More of thanksgiving in barcelona

So the second half of the day, after Sagrade Familia continued to be awesome.  While it would have been so awesome to be home, this day was the second best option for sure.  At the end of Sagrada Familia, we got climb the back facade and look into the towers and look out over the city.  The sun was getting low so the lighting was really pretty.  In the distance we could see our next stop, Torre Agbar.

Hanging out near the top of the Sagrada Familia, looking over Barcelona

Torre Agbar

Stepping out of the Sagrada Familia, we were starving.  It was thanksgiving and we all needed a taste of home for lunch.  Guess what we saw right away?? A KFC!! I know, not spanish food, not authentic, not even that good in the US, but nonetheless it sounded delicious.  We figured chicken is close to turkey, and we can all get thankgiving-esque sides of mashed potatoes and coleslaw or whatever.  In fact, it was delicious and a lot of fun. Love me some fried chicken!

Our Thanksgiving Lunch table! Just like the pilgrims...almost

Just what we needed.  Mmm mashed potatoes, just like kfc at home.  Nowhere near as good as homecooked food, but it was fun

So after that we wandered over to the Torre Agbar.  This building is pretty cool and famous.  While it is an odd shape (cucumberish, or some might say phallic), the facade is really cool and the color makes it pretty interesting.  Plus it obviously stands out in the skyline as different than your typical skyscraper.

Crazy tower! Torre Agbar!

Sunset + cool colors + cool facade = perfect timing for photos

Close up of the facade

After visiting that it was time for a snack.  Pastriess!! At least for me.  Another random cream/honey pastry which I wasnt too sure what it was, but it was cool.  Plus we found a lot of ham chips?  Weird, but they actually tasted just like ham.  

Random snack, always good

Ham chips.  Im sure they will catch on in the us soon

Then we headed back to the tower to see the real spectacle when it is lit up at night.  While it was impressive in the daylight, it was even more impressive and stood out more at night.  I loved the way the colors worked and blended.  

Bah! so cool

Everybody loves cool lights

Now its time for Thanksgiving Dinner! I even got dressed up. No turkey and stuffing for us.  Instead we found a really nice place in a backstreet that looked pretty cool inside.  This was our night for authentic spanish food.  We wanted delicious Paella and sangria.  We had been warned the night before not to go anywhere that had photos of the Paella because that meant it was frozen.  And the places without photos usually cost like 20 euro just for paella.  So we were lucky we found this place.  It was much cheaper and we could see them actually putting our paella together and cooking it fresh.  Its basically this rice dish with seafood and saffron and its super awesome. Plus we had some awesome red wine sangria and tortilla chips. mmm. Happy thanksgiving dinner!

Chips and cheese appetizer, dont mind if i do

Thanksgiving Dinner! The best it could be without being home,

Seafood Paella! Id go back just for that!

Late night snack!  Thanksgiving was a long day, and since I couldn't stuff myself with turkey and stuffing, I had to have a snack after looking for discotecas at night.  Luckily, the Kebab places are open late.  I had a delicious falafel one.  Basically its falafels, corn, yogurt sauce, spicy sauce, onions, and random other veggies and stuff.  Another awesome day!

Kebab!

nom nom nom, super delicious

Thanksgiving morning, First half of Barcelona day 2

 So I took way too many photos in Barcelona....oops.  But I want to show them all to you! I wish I could haha.  I went through and was just picking my favorites and there were way too many. So these are the photos from the first half of day 2.  Day 2 was probably our busiest day, so theres lots to show.

It was thanksgiving!! I wish I could have gone home.  I missed having turkey and stuffing and cranberry sauce and stuffing myself until I exploded while enjoying the break with my family.  It makes me realize how awesome that can be and how lucky I am when I am able to do that with my family.  Everybody was home and I was thinking about them! But I will be home in a short 3 weeks and I will undoubtedly be ready to stuff myself next thanksgiving.  For now, I must enjoy where I am and make sure I take everything from this experience I can.

So we started out our thanksgiving wandering around looking for somewhere to eat breakfast.  For some reason, we had a hard time finding a decent cafe.  Lucky for us though.  If we had found a cafe, we wouldn't have stumbled upon this massive outdoor market.  The market was really clean and they had everything you could imagine.  We all got pastries and they had every fruit juice possible from coconut kiwi to strawberry orange.  We later found out that this market is world famous and is one of the largest in Europe.  Pretty convenient to stumble upon it.  It became our breakfast spot the rest of the trip.

