Barcelona

It´s been a couple days. Mostly because I spent yesterday responding to some of the emails I haven´t gotten around to for a while (although there are still more) but also because I was a little disappointed in the lack of comments :-P I guess it´s gotten nice enough out in Canada that people are out having their own fun instead of reading about mine. Oh well...

Anyways, we leave Barcelona tonight, but it´s been great. When I first got here, I wasn´t very excited to be back in a big, touristy, hot city, but I think the break from the touristyness rejuvenated me because I´ve really enjoyed it! Yesterday we started out by just wandering the city and randomly came across a Salvador Dalí museum, so we went in :-) He was a very, very strange man, and he makes my head hurt. The museum was mostly sketches, drawings and sculptures of his and didn´t have any of his big masterpieces, but they were still super cool and had lots to look at. I think I liked it better in museums with just a couple of his works though because they all take so much thought to absorb!

Next stop was the museum of the history of Barcelona, but it was closed on Mondays. So instead we decided to make the 4-5km trek to Park Güell which was designed by Gaudí. I had never heard of Gaudí before I got here, but he was apparently a famous architect because his stuff is all over Barcelona! It was a long, long walk in the hotness, but worth it. The park was super cool with the centerpiece being this pavillion thing that has all sorts of mosaics on the ceilings and then on the roof where there´s a serpentine bench that´s all made of mosaic and goes all the way around. The rest of the park was really cool too with crazy stuff like a slanted archway. The park also provided really nice views of Barcelona. Boy is Barcelona big!!

By this time we were pretty exhausted so we took the metro back to where we started and headed back to the campsite. Unfortunately easier said than done. I don´t have time to go into it all today, but we arrived at the bus stop at 7pm and put wandering the city looking for a different bus stop and passing our campsite together and we didn´t get back until after 10pm. Ugh... exhausting!

This morning we packed up and headed out by noon. Our first stop was Montjuic where the Royal Palace and the Olympic stadium are. We didn´t go in either of the museums, but wandering around was cool. The field inside Olympic stadium looked SO nice and made me miss soccer even more than I do already!!

After wandering for a little longer we made it back to the museum from the day before. It was pretty neat. Underneath a palace/church (I´m not sure which one it is), there is a whole excavation site of the ancient town of Barcino which was in the 1st to 6th century AD (I think) You go down an elevator and there´s this whole archaelogical site with explanations about what everything was. Among other things we saw a fish plant, wine factory and some of the wall that went around the city and a episcopal church/ palace from a few centuries later than the other stuff.

I´m running out of time, but luckily that´s about all we´ve done. Now we have a few hours to wait until our train leaves for Madrid. I´m expecting it to be super, super hot there (the 35 it is here is plenty hot for me) but I think I´ll be able to survive for the 2 days :-) On the 12th we have trains booked to take us to Lyon, where hopefully we´ll go to Chamonix and spend a few days in the Alps.

Until next time!
Kaila