España, numero quatro!

Monday dawned sunny and warm enough to have the pants-or-shorts and sandals-or-sneakers debates while getting ready; sneakers turned out to be a good idea, jeans less so, but no matter.  The hostel had a small breakfast consisting mostly of bread with jam and Nutella (fine by me!), after which we set out for Parc Guëll, a winding expanse of greenery accented with Gaudí statues, buildings, and balconies.  It's a bit outside of town (and the Hello BCN Hostel is pretty central) and requires a significant uphill walk, though this was made easier by a couple of escalators.  Although these escalators were set up in a neighborhood--kind of strange.

In any case, the park was incredible!  Gaudí is all over Barcelona, of course, but this was really our first look at him.  His style involves a lot of mosaics and tiles, accented in fabulous color, done on shapes that seem to take a traditional structure--a house, a column, a fountain--and reconfigure it just enough.  Curse my broken camera!  The others were awesome about letting me take extra pictures with their cameras, happily, so once they all get stateside again I shouldn't be too wanting for pictures.

We somehow ended up walking to a different Metro stop than the one we'd started at, and the walk took a while.  But everyone was getting along and we got a good look at a different part of town, complete with plenty of stops in gift shops.  We took the subway a ways back into town and found lunch--falafel for the two vegetarians, Spanish meaty things for the Simmons girls.  The next stop, just across a park, was a spectacular cathedral, also designed by Gaudí.  It's been under construction for over a century!  The outside seems mostly finished, and it's really fabulous, with soaring towers, sharp-featured statues, and colors like I've never seen on a cathedral, anywhere.  The fact that the construction was still ongoing was enlightening-- every cathedral in Europe that I've seen featured a story of long construction, but with this one, you realize that something so massive simply takes forever to build, regardless of the technology available, apparently.

Against the recommendations of the Canadian girls from the hostel, who'd been less than enthralled, we paid to see the inside and the lower-level museum.  The interior is much further from completion than the outside--but completely, totally, 100% worth seeing.  It was designed to be almost forest-like inside, with the columns acting as trees and the stained glass windows (some of which were completed, while others were simply clear windows at this point) shining with solid blocks of colors.  It seemed like the finished interior would be a rainbow of color and light--not enough to make me Catholic, but certainly enough to merit a return trip if they finish it in my lifetime.  It was really stunning.  The museum downstairs was cool, too-- besides a surprising number of models, maquettes, and casts of all different aspects of the building, there were tons of pictures of the construction (with English explanations!), descriptions of many of the Biblical references in the architecture, and an overall good sense of how all of this would end.

We took the Metro back to the central area, to the foot of Las Ramblas where the waterfront is.  By the large Mroador de Colón, we found a British tourist who, with some trouble on his part, got a picture of the four of us riding a giant lion statue, and then took a long loop around the harbor, with a coffee/ice cream stop, of course.  We eventually found a cable car to ride to the Montjuïc area across the water, which brought more spectacular views and gorgeous parks.  Reformation artwork I might be sick of, but the vistas and the gardens were hard not to love, particularly when enjoyed with an in-depth discussion of children's television and old-school Nickelodeon.  At one point we even found a path covered by an arched trellis which I felt the need to skip up, Sound of Music-style!

We eventually ended up back near Las Ramblas, where the guidebook sent us in search of Basque tapas.  We found the recommended place with little trouble and discovered the wonders of pintxos, which are basically small Spanish-style smørrebrød.  We ended up having a solid appetizer course there--the cheese combinations were too much to resist--and found another place for dinner where Nadine and I split vegetable paella and Spanish-style gnocchi.  In case it's not obvious, vegetarian eating is a lot easier in that part of the world.  By the time we'd walked back to the hostel, it was nearly 11, and we were all more exhausted than expected, so we waited our turns to check email and such and called it an early night.  This was just as well--Nadine and I both had early evening flights out the next day, so we wanted to get as much in beforehand as possible.