Awesome market

Crunch honey/syrup bread with pine nuts

juice juice juice juice

Breakfast part 2 - apple muffin. yumm

Massive shopping mall that looked like a space ship

 After that, we had planned to take the morning and tour all of the Gaudi architecture in Barcelona.  There is a ton of it.  He was basically this crazy architect who designed stuff like no one else during this time.  Its very unique and pretty unforgettable. We were going to take a free walking tour that an organization in the city offered, but the tour guide was crazy.  She was British and too happy and telling us things we didnt really care about.  So we ditched the tour group and did our own touring, finding the sites ourselves.  This ended out working a lot better.  The first place we went to was pretty tame, but there was a lot of interesting ironwork.

Crazy iron work much? One of his tamest buildings, but crazy details

 The next place we stopped at was a house built for a really wealthy family.  The house is also called the house of bones, and from the way it was designed on the interior and exterior, it is clear why.  there are a lot of references to skeletal structures and ribbing throughout.  Gaudi was a master of mosaics, light, stained glass windows, and his unique way of shaping the stone.  We went inside this one and it was absolutely crazy.  Kind of expensive but well worth it.  It reminded me of Dr. Suess or something.  This is not the kind of style I would ever want to build, but it is impossible not to admire his daring, innovation and fearlessness in his designing.

crazy front facade

See the ribbing? explains why they call it the bone house

crazy roof + awesome sky = great pictures

just chillin on Gaudi

 We continued to walk through the city and saw a lot of other cool buildings.  Barcelona seems to be filled with unique architectural works and interesting places.  Heres a random apartment building that looked really cool, right across the street from another Gaudi project.

crazy facade

Gaudi number 3, crazy stonework this time

And the grand finale of Gaudi.  The Sagrada Familia.  This building deserves its own blog post and its own everything.  It was absolutely incredible and the pictures and any description I give cannot do it justice.  I have never been so impressed by a building.  The size, articulation, extremeness, craziness, detailing, lighting and spaces were all incredible.  I had no idea what the interior would be like and as soon as I walked in I was speechless.  This made the trip so incredible and I am so happy we chose to go to Barcelona. Like I said, I couldnt even take pictures that did it justice, but the exterior is gorgeous and so tall.  The interior blew me away.  Its just so huge inside and the columns are so impressive and ahhhh.  Plus the stained glass windows made the atmosphere so incredible.

AH Sagrada Familia.  Still cranes working away, but still absolutely incredible

The inside was filled with light

The ceiling was so complex and interesting

The columns seemed to go on forever

So huge its impossible to even show it all

Insane detailing on the other facade

Beautiful stained glass all over the northern end

Created some crazy effects

Looking up one of those massive towers on the outside

Thanksgiving with the Sagrada Familia!

This building has a whole history along with it.  It was designed over 100 years ago and is still under construction.  There has been funding problems and as you can imagine, the scale of the project is beyond comparison.  Lucky for us, the pope came and blessed the church last week, so there was a mad rush for construction in the past few years.  So it was perfect timing and the inside was open and clean and it appeared as if the whole thing was finally almost done.  (Apparently its really only halfway doneish, but I cant imagine how much more there is to work on).

Wow. Barcelona.

Ahh Barcelona!
We just got back from three and a half days in Barcelona and they were some of the most incredible days of my life.  The city of Barcelona is incredibly clean and beautiful and I could go on and on.  Not to mention it contains a huge collection of famous architectural projects.  Plus the people and culture were awesome and the food was delicious! With perfect weather added in, I didnt want to leave!  If I ever get a chance, I would come back to Barcelona in a heartbeat.

Our first stop in Barcelona was the Pavilion designed by Mies Van Der Rohe.  You may or may not have heard of him, but he is one of the architects we spent a lot of time studying and discussing in school.  The pavilion itself is not a huge project, but the way it deals with spaces, details, and surfaces was really fascinating, and as always, great to see in real life.  Walking through it was cool and it was a good opening to Barcelona.  One of the three architects of the pavilion's reconstruction was even there giving a tour to some Spanish students in English, so we got to listen in for a little.

