Last night was surprisingly good in our cramped little room. We had air conditioning and all the people who came to bed after us crept around in dark so that we didn’t even realise they were there. Perfection! Julie and I got up at the average 7.45am in a bid to get to the main tourist attraction here, the Sagrada Familia, without stupid amounts of tourists.
The walk down to the church took us around 20 minutes, down a tree filled street in an already balmy 27 degrees (at 8.30am). Our prebought tickets got us straight in. If you haven’t seen pictures of this church before I can certainly tell you that it is very unique, very Gaudi, weirdly gothic. All of the architecture is inspired by trees, oceans, nature and light – which means loads of stained glass windows and no straight lines. Very pretty. I think. It’s certainly one of the more memorable churches I have been to – when you see so many in Europe the unique ones quickly become your favourites.
We also had the option of paying three Euros to go up 50m in a lift to the top, which we took. This was actually rather unexciting, the view wasn’t anything special and we were right in the middle of a construction site (the church is still unfinished). After looking at the view we had to go down a narrow spiral staircase, getting stuck behind anybody who wanted to take a picture. Yay.
After spending sufficient amount of time at the church we caught the Metro back to our hostel area to search for two of Gaudi’s most famous houses. The first we quickly found but it wasn’t that special – we headed on to the second, Case Batlo, which is the most famous house here in Barcelona. We payed a rather large amount of money to go in and see some of Gaudi’s interior architecture. This house was bizarre, so many different themes on each level and the same Gaudi principles of playing with light and using no straight lines. We did get an included audio tour but both Julie and I abandoned it after it waxed lyrical about molluscs and dragon scales for just a little too long.
From here we walked down Passagia de Gracia (the shopping strip on which we were staying), back down to Las Ramblas, where delicious icecream was purchased. We then wandered around the Gothic Quarter a little bit more, saw the big Catedral (another church) and eventually found ourselves a random little cafe for lunch. Nothing too special about this place – we ordered Chorizo sandwiches and homemade lemonade for a very small price.
By now it was around 1pm and we agreed to head back to the hostel for a bit, for boring things like blogging, packing, leg shaving and general avoidance of heat. At around 2.30pm we ventured back out again to the Palace of Catalan Music. This was a ticket I had prebooked and in hindsight this was a really random purchase – the Palace is essentially a big music hall. I must have read on the internet somewhere that it was one of the highlights although it is really out of the way and obscure here. Anyway, we had a ticket so off we went! This concert hall wasn’t designed by Gaudi but by somebody similar – it was full of sculptures and stained glass windows and was generally very pretty. We were sad to hear they had a flamenco show there on Saturday nights, to see a concert there would have been something!
After the Palace tour we headed over to the area where the Magic Fountain show is at night… we’d decided to go see it, except problematically we were five hours early! We spent some time walking around the big park here, with another view over the city and lots of outdoor escalators (we love these things!) We didn’t feel like going into the big Catalan art museum so instead we sheltered from the heat in the big shopping mall across the street. Neither of us really felt like we had enough energy for shopping, so we sat with a drink for a while before finding somewhere for dinner.
Dinner for me was a rather yummy mushroom and asparagus risotto, whilst Julie had a ‘big sausage of the country’. We of course grabbed some Spanish wine as well and settled in for a couple of hours, eating, drinking and playing two person Euchre (another good game to add to my card playing repertoire). At 9pm we headed up to the fountains… as it got steadily darker all the lights came on. The best way to describe the show is a LOT of lights and a LOT of water. As the water shot up into the air they played dramatic classical music, plus the ET and Titanic theme songs thrown in. There were crazy amount of people here, clearly this is the spot where the entire tourist population of Barcelona goes at night.
We didn’t stay until it was really dark (having watched the same show on repeat for about an hour). Instead we went back to the hostel to finish packing and to prepare ourselves for the next travelling day. It was a relatively early night at 11pm.
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