We Love Barcelona

Carin and I agree, this town is, as my dad would say, "Somethin' Else". So far we are having the time of our lives here, at last on vacation with no more school obligations for the rest of the summer. I struggled with which photo to open this blog entry with, and I decided it had to be the wall o' candy. Yesterday, after getting our hotel situation all figured out, we decided to start our day with a walk down the most famous street in Barcelona, La Rambla. This photo was taken at one of our first stops, La Boqueria, an open air/semi covered market that sells everything from your favorite animal freshly skinned to fresh picked fruit to...well...the wall o' candy. We were somewhat surprised, delighted, and disgusted to see the Dunkin' Donuts right next door to the market. I feel like I'm back in Boston.

As we continued down La Rambla we began following the "Ruta del Modernisme de Barcelona" map we obtained at the tourist office. Translated, that means I began enjoying some really amazing architecture you can't see anywhere else in the world. Spain, and especially Barcelona, is famous for the "Modernisme" movement in architecture, which coincided with the Art Nouveau in many other parts of the world. An extremely famous Modernisme architect, Antoni Gaudi, and especially one Modernisme building, La Sagrada Familia, are pretty much two of the major reasons I became an architect. I have waited my entire educational and professional career to experience this movement first hand, and here I am, in my own personal architectural Mecca. The photo here was taken at a building that ended up being my first taste of Modernisme, the Antiga Casa Figueras by Antoni Ros i Guell.

We spent several hours wandering down La Ramblas, enjoying many Moderisme sites and buildings, discovering various "Placas" (in Italian - Piazza) along the way and just having a great time in sunny weather with a light breeze and temps in the upper 70s -- i.e. perfect. Eventually we came back and checked into our new hotel (pic show here to the right of part of the lobby) which turned out to be the best decision we could have made. The place is absolutley stunning and very, very comfortable.

After checking into our hotel Carin and I went for a stroll through our new neighborhood -- the medieval part of Barcelona -- and hit our first museum, the Museu d'Historia dela Ciutat. At, or rather under, this museum are the remains of an excavated Roman town from around 100BC. Unfortunatley, photos were not allowed, but we learned a lot about all of the iterations Barcelona had gone through from a series of Iberian settlements to a Roman City to a Visigoth Republic. The museum consisted mostly of a series of catwalks suspended over the remains of the Roman City so you could actually act as if you were walking through the ancient streets. It was very interesting -- I'll be recommending it to my architecture buddies from Roma and Istanbul for when they come through Barcelona later this month.

We made a brief stop by La Seu, a major gothic cathedral in Barcelona, but there was a mass in progress so we didn't get much of a look (picture here of the giant screen showing the mass while we were there). I'm hoping to make it back there tomorrow but we'll see how that goes -- we have other priorities.

We ended the evening early enough to get a good night's sleep -- just what we need from a vacation. Tomorrow I'll tell you more about today's exploits -- a vertitable plethora of architectural goodness. Until then, Adeu!!! (Pics of the hotel room to follow.)