Yikes. Go me!
Since I'm conserving me metro tickets, I decided to just hike the city, purposely getting lost and seeing where I'd end up. Barcelona is such a beautiful city and it's so well designed that even if you get lost, it's very easy to find yourself again. And it's so clean that even when I found myself on the poorer side of town, it wasn't too shabby.
I managed to find my way to the beach and through several parks, heading from my hostel which is more to the northeast side of town all the way to the far south of the city (no small distance!). And from there I managed to look back towards the city with a happy sigh...
You can't really tell in this picture, but from where I was standing I could actually see that Sagrada Familia cathedral I'd initially left my hostel to see, all the way back from the seaside! What the heck?! Or so I said to myself, feeling like that cathedral, that I'd spent a good chunk of time looking for earlier, was purposely messing with me. I knew it would be about an hour walk to get to where it was, but I couldn't let that thing get away with openly mocking me!
I got to it, happy to snap a few pictures, and then moved on. This cathedral has been a work in progress for like 80+ years and it's still not slated to be completed for like another 30 more years. The designer is some guy named Gaudi who I guess was a really important architect. He designed a few other buildings in Barcelona that I went to check out, all of them being pretty weird.
The first one is the cathedral.
Next is some sort of weird house.
I'm not even sure what the last one is supposed to be.
There's a park with more statues by him that I want to walk through tomorrow. I had thought about just using tomorrow as "beach day" but since it looks like it's going to rain in the morning, I'll do that Friday.
I love Barcelona! It's such a relief after being in scorched Seville, where the temperatures didn't drop below 85F the entire time I was there (including the evenings). In Seville, I'd set out for a good walk feeling energetic and refreshed...and I'd get back feeling like the weather had brutalized my body. Today it was sunny outside and a balmy 75F with nice breezy winds to keep the air circulating. Whenever it got too warm in the sun, it was easy enough to just step into some shade and immediately get relief. Not that it was really too warm! It was a perfect, perfect day!
I've walked for 9 hours almost nonstop, just moving from one interesting place to another. I even ended up in a H&M for a little bit, contemplating buying a summer dress because I was in such a good mood and summer dresses seemed like the perfect way to compliment that. I wandered into a music store and listened to the samples from an album Lucas raved to me about, grabbed some fresh bread from the marketplace, and was just very happy. After about 6pm, it started getting uncomfortably warm so I made my way back to my hostel and wandered the nearby neighborhoods for a bit -- I just couldn't stop walking!
Now I'm streaming Indie music onto my phone, chilling in my bed and contemplating the night's dilemma: to shut the room's windows and keep out the mosquitos, or leave them open and sleep comfortably. Last night, the other girls in the room -- they've been here for a few days and were very wise in the ways of the windows -- insisted that we shut them, saying the the mosquito population is out of control here. I went to bed only to wake up a few hours later sweating terribly and feeling like all the air had turned stuffy, getting nothing but terrible sleep for the rest of the night. Right now, the windows are wide open and I've already killed like 4 or 5 of the bugs. But it's so nice and cool right now, and I really slept poorly last night... *sigh* that's what a cheap hostel will get you: no AC and no screens for the windows.
Location:Barcelona, Spain
I remember my first night in Venezuela was somewhat similar. We were in Tio Ricardo's house and I went to sleep on the bed that was closest to the air conditioning. However, at night everyone else gets really cold, so they turn off the window unit and that night, to keep me from dying of heat, I slept without any blankets on me. I woke up the next morning to about 20 bites on each leg and a hard lesson. Don't sleep without something covering you because mosquitos are vicious!
ReplyDeletePS-Those buildings are kind of ugly
ReplyDeleteThe buildings really were bizarre. from a distance, the Sagrada Familia looked like an enormous sand castle to me, and up close it's just incredibly overwhelming when you see how much detail they're trying to stuff onto every square inch. I didn't like it much either. It's like a group of people with great imaginations got together to think up a creation, and then instead of just combining the best of all they just crammed it all together.
ReplyDelete