Barcelona Day 1: The Old Stuff

I’m especially glad I got to relax in Bonn because the next week was a whirlwind. I flew from Cologne to Barcelona (with a hilarious and eventful RyanAir experience which should probably be the subject of its own blog post) to meet up with Michal! Here is a brief overview of what we did. Check facebook for many many more pictures J

Day 1: We began our Barcelona experience with the classic old city. La Ramblas is the most famous touristy kitchy but fun street running from Placa Catalunya (a main downtown square) to the port. We walked down the street, stopping at anything that looked cool: pretty churches, really cool and very bustling market with mouthwatering produce, cheese, meats, etc, and eventually the many harbor-side buildings and monuments. I loved the harbor promenade. There was a huge monument to Columbus (reminiscent of Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square) as well as lots of beautiful old buildings lining the port. 

Old bullfighting arena, right next to the place we stayed

Buildings lining Placa Catalunya

Newer building behind a statue also in Placa Catalunya

Inside the market on La Ramblas

Columbus memorial

One of the harbor-side buildings

We walked along the sea side into the Barri Gotic, the old city, which has your typical narrow alleyways, winding cobblestone streets, and of course lots of churches. There are ruins of an old roman wall (those Romans were everywhere) and a very large Cathedral that, frankly, was kind of strange. The courtyard was part jungle, part zoo, party mini golf course. There were creepy statues and tacky little fake rivers all over the place and lots of exotic birds and tropical plants. It was kind of strange. Definitely memorable though.

Roman ruins

Cool arch over one of the Barri Gotic streets

Courtyard of the Cathedral. I told you it was strange.

One of my favorite structures/areas of the city is the Arc d’Triompfe. Barcelona’s version of this landmark seems to represent the Spanish cultural mix very well. You can definitely see the sort of Islamic influence mixed with more classical European elements. The part around the arch is lovely and leads right up to another park, which might be my favorite spot in Barcelona. There is this awesome, huge fountain, with dragons and other animals, a large lake with people on little rowboats, Alice-in-wonderlandy gardens, and lots of museums that were in very pretty buildings. Poor Michal probably got so annoyed of me exclaiming how cool everything was. 

We also visited the Picasso Museum, although it took us about an hour to find…the Barrio Gotic is super confusing, people. I’ll be real with you, it was kind of disappointing. There was a lot of stuff from Picasso’s Pre-Cubism days, which was definitely interesting, but I was expecting more of the real PICASSO kind of stuff. I very much enjoyed learning about how he developed as an artist and seeing the process by which he transformed from realism to cubism, including all of his influences, but I would have liked to see more than 2 or 3 cubist works. Oh well. Our final stop of the day (after souvenir shopping in this awesome awesome ceramic store with BEAUTIFUL stuff for quite cheap) was the Modern Art Museum. It was a Modern Art Museum. We’ll just leave it at that.