Barcelona -- Gaudi

Day 6 -- Monday April 19th

We made friends with the guy at the desk at the Atlas Hotel, where we stayed while in Barcelona. He was an Indian transplant to Spain. Seems like Indians run a lot of businesses there. Anyway, this guy was very friendly and gave us lots of good directions and asked us to be safe, etc.

It was a very happy moment when we handed off the keys to the rental car. The line was incredibly long. When it was finally our turn, I realized we hadn't filled up for a hundred km or so. The guy said I could go fill it up and come back. No thanks... Turns out it was full enough anyway. Renting the car turned out to be a pretty good deal. Less than 40 euros/day.

One of the first things we saw (or heard, really) was a guy running down La Rambla screaming, apparently hot on the trail of somebody who'd just stolen something of his. "Policia! Policia!" he yelled. I couldn't tell exactly what happened, but it seems like he tackled the robber. Nice.

This day would be a big walking tour of Barcelona. We stopped and saw the Gaudi Museum from the outside. We hardly paid a single museum entry fee -- partly, we are cheap, but also, one could spend an awful lot of time in boring museums :) This guy, Gaudi, is a famous architect around these parts. He was an eccentric character and his architecture style fits with that.

Casa Battlo. Locally called House of Bones. Gaudy tended to design things with a bit of a spooky skeletal nature. Gaudi also famous for using no straight lines. Didn't use blueprints. Only sketches.

Stopped in a high-end cosmetics store called Kiehls which Anita likes and is cool because it has a Harley parked inside. They were nice enough to give us some free sample sunscreen. I could've bought some but the 40 euros seemed a little steep. On we went to the Sagrada Familia, which is a cathedral largely designed by Gaudi. His lack of blueprints was a tiny bit problematic for them on this complex structure. Gaudi died in 1926, but they're still trying to straighten it out.

Gaudi's Sagrada Familia cathedral, still under construction. Good place for ping pong.

An interesting story about Gaudi is that he ended his life in penury, begging every rich person he knew for more money to finish his cathedral. He was hospitalized when he was hit by a streetcar. He was wearing ragged clothes, so, not recognizing the famous architect, they put him in the paupers' hospital. His friends found him the next day, but he insisted on staying in the poor people's hospital where he died a few days later. His primary benefactor, a guy named Guell, had died in 1918. The next place we visited required a few miles walk -- the Parc Guell. You can read about this and all of Gaudi's other stuff on the Wikipedia page about him

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoni_Gaudí

where there are links to his major works including Parc Guell, Sagrada Familia, and Casa Batllo. Briefly, the Parc was designed initially to be a garden-oriented housing development for rich people. Didn't work out, so Barcelona made it a municipal garden.

Anita photgraphing the famous multicolored mosaic dragon. ("Mosaic" refers to the thousands of tiles that it's made from. This mosaic style is classic Gaudi.)

By the way, later, when we got to Madrid, Anita's friend Adam reminded me that Barcelona is the location of the story The Shadow of the Wind (Momma and Tess, you've read this...). Might've been fun to keep an eye out for some of the specific places in the book.

Next, we got lazy and took the metro back down to the waterfront where we walked another 5 miles. More on that later!