Barcelona: Tapas, Tapas, Tapas

This post is part 2 of 3 chronicling my trip to Venice and Barcelona with my Canadian friend Allison.
We landed in Girona and took a hour long bus to the center of Barcelona. By the time we arrived it was already dark out, so we found the subway, and took it directly to our hostel. When we arrived at the front door to our hostel the front gate was locked and none of the buzzers on the door listed the name of the hostel. There was a sign though, with an arrow pointing over to another door, so we tried the buzzer there and got a really angry reply in Catalan, not what we wanted. Eventually a group of American girls walked right up to the door and unlocked it, they said we could follow them in.

The hostel was pretty nice, with big common areas including a kitchenette and a TV room with a whole pile of DVDs. That night we went out to a restaurant around the corner and sat outside drinking wine and eating tapas. Tapas are basically small appetizers meant to be bought in groups and shared around. As a rule they are delicious, and interesting. However, their cheap price and deliciousness forces you to order much more than you really should, as we were to learn...

The firs morning (Monday) we headed straight for the most iconic tourist attraction in Barcelona, the Sagrada Familia. The Sagrada Familia is the only modern church of this scale currently under construction in the world. The church was designed by the famous architect Antoni Gaudi who also designed many other buildings, and a park, in Barcelona, and construction began in 1882. Almost every piece of stone in the building is uniquely shaped based on complex geometries or natural forms, so construction was expected to take hundreds of years. However, due to modern advances in computer modeling, the expected date of completion is 2026.

The Nativity facade was the first portion to be completed and is therefore more or less true to the original Gaudi designs. If you click on the picture to see it in a larger version you'll notice the detail and rich colours of the steeples and the tree covered in white doves. Every inch of this building is covered in layer upon layer of detail and symbolism.
The addition of modern cranes and techniques to the construction of the church has taken centuries off of the construction, and created an odd mix of ancient stone craft and modern technology.
The Sagrada Familia is a unique site, attracting millions of visitors a year, who's admission fees help pay for the cost of construction. One thing that makes visiting the site so special is the organic character of the building; it is constantly growing and changing, making each visit unique and unrepeatable.
The Nativity facade features scenes from the birth of Jesus from the classics which would be expected to odd things like the killing of the innocents (a statue of a roman soldier killing an infant).
During the Spanish civil war, most of Gaudi's sketches, designs, and plaster models were destroyed. The remaining pieces were compiled, and the plaster models are still being reconstructed from the fragments today. As detailed images of the original design have been lost, and out of respect for Gaudi, subsequent architects haven't attempted to pass-off their work as Gaudi-esque, instead using their own styles inspired by their own era. The Passion facade illustrates this perfectly, with its simplicity starkly contrasting the organic detail of the Nativity facade.The statues on the Passion facade portray events from the Passion (the final days of Jesus' life), such as the last supper.
The square on the wall between the Roman soldier and Judas betraying Jesus is called a "Magic Square" and is included because the numbers in all rows and diagonals of the square can be added up to 33 (the age of Jesus during the Passion).
The simplicity of the sculptures directly contrasted with the complexity of the large bronze doors which are covered in religious words from the Bible.

Peter denying Jesus.

Close-up of the door

The columns which support the roof and the massive towers still to be built really show Gaudi's genius. First, the cross section of the columns is continuously changing, starting as a square then becoming am 8-pointed star, then shifting into a circle. The square to star pattern is generated by rotating two squares in opposite directions and looking at the overlapped area. You may also notice that the large columns are also different colours, this is because they are built from different types of stone depending on the weight they are required to carry. Instead of changing the size or spacing of columns, as is done in all other buildings, Gaudi simply chose to build the columns which support more weight out of a stronger and stronger stone.
The vaulted ceiling is meant to resemble a tree canopy, notice the light pouring in from the section where the roof is not yet complete, and the complete lack of windows.
After spending a long time touring the Sagrada Familia we decided to tour the historical city center. This courtyard is the old rector's house by the main medieval cathedral, the palm tree is 115 years old, and the walls of the house include parts of the city walls built by the Romans over 2000 years ago. Across the street from this house a woman sat singing in a doorway to the church, her song sounded very eerie and added a whole different calming mood to the courtyard.If you lived to be 115, you'd need some help standing up too.
The cathedral, originally built between the 13th and 15th centuries was under extensive exterior renovation, so this is the only portion I could get a photo of without scaffolding.
The woman who was singing the eerie song was sitting in the doorway below this facade.
From the cathedral we decided to walk towards La Rambla, a large boulevard and shopping district in Barcelona. Walking through the narrow streets we passed some unique stores. One had this statue holding a blue neon tube out front, giving Ali and I the opportunity to take cool colour-select photos.
When we finally got to La Rambla, there wasn't much to see, likely because it was a cool Monday afternoon in February. One of the highlights was La Boqueria, a huge covered market.

