Barcelona, Spain

Now it was time to bid our ship goodbye in Barcelona. Being as this was our honeymoon and Hubbin had some specific goals for Barcelona when he booked the trip, he booked us an extra night in Barcelona before we would fly home. It was a verrrrry nice hotel and it seem exceptionally lush after two weeks in our little closet cruise ship room. He used to have a Spanish girlfriend so he’d been to Spain a few times and more than anything this time in Spain he wanted to visit La Sagrada Familia. So that’s what we did. While consulting tour books in our hotel I decided I wanted to visit the Gothic Quarter and La Rambla. Fortunately our hotel was pretty much in between all those, so even though we vowed to treat ourselves to cab rides, we still ended up walking nearly everywhere. Here’s a traffic sign Hubbin decided means “It is now ok to run down pedestrians with bicycles”. I’ll go ahead and admit I was not really looking forward to La Sagrada Familia, but I was completely impressed. In awe really. We ended up spending several hours there and I’ll just give you the two minute overview on what it’s all about. So Gaudi was an architect who is famous for his “overdone” style (where we get gaudy from). And he set out to build this enormous cathedral that told the story of Jesus Christ. You need a lot of time to sit an look at it, but nearly every story you can think of in the bible is represented in the architecture. This particular side is “the nativity” side. The church is really only maybe 40% built at this point and is still actively under construction. I was pretty surprised how much Hubbin enjoyed it, since he’s generally anti-religion. He said if he had visited this church in his younger days it may have made him a religious man, that the kind of impact this had. Inside the church is a really neat effect. Gaudi found inspiration of religion in nature and really tried to bring that into the church. His pillars are supposed to look like redwood trees. They REALLY do. You would get the distinct impression that you’re attending church in a forest when you came here to worship. Especially when all the stain glass windows are installed it really gives the impression of light filtering down through the trees. We’ve decided we’re going to make another pilgramage back when the church is finished… of course we may be in our 70s by then and traveling with grandchildren… We had a good time strolling down La Rambla but were a little confused about what we were supposed to be thinking. There’s lots of gypsies and stands set up in the middle where people are selling everything from flowers to live animals. We saw chipmunks, ducks, bunnies, turtles, hedgehogs and so forth. There was a distinct black-market quality about it all. We obviously made no purchases. The gothic quarter we just sort of wandered into. I was expecting gothic buildings and for it to be a bit more like Venice, but it seemed to be more like Barcelona’s shopping mall, full of teenagers and buildings transformed into H&M. We had a lovely time in Barcelona, but we were quite ready to head home the next day it had been a long and wonderful trip.