Barcelona

After Valencia we went to Barcelona for 2 nights. Barcelona was awesome! It might be my favorite city in all of Spain that I’ve seen.

First of all, Barcelona is huge. It’s an enormous metropolis. The buildings are really tall, the city blocks are big, the streets are all 5-6 lanes. It’s a crowded, busy, modern city – very different from the other cities in Spain.

We arrived in Barcelona after my final bus ride EVER in Europe. It’s all trains and planes from here! The bus ride was about 5 hours and every seat was full, including 2 not happy babies and an elderly man who fainted halfway there. Let’s just say that I was very relieved when we got to Barcelona…

By the time we got checked into our hostel and set out into the streets, it was late afternoon, so we didn’t have much time to see a lot the first day. We went to several Gaudi houses. Ok so Gaudi was a very famous architect who designed a lot of amazing but very weird buildings in Barcelona. The style is like something you would see in a Dr. Seuss story.

After we saw some of his houses, we ate paella at the hostel and met a lot of the other people staying there. It was a nice hostel, just very small and crowded. The next morning we went to the Park Guell. It’s high up on a hill, it took years to climb all the way up, even with the help of some escalators now and then.

The park is awesome. It was like a big adult playground. Kind of like what you would find in Willy Wonka’s factory. The park is huge, we were there for hours and didn’t see even half of it. There are levels that lead to terraces, then you go down a path and see a fountain, then up stairs to a big area with pillars and statues. All the architecture is random, and almost bizarre. There are benches shaped like serpents on the edge of a big plaza that overlook the entire city. There is a fountain with a dragon that is apparently very famous. The entrance of the park has two buildings that look like gingerbread houses. The whole place was very cool, nothing like I had ever seen before.

After the park we went to the big market in Barcelona. It was an inside market, and it was enormous! There was a lot of fruit, some candies and dried fruit, meat and seafood, cheese, bread, and wine. It was very crowded and I felt like we all smelled like fish after being in there, but it was the biggest market I’ve ever been to. We all bought fruit and bread for lunch and ate it outside.

We went to the Barcelona Cathedral, the Arc of Triomf, and several really pretty plazas. Our last stop was the Sagrada Familia. This was Gaudi’s masterpiece. It’s been under construction since 1882 and won’t be completed until 2026 or so. It’s really big, but I wouldn’t describe it as beautiful. The design on the front of the building almost looks like it melted together. We walked all the way around it to see all the facades. It was cool to see it in person after I have studied it so much in school.

We left the next morning for Nice, France. I’ll have lots to write about Nice later!