We’ve been to Valencia, Seville, & Granada.

Now, we made it back to Madrid and I just dropped Amy off at the airport.

Me, I’m on a train to Paris for the weekend before school starts in Brussels on Monday.

I’ll be off the grid until then.

Amy’s working on a piece for her travels in Madrid while I underwent Finals III: The Spanish Inquisition. We barely had time for some light shopping and all you can eat tapas.
We rushed immediately from my last final to the train station and spent the last two days in Valencia. There we visited churches, got lost, got abandoned by a taxi driver in a small town outside of Valenica, ate great paella in the same town, played at the beach, and visted a science and art park with an aquarium, and got lost on the way to the airport.
Pictures of the whole thing start here.

As promised, I was going to write about my trip every couple of days, updating you on what I have seen, as well as just letting everyone know that I am still alive.

For those of you busy people, here is the condensed version of my weekend in Barcelona:
We took the night train from Madrid to Barcelona (about 8 hours long) on Friday, suffering through some really annoying teenagers who played drums all through the wee hours of the night (what’s with teenagers and me on this trip?).  We arrived in Barcelona, Saturday morning at 8am and that’s when our whirlwind trip in Barcelona started.  We saw the Barcelona cathedral (huge and very creepy), the opera house (beautiful architecture), before we head off to La Rambla (busy and crowded around the clock), the waterfront and Museu Picasso for the rest of the day.  We spent the night wandering around La Rambla, looking for food.

After trying to take a shower in our hostel (it’s a little difficult trying to take a shower when the water only drips out from the shower), we head off to the Museu d’Art Contemporani, where we saw some interesting modern art exhibts (which, unfortunately, are just too modern for us uncultured North Americans to “get”).  Afterwards, we shoot across town to see some of Gaudi’s work (if you don’t know who Gaudi is, you need to look him up as part of your cultural education).  Our first stop is the Sagrada Familia — which is my favorite part of the trip.  Sagrada Familia started in 1883, and became Gaudi’s life’s work and he lived on the site for the remainder of his life.  He is buried in the crypt (which really fascinated Joshua).  At Gaudi’s death, only one tower had been completed.  But work continues on today, following Gaudi’s original plan with some “downsizing”.  Many parts of the church are covered in scaffolds and construction cranes.  However, the parts that we can see are magnificient (imagine Amy walking around with her jaw hanging open) — especially in the nave, where a forest of fluted pillars (~20 – 30 meters high) supported the galleries above, letting in the morning light.  I don’t consider myself a religious person, but I think the visit to Sagrada Familia is as close to a religious wakening for me as it will ever be.  We climbed up 400 steps, stopping along the way to take photos, to the very top of one of the church towers, seeing various completed structures.

Needless to say, I fell so in love with Gaudi’s work at that point that when we came back down the 400 steps, I decided to buy lots of souvenier from the gift shop in Sagrada Familia.

The remainder of the afternoon was spent looking for other Gaudi’s work (not that difficult in Barcelona, since Gaudi designed much of the architecture in Barcelona).  We visited Casa Mila with its amazing wave-like facade and a series of abstract sculptures for the vents and chimneys (many of them look like Darth Vader’s masks to me).  After hours of oohing and ahhing at Casa Mila, we again ran across town to see another one of Gaudi’s famous work, Parc Guell.  Many of the places that I have described, there are pictures posted on the web at www.illegitimatesun.com

After 9 hours of walking nearly nonstop, Joshua and I took a break and had some tapas before catching the night train back to Madrid, thus concluding our short trip to Barcelona.

I spent Monday sleeping, and Tuesday visiting the Thyssen Museum (more about that later).  I will be visiting the Prado today (more about that after I actually visit the Prado).

Hope everyone is doing well.

Love,

Amy’s Giant pictures will mixed in with them just out of perverse spite.

Enjoy

Just a quick post before I go into the city in detail.

In keeping with the theme established here in Vancouver:

I’m posting a series of pictures of Amy next to giant items we found throughout Barcelona.

PS – I’ve taken over 530 pictures so far. There’s no way my server or my bandwidth could handle such a presentation. So, I’m selectively passing some your way. If you’d like more, I’ll look into building a DVD type system that you could download and play in chapters as movies.

Just a quick note. Amy arrived safely in Spain today. We’re catching up on sleep and then taking the Night Train to Barcelona for a couple of days.

I hope to post this trip and my trip to Segovia when I get back.

I placed some pictures from Segovia starting here. Take a look at this quaint town that just happens to have a fortress, one of Spain’s largest cathedrals, and a Roman aqueduct.

Ciao,

Joshua

(PS I know Ciao is Italian, but they say it here too.)

El Escariol is a huge monastery that was built to celebrate a victory of the Spanish in the Netherlands.  It was later turned into a palace and then back into a working monastery.