From the market we took the subway down to the end of La Rambla to the Arc de Triomf, built in 1888 for the Universal Exhibition.

The Barcelonan Arc de Triomf is much smaller than the Parisian one, but just as detailed.

I especially liked the bats holding up the arches.

The Arc de Triomf is located within a large park, which had palm trees, and working fountains, a rare sight in February, even in Barcelona.

The central fountain and pavilion was under renovation.

After the park, we decided to do as the Barcelonans do, and go back for a siesta. The subway exit closest to our hostel was directly in front of a famous Gaudi house, Casa Batllo, which also shows his organic, almost skeletal, style of architecture.
That night we went out to another Tapas restaurant which had a placemat covered in photos of the 60+ different tapas selections to chose from. We just kept ordering, as everything was amazing, which resulted in the bill being far higher than either of us would have ever expected... but it was definitely worth every penny.

The weather on the Tuesday was much nicer, so we decided to visit Park Güell, a large public park designed by Gaudi. The way from the subway to the park was up a very steep still, with outdoor escalators!
Even though it was warm enough to walk around in short sleeves in February, seeing the cacti growing wild in the park was what really made me realize how nice and warm Barcelona was.
In the center of the park there is a large pavilion designed by Gaudi as a location for a public market.

Many of the surfaces are covered with broken tile mosaics in cool patterns. From the top of the pavilion you can look down on the park, which was already in bloom and filled with birds chirping away.

This photo, taken by Ali, makes the trumpet player look all alone. In reality, there were crowds of people all around selling cheap souvenirs and sitting around taking in the atmosphere. The entire edge of the plaza was lined with a continuous bench covered in the same broken tile mosaics in organic and creative patterns.Gaudi's designs are inspired by nature; this colonnade is a wave of stone.
If you look closely or enlarge this (slightly fuzzy) photo you can see the family of small green parrots living in the palm tree (in the upper right corner). They reminded Ali and I of our friend Seanna's pet parrot Squeak. We kept on hearing the parrots, but it took us a while to actually find them, hidden away in the palm tree.
From Park Güell, built up on a large hill, you can look down on Barcelona and out to the Mediterranean. By far the most recognizable sight on the skyline is the Sagrada Familia surrounded by cranes. This view will change as the other facades are built and the central steeples grow to their full height which will be taller than the highest crane. There's a model of the finished design showing the same angle as this photo here.
From the top of Park Güell we took the subway down to the sea.
The Barcelonans were bundled up against the "cold", but the dumb Canadians decided to roll up their jeans and walk right in. Surprisingly, it wasn't even that cold, about the same temperature as the St.Lawrence in June (which we voluntarily swim in).
While walking down the beach we passed kids playing on this play structure. I found the red geometrical structure set against the horizontal bands of light sand, aqua sea, and blue sky punctuated by playing children fascinating. This is definitely my favourite photo from the whole trip, and possibly from my entire time in Europe.
We walked around the harbour and decided to find the monument to Christopher Columbus.
It was 22C, but the wind coming off the water cooled it down, making it feel like ~12C. I think this is the first time in my entire life that I have felt temperatures this warm in February, -22C plenty of times, but never +22C.
The monument to Christopher Columbus it placed right at the end of La Rambla by the harbour.
From La Rambla, we walked around, stopped into a little bar for a drink, and then went back for a siesta. For supper we went back to the beach and found a little tapas restaurant suggested to us by a woman who worked at the hostel. No one in the restaurant spoke English, and being a true tapas restaurant there was no menu (or listed prices...) so, Ali used her caveman communication skills to order us a little bit of everything and a bottle of wine. When we got back to our table, it had been taken by someone else, but we managed to find a seat inside. The wine came first, in a chilled bottle with two ice-cold frosty wine glasses. The only reason I could think of for serving chilled red wine in frosted glasses was to make a cheap home-made wine taste better. Anyone have any other ideas? It tasted fine. Then the food arrived, dish after dish. It's hard to remember everything but it was all amazing, the best food of the trip, by far. We had shrimp, pork, mussels, potatoes, olives, and many more delicious things. It's too bad we were too concerned with devouring the food to stop and take photos of it. When the bill came, we were a little shocked, but our stomachs were full and we were content.

From the tapas restaurant we walked off the meal then took the subway to "Manhattan" a jazz club in the old city center. It was really cool, I had never really seen live jazz before, but we only stayed for a while because we wanted to catch the last subway and we were dead tired.

The next morning we caught our bus to the airport and flew back to Bratislava, Slovakia which is the closest Ryan Air airport to Vienna, about 90min away by bus. Our initial plan was to tour the city before going back, but we were hungry and poor, so we decide to go straight back and make supper.

Ali's few days in Vienna will be covered in the third, last, and shortest post of this series on our trip which will hopefully follow very soon as I have other things I want to get to.