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).