Barcelona!

Me outside of the cafe were George Orwell wrote "Homage to Catalonia" during his stay in Barcelona while fighting in the Spanish civil war.

The door to our apartment 

Barcelona! City of music, culinary capitol of Spain and according to Rick Steves, home to quite a few pickpockets. But boy is it nice to be back in a big city! We flew in from Dubrovnik two days ago, and we’ve spent the past two days exploring. It’s amazing how different it is from Croatia the food is great and they have 24/7 markets. It has a perfect mix of old and new, fast and slow, humble and outlandish!

Our first day here was quite a shock; we’d just spent 3 weeks going from tiny town to tinier town. But as soon as we stepped off the plane it was clear that we weren’t in Kansas anymore! We walked through the Ramblas (which is a pedestrian walk way leading from the harbor to plaza Cataluña, running roughly along where the old city walls were) to our 7^th floor attic apartment, carried the bags all the way up a tiny cramped dark staircase and unloaded our stuff then immediately returned to ground level to scout out the surrounding area. 

My dad climbing up to our attic apartment

After several hours of scouting, we decided to have dinner at a large fancier restaurant to celebrate our arrival in Barcelona. Finally we found some good food and it wasn’t outlandishly expensive! You’d think some of the good food would have transferred across the Mediterranean and up the Adriatic! That night we climbed up or 7 flights of stairs and went to sleep happy and content.

Gaudy's Sagrada Familia 

The next day we went and explored. We took the tube to Anthony Goudy’s “Sagrada Familia”.  It is one of (if not the only) cathedral still under construction today (Their goal is to be done by 2026). It was unlike any Cathedral I’d ever seen before. Four beehive like towers which rise 100 ft. over an arch with buttresses that then plummet another 50 ft. to the ground. Underneath these reside cubist versions of Christ on the cross and other biblical scenes. Also Goudy laid the church out in the form of a cross mirroring most medieval churches. The entrance I just described is the west and the main entrance for now. When the Cathedral’s completed the south entrance or “glory facade” (which is decorated with pictures of Christ’s life and his family, after which the church is named, the sacred family) will be the main way in. Once finished it will have 18 towers in total 4 over each entrance and two in the middle. The tallest of which will be 560 ft. high and topped by a giant gold cross will be able to be seen from miles around. And the inside is no less spectacular. Walking out from under the blazing sun in through the solid bronze door and into the cool dark interior, it takes a moment for your eyes to adjust. At first it looks and feels as if your in a forest of marble, with the blue, green, orange and red stained glass casting dancing flickers of light on the columns and canopy rising high above. At around 50 ft. up the columns of marble and granite split apart into various different branches that then support the multicolored roof another 50 ft. above. One of Goudy’s famous sayings was “nothing is invented, it’s written in nature.” In fact his whole religious vision was a love for nature. All of his numerous architectural wonders show this, not just “Sagrada Familia”. 

Walking back to the Ramblas from the Cathedral we admired several of Goudy’s other works along the way (it looks to me as if he took some of them strait out of a Dr. Seuss book, or visa versa). We stopped by our new favorite take away pasta place (which we had discovered earlier that day and had a great lunch for just 10 Euro before heading off again

A sign written by an unknown person in a square where the 42 children were killed during the bombing of the "fight for freedom".