First stop on Friday morning was Parc Guell – my first real encounter with Gaudi’s crazy creations. Parc Guell was staggering! Gaudi designed everything and it has an overall sense of organic shapes – from balconies that echo the shapes of palm trees, to a smooth balcony that lolled around the park like an underwater plant covered in bright intricate mosaic. His buildings look like sandcastles, or chess pieces blown hugely big. I love the mixture of simple, flowing, organic forms and the bright complication of the tiles that adorn them.
More Gaudi feasting followed with the Sagrada Familia which I walked all around, then saw that the queue for tickets stretched half way round the circumference of the building, so I moved on! It's still a building site but the bits you can see are amazing - I particularly liked the Cubist figures. What's astounding about Gaudi is not only his mind but the fact that he was given the opportunity to realise his crazy ideas on such a huge scale!
I walked down Carrer de Mallorca to see Casa Macaya, but you could only see the facade and the inside seemed to be filled with builders who called me 'chica guapa' and gave me funny looks. The Arc de Triomf caught my eye in the distance, so I walked down (there is a weird bat figure carved in the stone!), then walked back up to Placa de Tetuan and a long the very busy and dusty Gran Via de Les Cortes Catalanes. I think I had the wrong idea about this area - apart from Barcelona's answer to the London Gerkin (the multi-coloured Torre Agbar), there's just a shopping centre (though the loos here were very welcome!). There was also the largely underwhelming Els Encantes flea market, where a scary guy called me 'idiota' for trying to take a photo :-P
By now I was dying so I struggled back across to the metro and got the tube to Catalunya. Gasping, I finally found the street Las Ramblas (a favourite attraction of the city) and stumbled to the nearest peaceful-ish cafe I could find. My favourite section along Las Ramblas is probably the Boqueria Market, which is under a shady roof and crammed with stalls bursting with fruit, veg, fish, meat, and some tapas bars. Here I became instantly addicted to the small cups of fresh juice sold by the fruit stalls (banana and coconut, mmm).
My biggest expense of the day was 12 euro suncream, which was required when I realised I'd turned a fetching shade of fushia pink.
Once I'd laquered myself in suncream I grabbed a beer then met Alicia from work. Had a bit of a wander up and down Las Ramblas – a street filled with weird spectacles – lots of people in fancy dress to have your photo taken with, flower girls, fairies, and two demons that looked like they might be the next career move of the band members of Lordi. Also stalls selling birds of paradise, lizards, flowers, wooden flowers, and food.
There were also stalls selling overpriced sangria – Alicia got very mad about this when I suggested that we might like to get some sangria. She says the restaurant sangria is massively overpriced and that in Spain it is normally only students who drink sangria because it is so cheap. You make it specifically with cheap red wine, add in juice and a white spirit, sugar, and fruit, and leave it to ferment at least overnight. The tourist restaurants just add juice to cheap red wine, pop in a slice of orange, and charge 15 euros a litre. This was a subject of great passion for her.
There are lots of buskers in Barcelona – on my way to meet Alicia I passed one group playing I think it was the ‘tequila’ song - and an old couple and a couple of old men were bopping along to the music in the centre of a crowd.
Met Alicia and Fabien at Jaume I and we immediately headed towards beer - most restaurants serve the local beer. After a glass of this gorgeous stuff at one of the outdoor stalls, we headed to one of their favourite restaurants. It opened at 8pm and we had to get there early because there was normally a huge queue – it’s very popular with the locals. Inside the door you are immediately met with a counter of fresh fish and seafood – seafood so fresh it made it living presence known by sometimes spilling out of its shell like a tongue sticking itself out at you (I didn’t select these ones to eat!)
We chose fried tiny squid, crab salad, tuna steak, and calamari rings, as well as a bottle of zesty white wine. I have to admit I was a bit daunted by the seafood (after my squeamish mussel incident) but the fried squid and calamari were delicious, especially with the aioli sauce, which is basically mayonnaise and garlic. After this we were totally stuffed, so we spilled out onto the warm Barcelona streets like slipping into a warm bath, and meandered around.
Fabien (who is himself a great fan and a bit of a practitioner of graffiti) says that Barcelona is famous for its graffiti. The city has several walls dedicated to graffiti art, and there is also a graffiti festival each year. We spotted lots dotted around the narrow, butter-yellow-lit streets. Some are on paper pasted onto walls and the metal doorways, some are painted or sprayed on directly, and also onto pillar boxes, dustbins - anything stationary. Fabien says there is more paper graffiti now, while the painted one is more traditional.
We wandered around the gothic area just off Las Ramblas – lots of people were also meandering around, and I noticed several icecream and coffee shops that I swear weren’t open in daylight hours. The streets were punctuated with romantic pockets of buskers – including one small square filled with the sweet sound of a man playing the harp. We headed to find Barcelona’s other favourite drink after the beer – super fresh mojito. We found a not-so-crowded bar and the waitress made us 3 drinks with heaps of fresh mint and limes from a bowl on the bar. It was so gorgeous and tangy!
