Friday in Barcelona

Our online ticket-booking for Sagrada Familia had been semi-successful, but it did involve finding a “La Caixa” bank with a “Servipoint”.  The concierge had kindly given me directions to one of these when she printed my docket the previous afternoon but I think that she, like me, gets her left and right muddled.  We certainly hadn’t found the place while walking to dinner the night before.  Luckily Google came to the rescue – turns out there are heaps of these places.   Our time slot for Sagrada Familia was 9 – 11 am, with the tower tour at 9.45.  We decided we would look out for coffee and maybe breakfast on our way, as we didn’t want to be too late.

The La Caixa Servipoint turned out to be a self-service machine (in the bank) where you put in the credit card you had used to buy tickets, and it printed the tickets for you.  Really quite clever – once you managed to get the page in English!!  Tickets in hand, we continued to the church.  We found coffee and croissants on the way.  The coffee was far too strong for me but Grant quite liked it.  The croissants were very fresh and very good. 

I did wonder whether the online tickets would have been worth the trouble given our early start, but we arrived at Sagrada Familia just after 9am and the queue was nearly as big as the previous day.  Feeling slightly smug, we joined the very short queue for those with pre-purchased tickets and were quickly ushered in.  La Sagrada Familia is a building I have wanted to see ever since studying history of architecture in 1987.  

Seeing the facades on Thursday had been pretty exciting; seeing inside was indescribable.  The main columns are like wonderful stone trees holding up the skin of the church, and the detailing is unlike any other church we have seen.  And we have seen quite a few now.  Photos can never truly do it justice but we took heaps anyway.  The building is still under construction but the main aspects of it are now complete.  I could have wandered around for hours but we had to get to our assigned lift for our tower tour.  I was so glad we had pre-booked this, as we overhead another tourist being told that the soonest available tour was not until that afternoon.

We were taken up in the lift to one of the higher balconies in the south tower of the Passion Façade (the two main facades are the Nativity façade, completed in Gaudi’s lifetime, and the Passion façade, still under construction but very impressive just the same).  The views out over Barcelona were spectacular, once I got over being so high up!  We then crossed a balcony into the smaller tower and made our way down the spiral staircase, stopping for photo opportunities at most of the little windows on the way.

Once back in the main body of the church we visited a gallery to the side which detailed the geometry behind Gaudi’s designs.  I hadn’t remembered all those details (we are talking 25 years here after all) and I came away longing to teach a conics class.  So many real world applications of parabolic and hyperbolic curves!  

While you spend days in that church and still find new things to look at, we were conscious of the fact we really only had two full days to see Barcelona, so we eventually headed back out of the church.  We had decided that a stroll along Las Ramblas, one of the main shopping and tourist streets, was next on our agenda.  We made it there without getting lost although it did require frequent perusals of the map our concierge had given us.  Las Ramblas was very pretty, with a central pedestrian area and lots of trees.  The architecture here was beautiful too, if more traditional than Gaudi’s work.  I was lucky in finding a pretty top as a souvenir of Barcelona (we won’t worry about the fact that it was made in Italy, it’s all the Eurozone now anyway) and we also found a café to stop and have lunch.  Despite the fact that Grant spends nearly an hour each day walking to and from the train, and I spend most of my working day on my feet in the classroom, we were very glad to stop and take the weight off our feet.  We opted for tapas again for lunch – we really enjoy the concept of a shared meal of different little dishes.  It’s so much easier than trying to decide on just one dish.  We also found that when you order an orange juice in Barcelona, they actually squeeze the oranges for you then and there.  Delicious.

Fountain opposite the Apple store

At this point we still had at least half of Las Ramblas to go.  We followed it all the way to the harbour, with occasion little detours into lovely old plazas.  It was quite crowded though, as it is a major tourist destination and it was a lovely day.  So it was a long walk to the waterfront and time for another comfort stop.  We will confess to being a bit tired of the language barrier (acknowledging that it is entirely our own fault; we don’t expect the Spanish to speak English just for us) so we had afternoon tea in Starbucks.  Culturally abysmal but at least I could get Earl Grey tea.

Along the waterfront

Dali sculpture

It was mid to late afternoon by this time, so we decided to head back to our hotel slowly via the old cathedral.  This entailed much creative map-reading and a few unexpected detours which proved very successful.  One detour took us past the Dali Museum and while neither of us are hugely into surrealist art, we had to stop for a look.  It was absolutely fascinating, and unlike many art museums we were free to take photos.  Dali had a very strange mind I think, but there is no denying his talent.  We did eventually find the cathedral too, and admired the outside.  We decided not to go in after all.

The Cathedral

While Grant is right, and two days is not long enough to get in the Catalan zone of siestas and late evening meals, we were still very glad of a rest when we got back to the hotel.  And we didn’t go out for dinner until nearly 8pm, when we wandered the local streets before deciding on a small café called Troles which had been in operation since 1896.  We both ordered paella rather than tapas this time – another famous local dish.  Sadly, fine dining is not the speciality of the house and the paellas were only ok.  I don’t think we really got a true idea of good Spanish paella.

Grant was keen to go wandering further afield in search of gelato for dessert.  We regularly saw little gelato shops on the side streets during the day, but they proved more elusive in the evening.  We eventually found ourselves back in the heart of the city, and were quite surprised at how close it was to our hotel.  We had been taking scenic routes until then.  We were successful in our gelato hunt too, and the café we went to even had nice tea that we got in take away cups to take back with us (the other downside of our hotel is that it doesn’t have a kettle in the room).  Our first full day in Barcelona had been very busy and we were ready for a sleep to prepare us for Saturday.