Day Thirtytwo - Jun 22, 2012
Barcelona, Spain
Daily Didactic
Today was a little simpler than yesterday. We rose early again for our 10:00 ticket to Gaudi's Sagrada Familia and headed off to try to figure out how to print the tickets we bought online. The Spanish Ticketmaster (you know you are in good hands at this point) site said we should go to 'Caixa', which turned out to be a money exchange or bank or something with no idea what we were talking about. We ended up jumping on the metro to figure it out there. We arrived and it turned out no was printing necessary. We got in a little early, paid a few euro extra to go up one of the towers, and grabbed our audio tours. This place is simply hard to explain in its scale and ambition. It is half to two thirds complete, with eight extremely tall existing towers, four more similarly heighten towers to be added, and one insanely high tower yet to come in the middle with a huge gold cross on it. We followed the audio tower through the inside of the basilica and at 9:50 caught the elevator up one of the Nativity towers for a beautiful view of Barcelona. The place was a pretty spectacular cap on our modernismo tour. From the Sagrada Familia we caught the metro to the Barcelona beach (Barcelonita) to try to find a fish sculpture by Frank Gehry. Brian was expecting a fish sculpture, but it turned out to be a monumental sort of thing. From the big fish, we walked the Barcelonita promenade back to the foot of the Ramblas and made our way back up to our new favorite sangria stop for a break from the heat. On the way home, we grabbed some bread and two spitting crab from the La Boqueria market and proceeded to find out how hard it is to get a meal from crab. That sort of thing in perspective, we ate a great dinner and hit the hay with thoughts of heading to Madrid in the morning.
Today's Photos
