Barcelona!

Daniel and I both agree: we love Barcelona!

We left our B&B this morning at 7:30am and took the metro to the Madrid Atocha RENFE train station. We were a little confused at first on how to get our railpasses validated. Once that was taken care of, everything was easy. We found our train car and our seats and boarded the train. The girl sitting in front of us heard us speaking English and asked where we were from. When we said the US, she was so excited because she is from Chicago! As the train left we continued talking. Daniel moved up a row to sit next to her while I settled in for the movie. Unfortunately, it was in Catalan with Spanish subtitles (Catalan is a language similar to Spanish that is spoken only in Barcelona). Not much help to me. I thought it ironic that they played a movie about America ("Frost/Nixon") not in English. The scenery was pretty uninteresting, so I took a little nap.

We arrived in Barcelona at about 11:30am. It was pretty easy to take the metro to our B&B. We got off the metro with all our luggage and ended up right on the busiest tourist street in the whole city: La Rambla. The place we are staying it is literally right on the main street. It's about 2 blocks from the ocean. After a bit of wandering, we found our apartment. It is on the 3rd floor (4th floor in the U.S.) up many flights of steep stairs. It is so hot and humid here so it was pretty miserable once we finally got up the stairs. We checked in with the hostess and she showed us a few of her favorite restaurants and things to do around Barcelona. We left our luggage in our room and headed out to get some lunch and explore.

Since it was a Sunday, there were tons of artisans selling jewelry, scarves, purses, and all kinds of crafts in booths on La Rambla. It was fun to look at, and I couldn't resist buying some souvenirs. We found a little cafe and had lunch. Daniel ordered a cafe con chocolate and he thought it was delicious. I thought it tasted like bitter chocolate- yuck! We have discovered that though the people here speak Catalan, they understand and speak Spanish as well. We have found better luck speaking Spanish with Barcelonians than English. And our Spanish has improved so much! I surprise myself and how well I can communicate. Anyways, after lunch we took the metro a couple miles away to La Sagrada Familia.

As soon as we stepped out of the station, our jaws dropped. We saw a HUGE cathedral with very ornate sculpture on the outside and scaffolding and cranes on parts of it. We couldn't wait to find out more about it. It was pretty expensive admission at 9 euros, but it was a cathedral that was under construction, so I'm guessing they use the revenue to pay for the construction. We decided to get an audio guide and we are very glad we did. The guide explained all about the cathedral. The cathedral is by Barcelona's most famous architect, Gaudi. There are tons of sculptures covering the outside and every last detail has meaning and symbolizes something. The cathedral has two main "facades". One side of the cathedral depicts the Passion. There are 8 or 9 scenes built into the side of the cathedral that tell the story of Christ's crucifixion. On the other side, there is the story of Christ's birth. In addition there are four bell towers (for four apostles) two big pillars (for Mary and Joseph)..... the list goes on and on. Every aspect has a meaning and symbol. Like I said earlier, the cathedral is still under construction. It will eventually have something like 18 towers. All the disciples will have a tower and then one huge tower in the middle for Christ. I forget what the others stand for. The inside is filled with construction materials and scaffolding. There are beautiful stained glass windows. It's impossible to describe. Hopefully we can get the video working and post our video that we took. Until then, these pictures will have to do.

You can see the two different facades.

The birth of Christ facade.

The interior of the Cathedral is supposed to look like a forest.

Then we took the metro to Parc Guell. It's a park with a bunch of Gaudi's structures in it. There were tons of people there, just hanging out and climbing through his houses. We got a great view of the city from way up high.

Then we took the metro again, to Montjuic. It's a mountain in Barcelona that has been made into a big park. There are museums, gardens, the old Olympic stadium, and a big huge fountain. We walked through Montjuic and found a place to have dinner. We finally had tapas tonight.

Then we walked over to the big fountain just in time to watch "Font Magica". They choreograph the fountain to match music. It was really cool. It was a long and exhausting day, so we headed home. We had so much fun today! We think that Barcelona is friendlier, at least towards tourists. The people seem more welcoming. And it is much more American! We have heard more English here than in Madrid by far. We were worried about the Catalan, but most everyone here speaks Spanish, and some even speak English pretty well. Tomorrow we're hoping to spend some time at the beach and see some more museums.