Un dia en Barcelona

Well, you could say that our second arrival in a major european city went much better than the first.  After arriving in Barcelona, where we had absolutely no idea where to go, except for the address and phone number of our hostel, we somehow managed to wander outside of the airport and tram stations and find the correct bus using a series of broken spanish and catalonian sentence fragments to the driver.  About an hour and a half after we landed, we arrived at our hostel exhausted from another long day of traveling and with only one thing on our minds:  tapas and spanish wine.  So we dropped our bags and headed to a nearby tapas bar where we could sit in the cool evening air and talk about how happy we were to finally be in Spain.

The next day, which was to be our only day of actual sight-seeing in Barcelona,we awoke and headed towards a route where we could see the most of Barcelona in one day.  Without a map this objective was harder than we thought.  However, we did manage to stumble upon a couple of Gaudi’s famous architectural buildings.  After stopping for a sandwich and to buy a map at a local stand, we headed towards Barcelona’s smaller version of Paris’s famous Arc de Triomf.  Although not quite as impressive as its larger relative, the red brick that this one is constructed with was very striking.  I wish we had been able to see it at night.  I’m sure it would have been something incredible.

The area that the Arc de Triomf is located is one of the coolest in any large city I have been to.  Now I believe I realize why my parents told me how much they loved Barcelona.  If you have a love for history, architecture, and obviously art, it is a wonderful place.  After visiting the Arc de Triomf, we took the short walk from there down past the many museums in the area.  We did not go in because we felt we had too much to do.  From there we came to the zoo and some sort of government building.  Congress maybe?  After this, we came to the pier and the shops surrounding it.  We walked out onto the pier and got some great shots of the Mediterranean and all of the boats sitting in the harbor.  
From here we could actually see La Sagrada Familia, which was probably a 15-20 minute walk away.  We headed off in that direction with a slight detour stop at the bus station so that I could buy my ticket to Baeza.  For those of you that don’t know, La Sagrada Familia is a cathedral that was started in the 1870s by Gaudi and is an ongoing beast of a project even today.  The architecture of the building was like nothing I had ever seen before.  Standing there looking up at it, you get the sense that the building is almost organic.  Something that just sprung up out of the ground in the middle of Barcelona.  We walked around it for about 30 minutes and then paid a fee (fortunately smaller for us because we were “students”) to go inside and look around.  Gaudi was in every way a genius.  The architectural parallels that he used with nature to construct the building are incredible and something that even today, well over a 100 years later, I have yet to see another example.  

After realizing that the Olympic Park was not in the area we were at, we took another look at our map.  We then sound out that the area where we were very nearby, called Vila Olimpica, is not actually the Olympic Village.  So finally after spotting the actual Olympic Park, which was located in another very cool part of the city, we headed towards the Plaza Espanya, which was the metro stop near the Olympic area.  The plaza is a large and beautiful one and at one end lies the main Barcelona art museum.  Behind that and up on a large hill is the Olympic Park.  The enormity of this one and the other in Munich which we had seen only earlier in the week was just about the only similarity between the two.  Other than this and the fact that each have a large museum next to the grounds, the two are strikingly different.  Munich’s strange attempt to have a modern looking park and Barcelona’s classic stone on all of its buildings were very contrasting.  Unfortunately here we were unable to see inside the Olympic stadium.  However we were once again able to swim in the Olympic pool and we sat for awhile and rested in a beautiful plaza/promenade that was easy for us to imagine, being filled with thousands of athletes and spectators 26 years ago.


After getting or fill of this stop on our endless walking tour, we returned to the Plaza Espanya and found a nice little restaurant nearby where we had our first paella and sangria in Spain!

After feeling quite satisfied, we returned to our hostel and relaxed as it was already a bit late and Russ had an early plane to catch the next morning.  I on the other hand was in for an exciting day of sitting at the bus station caused by a 12:00 check-out of the hostel and  a 10:00 departure from Barcelona.  I sat and read my book, had a very long and relaxing late afternoon lunch or early dinner, and watched Across the Universe on my computer.  Finally, ten hours later, I was off.  On my way to my new home in Baeza.  I had no idea what to expect, but was anxious to finally have a place to drop my bags and meet my new roommates.

More from Baeza soon!