On October 20th, my aunt and uncle arrived in Barcelona. After I gave them a little tour of Sant Cugat, they treated me to a delicious dinner of pretty much all the tapas on the menu at La Placa, arguably the best restaurant in Sant Cugat. We met up again the next morning at La Rambla and tried out some Churros con Chocolate at a little cafe. We all agreed the chocolate should have been thicker, but I still thought it was good. Continuing down La Rambla, I showed off La Boqueria (one of the biggest markets in Spain) and we got fresh fruit and smoothies!
On the way down La Rambla, we noticed the cable cars traveling over the Mediterranean and up Montjuic. We walked allll the way to the waterfront and I jumped in a ball pit!
We headed over the sea in a cable car and then up further in another cable ca all the way to the top of Montjuic! Uncle Ed even bought me the picture from the top! It's now hanging on my wall of post cards! The middle picture is the view from above of La Rambla. The whole street is completely visible though out the city because of the huge tree canopy!
Since we missed out on ice cream on day one in Sant Cugat, we headed to ARTiSA, my favorite ice cream place in Barcelona. Their mango and hazelnut (Ferrero Rocher) gelatos are unbeatable. But we also went to Font Magica, which we will go to again to see the show the next time they come to Barcelona in two weeks. We called it a day pretty early because we were meeting very early at Park Guell and the it was going to take a longggggg time to get there, especially since it turned out that Chris and I missed the train, had to wait for the next one, and then the bus kept getting delayed, so we ended up taking a cab for the last leg of the journey. Even though the day was really early and the transportation a bit rocky, being at the park early was a great idea since no one was there! We were able to see the park without all the other tourists.
We also got another amazing amazing ice cream- Mima! It's so good! Ice cream in between two macaroons! We all had a great time and headed to the Sagrada Familia next and wandered around town before our time to enter the basilica. We also found a buffet, which was a good example of a buffet to use as a precedent for our semester project. But the Sagrada Familia was absolutely beautiful.
Since the basilica originated in the gothic style, and Gaudi was the architect, the building truly reflects the idea of lightness and openness. The columns are actually designed to look like trees! That is such a Gaudi thing! Even if you don't know much about Gaudi, you might recognize his nature motifs from pictures of Park Guell. For Gaudi, sun was insanely important (check out the sun in that selfie of all of us) and the sun coming through the stained- glass. The Ed and Dec took us up to Passion Tower and we got to see the view over Barcelona. Not only that, but we also got to see the construction process (BTW- the basilica is supposed to be completed in 2028). Maybe I'll take a vacation here a couple years after it's complete and see it. I say vacation because there is no way I'm moving back here. A cool fact is that the guy on the far left in this picture is modeled after Gaudi!
Our last stops of the day on our Gaudi tour were casa Mila and the Block of Discord. We learned a little about both locations from Christian's Gaudi book- did you know that the Block of Discord was designed as such because the owners of the buildings wanted their building to be the best and hired the best architects of the time to out do each other. The result was Casa Lleo Morera (Domenech i Montaner), Casa Amatller (Pugi i Cadafalch), and Casa Batllo (Gaudi). We tried to go the day before, but ended up at a protest for the separation of Catalunya from Spain. Surprisingly peaceful for there being over 450,000 people screaming for independence.
Next visitor is Auntie Carroll, hitting up Barcelona at the end of the month. Can't wait to see her right before I hit Greece with Elise and Maddy, then get to see Ed and Denise again.
