The Travels of Eric and Lorna

Cool bull sculpture on the upper part of La Rambla. Stained glass window in the Barcelona cathedral in Barri Gotic. Buildings in Barcelona. Lower part of Casa Batllo. The view from the balcony of our hotel in Barcelona.

This was, sadly, our last day in Barcelona. We slept in, checked out of the hotel at around noon, and then went to walk around the old quarter one last time. We ended up wandering down to the port. Those ships you see on the right were part of some big race. A random old quarter street. We also went through the Museum of Pre Columbian art. It was a small museum, but all of thier pieces were extraordinary. I got a few pictures before a guard (presumably) told me to stop taking pictures. Whoops. This is some kind of music hall. Overall we both loved Barcelona. I like it more than any city I have ever visited, save Rome. The extravagant amount of Roman ruins in that city gives it a slight edge over Barcelona for me, but only slight. It is an amazing city and I highly recommend everyone visit. We later gott a ride to the airport and flew to Granada. It was a little worrisome for a while, as when we left the airport in Granada at like 10pm there were no taxis waiting. Fortunatel...

While in the neighborhood of the Archaeology Museum, we had an excellent lunch at a place called La Gordita. We had the menu of the day, which included this awesome seafood soup. Yes, that is a lobster head in my soup. We then went back and toured Casa Mila, also known as La Pedrera (the quarry), a gaudi building about 7 blocks north of our hotel. It is a fairly large apartment building. Here is the exterior. And here is a close up of one of the awesome balconies. Some of the roof decoration. And a general view of the roof. It was a very cool building, and gave a good overview of the progression of Gaudi's work. You also goot to go through one of the apartments in the building. They were very cool, very open and airy.

Today we got up and hopped on the metro to go see Sagrada Familia, the famous cathedral by Gaudi. It is still under construction, as you can see by all the cranes. I'm sure everyone has seen a million pictures of this so I am only going to post the one. We didn't go inside. Afterwards we rode the metro to the other side of town to visit the Archaeology Museum of Catalonia ( M useu d' A rqueologia de C atalunya) . It was very cool, and they allowed pictures, which was a nice touch. Here are a few pictures fomr the collection. I took many more, but we are eager to go out and explore Granada, so I will post more later. After a great lunch (more on that later too) we went to see Casa Mila, a.k.a. La Pedrera, another famous Gaudi building. I will post more about these later today. For now it's time to go see Granada.

More Park Guell A view down La Ramblas You can't read it very well in this pic, but these letters spell Barcino, the name of the Roman colony that founded the city. This is the view off of our balcony.

This morning we took the metro up and then walked to Park Guell , a large city park designed by Gaudi . Here are a few pics from there. The entrance. View of Barcelona from the top of the hill. Cool stone chair. Overall, we honestly weren't really impressed. There was some cool architecture, but we weren't sure it was worth the long metro ride and long walk involved. Afterwards, after what was really the only mediocre lunch we have had yet, we went to the Picasso Museum. It was fabulous. It was the only museum founded while the artist was still alive, and was also the only one founded on his express wishes. It was heavily weighted towards his early works, but it was really cool to see the evolution of his style. No pictures allowed, though, sorry. Last night we went to a great restaurant called Cerveceria Catalana We got there 15 minutes after it opened and only had to wait a few minutes for a table. When we left we had trouble getting out it was so crowded. The food ...