Days 33-38: Prowling Barcelona

We spent all of day 33 and most of day 34 flying from the bush to Johannesburg, then Paris, then Barcelona.. but it was well worth it when we finally arrived at our beautiful apartment in the heart of the Gothic quarter of Barcelona.. just in time to capture this beautiful moonrise over our little street.

We spent the next several days prowling the streets of one of our favorite (and most visited) cities. We examined architecture and modern urban art, visited cathedrals, bought knick-knacks, drank a copious amount of sangria and just really enjoyed our 4 days of perfect beautiful summer weather.












For those who may have heard about NYC's new plan to install "rent-a-bike" stations that will use a metro card to rent urban assault bikes by the hour, the company that NYC selected also did Barcelona's program called BiCiNg (cute!). It's wildly successful here. It will be interesting to see how it works in Manhattan...





We spent a good portion of one afternoon looking at several of Gaudi's works. He is the patron architect of Barcelona and left the city with an incredible number of impossible modernist structures. The images shown below are from Casa Batllo, a 6 story urban showpiece of a house commissioned in the 1910's. Gaudi designed every single component of the house from the architecture to the facade, doorknobs, and furniture. It's really beautiful and strange. It honestly feels like the house is breathing and alive.












Barcelona really comes alive at night (they generally eat dinner at 10 PM) so we spent most of our time wandering the streets from dusk into the wee hours of the night. Barcelona is so many different kinds of pretty, it's hard to capture it in words or images.





The next day we rode the port cable car from the port up to Montjuic, a small mountain on the side of Barcelona where the Olympic Stadium for the 1992 Olympics was built. From there one can see amazing views of Barcelona..





Christian couldn't resist posing with the network broadcast tower built in the 90's to send the "highlights and lowlights" of the 1992 Olympics out to the world.. It was built by Santiago Calatrava, the same architect that is building the World Trade Center transportation hub.







We rounded out the (very hot!) day with a visit to the grounds of the great museum of Catalonian Art.





Now we have three real days left until we have to take our 6 AM flight out of here on Saturday. The end is rapidly approaching and the feeling is palpable. We're going to spend the next three days hanging out with some friends from Barcelona, zip over to Sitges (the famous art colony beach city about 30 minutes up the coast from here) and perhaps spend the LAST day of our amazing trip at an amusement park of all places!


Stay tuned...