I promise I'll stop making puns on city names soon.
So today was the day in Barcelona. Which, by the way, is a really nice city.
We were dropped off in the middle of the city at the top of La Rambla, which is kind of a big long street with lots of shops and whatnot. Having seen the outside of Gaudi's church - La Segrada Familia (or The Sacred Family), we then decided to head off to see the inside.
Well, that was the plan, anyway.
We took the metro to the church (and here's a good time to point out that Barcelona's metro system is surprisingly easy to use. Although that's to be expected. if it were hard to use, nobody would use it), and when we arrived, well... Take a look:
This is the outside of the church from the walking tour around it the previous day:
Actually wait, first. A bit of an explanation. As the name implies, La Segrada Familia is a church dedicated to the family of Jesus Christ. However, that's kinda irrelevant to the point I'm getting at which is the fact that the outside of the church is divided into three facades, each representing a different part of Jesus' life: The nativity, the passion, and the glory - birth, death and resurrection, in that order.
So here we go, starting from the Nativity facade, and working our way anti-clockwise through the facades:
The Nativity Facade:
The Back. Nothing much to see here:
The Passion Facade. This is the side that has the ticket booth for entrance to the church:
Aaand the Glory Facade:
Did I mention the Glory Facade is still under construction? It's going to be the biggest and well, glorious of the three facades, and it still isn't complete despite the fact that construction started on the church in 1882.
So there you have it. you have four sides, each with a wildly different architectural style, with the Nativity opposite to the Passion, and the Glory at the front.
So here's the sight we saw when we came out of the metro station:
That's one the side of the Nativity Facade. Remember when I said the ticket booth was on the Passion Facade side? Yeah. that's the same line.
So we then decided to head on back to La Rambla. Not wanting to waste a perfectly good €2 worth of metro ticket, we decided to take the opportunity to walk back. Noting to ourselves that this particular Barcelonian (Barcelonan? Spanish.) monument was actually off the map we were given. So we promptly got ourselves slightly lost (but not too lost!) and ended up back where we started with little gained but some exercise. Which we promptly remedied by eating lunch at McDonalds.
So with our bellies full and balance restored to the universe, we -
Wait, I've forgotten something.
BEFORE we decided to waste our time at a church we didn't get to enter, we were taken on a nice little tour of Barcelona's Gothic Quarter. it's a nice place - lots of winding streets with narrow passages, easy to get lost in. We walked past the place where Christopher Columbus first unveiled American Indians to Europe, and sooner or later ended up in a very nice little square somewhere.
It was a very nice square:
Peaceful, even:
Well, that is, until you saw the bullet holes:
Turns out this particular tiny little square was the site of a brutal scene from the Spanish civil war. Unarmed civilians were lined up against the walls of the church, and shot in cold blood. The height of some of the bullet marks suggest that even some children were present that day. Although the height of the others suggest that they just weren't very good shots. Or perhaps some soldiers intentionally aimed high to avoid having blood on their hands. I'll probably never know.
So back to the present, and we are now walking down La Rambla. It's an incredibly busy street (and you'd better keep a close eye on your possessions) but for some reason today there weren't quite as many street side stalls as there are. I mean, there were still a lot, but I wasn't accosted to buy something or other every ten steps.
We ducked out of the street for a bit to look through a bunch of covered markets, and for a while we just wandered around in there, looking at everything there was:
It was while we were here that we were stuck in the middle of a very Spanish peculiarity: Siesta.
Now don't get me wrong. The idea of Siesta is pure genius. Have lunch, close the shop, go the fuck to sleep for two hours, wake the fuck up, and get the fuck back to work. What more could you want?
Well, at least, that;s the point of view from the people actually taking the Siesta. As a tourist, all you get from this experience is two hours where you can't buy anything, and the slightly odd felling of standing in a crowded market, and suddenly realising that not only are three quarters of the shops around you now closed, but there is suddenly a lot less people around. Like so:
No wonder their economy is so messed up.
So we walked out from under the covered markets (without buying anything on my part) and casually strolled down to the beach, where we spent the rest of the afternoon. The beach in Barcelona is one of the rarest sights in Europe: An actual, proper, SANDY BEACH.
Well, scratch the "actual" part, because the beach is entirely fucking FAKE.
Yes, that's right, it's an entire fake beach. They opened most of the beaches in Barcelona when they hosted the Olympics in 1992. They also ship stupid amounts of sand from somewhere each year to replenish the sand lost due to storm erosion. Of course, it's all worth it because of the ridiculous amount of people that go to the beach every day.
Take a look:
If you look closely (or at all) you'll see that there are more people on that beach than there is actual beach. It's insane.
So we chilled out there for a while, went swimming for a bit, and pretty much everything else that happens on the beach. I should point out that it is a REALLY nice beach, with amazingly clear water - warm too, and the only problem is that the biggest wave is about twelve centimetres high. But you learn to deal with it.
...Aaaand then we went home, after several hours of the beach in which I got more sunburnt than I can ever remember being. Which was kinda stupid on my part. I was peeling for weeks.
Oh yeah, and on they way back, I saw this sign, which kinda cracked me up:
(I'll make it big so you can actually see it)
With that note, I'm off. Tomorrow is another travel day, to the French Riviera!