 No big deal, just chillin in front of the pavilion

"Interior"

Did some pretty nifty stuff

Chocolate pastry = always a good morning

Next we headed to the Olympic area in Barcelona.  The spire was designed by Calatrava and is a fairly famous symbol in Barcelona.  The rest of the Olympic area wasnt super fascinating, but it was cool to see.  They were even having a Shakira concert in the stadium that night (we were sad we didnt get tickets).

Calatrava's spire

You can see Toyo Ito's tower in the distance

 After that we continued our treck to top of the hill and entered the Botanical Gardens of Barcelona.  These were really very impressive.  They had plants from California, South Africa, and all over the world.  It was on the side of a hill and the pathways they designed were really interesting to navigate.  At the top of the hill was the Botanical Institute.  We snuck onto the second floor on accident and got yelled at haha but it was fun.

Botanical Gardens

Botanical Institute

 Our explorations continued down the hill to other new and notable architecture projects.  This pattern below was really pretty and covered the entire side of a building.  They are old misshapen pots and the sun made them really cool.  For lunch we had our first real Spanish tortillas.  What they call a tortilla is nothing like the flour things we wrap our burritos in.  Instead, its an egg omelette kind of thing, typically with potatoes in it.  So we had tortillas sandwiches.  Not anything super special, but a great lunch and it felt good to try something spanish.

Tortilla sandwich!

 Then somehow we made it out to the sea!  We walked and traveled so much over those 3.5 days.  I swear we walked through every part of Barcelona at least once.  Well worth it though.  The water was beautiful and the sun was shining the whole time.  We stumbled upon this big pier thing with the wave structures going along it and a huge crowd of people walking out.  There was a big mall on the end and it was full of cool shops.  There was even a starbucks! (we later found them all over the city).  We were all cold and could use a little more energy so we got ourselves a little taste of home in the form of coffee. mmmm.

mmm ocean

Starbucks coffee! definitely expensive here, but a great taste of home

 Can't believe we did this all on the first day? Me neither! So much more to talk about too.  So we visited some more really impressive newer projects that were right on the edge of the ocean.  I was a huge fan of them.  The first one was just two towers, but there was a unique bridge between them and a huge piece jutting out.  The second one was an oval shaped building clad in wood with a huge part pulled out of the middle.  Also very cool.

super cool medical research center

Christopher Columbus pointing towards the sea

Colorful roof of a market

Interesting side to that same market

Impressive cathedral of the city (we didnt linger long, we werent there for the old stuff, we get enough of that in Rome)

Getting Christmas decorations ready! Cant wait to see them lit up around rome

Theater designed by a contemporary of Gaudi

 Finally, after walking all over Barcelona, our first day had an incredible ending.  My friend's aunt lives in Barcelona and we had a chance to meet up the very first night.  She was incredibly nice and had lived in Barcelona for many years.  So she was able to show us around and help us learn more about the area, the people, the food, the drinks and the culture.  She took us out for Tapas, because when in Spain, everyone should go out for Tapas.  The first place we went to (apparently the usually go to several places) was packed with people.  We had a local favorite that was similar to sparkling white wine and was really good, with some potato chips.  Then at the next place, we each got something a little more.  I had a piece of salmon on bread with a really good sauce.  Plus we tasted some of their cider/wine/idk but it was good too.

First Tapas!

Finally she took us to a bar that she goes to all the time, where one of the owners is from the UK and speaks english.  This place was packed too but we were able to grab a table.  I split the mixed Tapas plate with my friend.  There was potatoes bravas (potatoes with spicy sauce and garlic sour cream), blood sausage, chorizo, onions, peppers, seafood empanada thing, fried cheese thing, potato and zucchini tortillas, and a few other random things on it, served with bread.  This plus some local spanish wine was an incredible meal.  Plus we spent a long time talking to our new friend in Barcelona.  Like I said she told us all about Barcelona and we learned so much.  She made that first day so incredible and I am so thankful we were able to meet her.
I love Barcelona!!

Sooo incredibly good! I am a huge fan of Tapas.

And thats only day 1.  2 more days to come!