Barcelona was a strange place. We were so excited to finally use our 4 or more years of Spanish, only to discover Barcelona’s official language is Catalan. The region of Catalonya is fiercely independent from Spain. IT basically has wanted to secede for ages. We knew it would be different, but I don’t think any of us realized it would be illegible and nearly impossible to decipher (there are Xs randomly put in their words!)
Saturday we took advantage of a free walking tour. Our tour guide, a British guy named Chris, took us all over the Medieval and Roman (we felt right at home) parts of the city. We learned about the Catalan identity, Barcelona’s history, and the current Barcelonan identity. Subjects of interest include: St. Eulalia, Christopher Columbus, Hairy Wilfred, and St George. Chris was super cool and his tour was tremendously refreshing compared to Jan’s History class and Paolo’s Renaissance Art classes.
After the tour and lunch, we went to check out the Sacrada Familia- the famous cathedral. I had seen it in pictures, but up close it kind of looked like a melting fudgecicle dipped in trix cereal. It is brown with drooping decorations and on the top of the towers there are brightly colored fruits. It is a super bizarre structure. We then went to Montjuic to see the Magic Fountain show. It started off kind of lame (just some water changing levels to random elevator type music), but once it got darker my attention was captivated: they started playing Circle of Life from the Lion King. They proceeded to do an entire Disney tribute- in Catalan! IT WAS AWESOME! It was really fun seeing all the little kids jumping around and dancing.
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| The Sacrada Familia kinda looks like it's melting |
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| Magic Fountain |
On our way back to the hostel, we decided to check out the old Bull Fighting Arena in the Spanish Plaza. Bull fighting was recently outlawed, so the old arena in all its splendor was converted into a huge shopping mall!!! It was SO COOL! The view from the top was incredible, and it had a gym, tons of restaurants, and even a movie theater. It was the Barcelona version of the Mall of America.
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| The Mall! |
Sunday didn’t give us much time to explore Barcelona, since our train left at 3:50 for Seville. We put what time we had to good use. After breakfast, we ventured to Güell Park. It was huge, and the views of the city were incredible! There were tons of cool buildings, walls, and sculptures with mosaics on the facades. It was cool to just roam around for a while until it was time to catch our train. Let’s hope our Spanish actually can be put to use in Seville!
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| View of Barcelona from Güell Park |
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| Lizard sculpture was so hard to find! |
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