out being really negative about it, saying how if THAT was art, anyone could do it, and that there was no craftsmanship in it, so don't even get me STARTED on the hermit one!

But then we kept looking at this the Approaching Death triptych (I'm just gonna make up a title, seeing as I can't remember the real one), and gradually we started to make sense of it. I still think that any six-year-old could have painted it from a purely physical point-of-view, but she sure couldn't have invested it with the symbolism that Miró did. I suppose that's what makes it a Piece of Art. Nearby a few of his sketches and preliminaries for this triptych were on display, which proved that he had actually given some thought to what he wanted to display on the canvas. So I started out absolutely hating it, and I ended up kinda liking it, because by discussing it we had actually managed to find some meaning in it. But! I still totally detest the hermit triptych, because THAT makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever. So there.

Oh and downstairs there was an exhibition of other artist's works - can't remember if they were there because they were inspired by Miró. There was one, which was essentially a lot of black stuff on off-white background. The black part looked like a square rubber eraser does after you've used it a week or two, and the one corner is starting to wear away. It was called 'Patience', and it made me see red. I feel about this painting the exact same way I feel about that hermit triptych - there may be ideas, but there is no visible skill to it, and it's a combination of the two that really attract me to a painting. Witness Dalí's 'The Hallucinogenic Toreador' that Giorgia and I saw in Florida. I will never forget that. So many layers, not only of paint, but of symbolism and homages, sheer imagination and beauty. Loved it, loved it, loved it!

When we got out, the sun was slowly on its way down, and we walked up to the Palau Nacional, from where you can look down the cascading steps to the Font Mágica (big fountain, that unfortunately we didn't get to see in action) further on to Plaza de España. We sat on the top of the steps for a while, until we decided we'd better get moving or our legs would never again obey. Got a metro from Plaza de España home to Passeig de Grácia. Went to another Lonely Planet-recommended restaurant 2 minutes from Casa Batlló, which turned out to be excellent. The sangría was loooovely!! And cheap too! We had planned to get up early Friday morning, in order to beat the crowds at be at Casa Batlló the minute it would open at 9am.

Stay tuned for Part IV, in which it is revealed whether we manage to get out of bed in time or not.......

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.....

Barcelona Trip, 16-20 May - Part I

Yolanda was getting married in the vicinity of Barcelona, and so I had decided to take a couple of days extra to check out Gaudí's creations as I'd never been to Spain before. As a really great bonus, my sister then decided that she was gonna join me! She got there on Monday, and I arrived Wednesday. She would leave Friday, when I was to go meet the wedding party.

Anyway, the approach to Barcelona held a lot of promise which turned out to be fulfilled completely. We were flying parallel to the city, over the water, so I had a good view of the city, but was straining to find La Sagrada Familia. Anyway, what a lovely way to start the trip! I found city centre and Mona without any problems, and after a good lunch we set off to go see Casa Míla, also known as La Pedrera (The Quarry). Our hostel was just around the corner from Casa Batlló, another Gaudí must-see, and Casa Míla was a few blocks away. We decided to start with La Pedrera and continue on to Park Güell later in the day.

Here's a picture of the street-facing facade of the building:

I cannot get over the imagination that Gaudí had, and this goes for everything of his we saw. Simply and utterly amazing. One thing I will say, though, is that you can only take in so much Gaudí in one day. We had split our four places (Casas Míla & Battló, La Sagrada Familia and Park Güell) over 3 days, which was perfect. You just get to a point where you cannot process any more awesomeness, and so you would not appreciate anything properly you saw after that. I think we had a really good distribution, and it never got too overwhelming.

Anyway, back to La Pedrera. :) Here's a picture of the really cool ventilation shafts, which looked like helmeted heads. I absolutely loved the sinuous lines and the mosaics, which are Gaudí trademarks if anything. I have wanted to see Park Güell since reading a description of it in a William Gibson novel (Mona Lisa Overdrive). It did not
disappoint - check out this photo with the famous undulating bench that runs around the top of the Sala Hipóstila, the forest of
columns with lovely mosaics in the ceiling.

You could happily spend a day here, just chilling out, if it's not hot enough to go to the beach. Here's a picture of one of the many fantabulous stone colonnades dotted around the park. As it frequently does with Gaudí, the stone looks like you've taken a mixer to it and just left it like that. I've said it before and I'm gonna say it again - amazing....

Anyway, that's it for Part I, stay tuned for Part II, where we go for tapas......