Decided to save money and make more mojitos at home but in fact by the time the night bus had reached the area where they live – Gracia, above Park Guell, we were all super tired. (I keep saying ‘super something’ because that’s a favourite phrase of Alicia’s, and now it’s stuck in my head!) So we headed to bed at 1ish.
More Gaudi feasting followed with the Sagrada Familia which I walked all around, then saw that the queue for tickets stretched half way round the circumference of the building, so I moved on! It's still a building site but the bits you can see are amazing - I particularly liked the Cubist figures. What's astounding about Gaudi is not only his mind but the fact that he was given the opportunity to realise his crazy ideas on such a huge scale!
I walked down Carrer de Mallorca to see Casa Macaya, but you could only see the facade and the inside seemed to be filled with builders who called me 'chica guapa' and gave me funny looks. The Arc de Triomf caught my eye in the distance, so I walked down (there is a weird bat figure carved in the stone!), then walked back up to Placa de Tetuan and a long the very busy and dusty Gran Via de Les Cortes Catalanes. I think I had the wrong idea about this area - apart from Barcelona's answer to the London Gerkin (the multi-coloured Torre Agbar), there's just a shopping centre (though the loos here were very welcome!). There was also the largely underwhelming Els Encantes flea market, where a scary guy called me 'idiota' for trying to take a photo :-P
By now I was dying so I struggled back across to the metro and got the tube to Catalunya. Gasping, I finally found the street Las Ramblas (a favourite attraction of the city) and stumbled to the nearest peaceful-ish cafe I could find. My favourite section along Las Ramblas is probably the Boqueria Market, which is under a shady roof and crammed with stalls bursting with fruit, veg, fish, meat, and some tapas bars. Here I became instantly addicted to the small cups of fresh juice sold by the fruit stalls (banana and coconut, mmm).
My biggest expense of the day was 12 euro suncream, which was required when I realised I'd turned a fetching shade of fushia pink.
Once I'd laquered myself in suncream I grabbed a beer then met Alicia from work. Had a bit of a wander up and down Las Ramblas – a street filled with weird spectacles – lots of people in fancy dress to have your photo taken with, flower girls, fairies, and two demons that looked like they might be the next career move of the band members of Lordi. Also stalls selling birds of paradise, lizards, flowers, wooden flowers, and food.
There were also stalls selling overpriced sangria – Alicia got very mad about this when I suggested that we might like to get some sangria. She says the restaurant sangria is massively overpriced and that in Spain it is normally only students who drink sangria because it is so cheap. You make it specifically with cheap red wine, add in juice and a white spirit, sugar, and fruit, and leave it to ferment at least overnight. The tourist restaurants just add juice to cheap red wine, pop in a slice of orange, and charge 15 euros a litre. This was a subject of great passion for her.
There are lots of buskers in Barcelona – on my way to meet Alicia I passed one group playing I think it was the ‘tequila’ song - and an old couple and a couple of old men were bopping along to the music in the centre of a crowd.
Met Alicia and Fabien at Jaume I and we immediately headed towards beer - most restaurants serve the local beer. After a glass of this gorgeous stuff at one of the outdoor stalls, we headed to one of their favourite restaurants. It opened at 8pm and we had to get there early because there was normally a huge queue – it’s very popular with the locals. Inside the door you are immediately met with a counter of fresh fish and seafood – seafood so fresh it made it living presence known by sometimes spilling out of its shell like a tongue sticking itself out at you (I didn’t select these ones to eat!)
We chose fried tiny squid, crab salad, tuna steak, and calamari rings, as well as a bottle of zesty white wine. I have to admit I was a bit daunted by the seafood (after my squeamish mussel incident) but the fried squid and calamari were delicious, especially with the aioli sauce, which is basically mayonnaise and garlic. After this we were totally stuffed, so we spilled out onto the warm Barcelona streets like slipping into a warm bath, and meandered around.
Fabien (who is himself a great fan and a bit of a practitioner of graffiti) says that Barcelona is famous for its graffiti. The city has several walls dedicated to graffiti art, and there is also a graffiti festival each year. We spotted lots dotted around the narrow, butter-yellow-lit streets. Some are on paper pasted onto walls and the metal doorways, some are painted or sprayed on directly, and also onto pillar boxes, dustbins - anything stationary. Fabien says there is more paper graffiti now, while the painted one is more traditional.
We wandered around the gothic area just off Las Ramblas – lots of people were also meandering around, and I noticed several icecream and coffee shops that I swear weren’t open in daylight hours. The streets were punctuated with romantic pockets of buskers – including one small square filled with the sweet sound of a man playing the harp. We headed to find Barcelona’s other favourite drink after the beer – super fresh mojito. We found a not-so-crowded bar and the waitress made us 3 drinks with heaps of fresh mint and limes from a bowl on the bar. It was so gorgeous and tangy!
Decided to save money and make more mojitos at home but in fact by the time the night bus had reached the area where they live – Gracia, above Park Guell, we were all super tired. (I keep saying ‘super something’ because that’s a favourite phrase of Alicia’s, and now it’s stuck in my head!) So we headed to bed at 1ish.
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