Everything Should Be Considered Beautiful: Barcelona Part II: The Sites

Saturday Elley and I slept in pretty late, turns out we had a lot of missed sleep to catch up on. We decided that we wanted to go to the Gothic Quarter of the city and see all the historic buildings. Literally everyone and their grandma was out and touring the city on Saturday, so getting everywhere was a pain. We first saw the Plaça de Catalunya and then made our way into the Barri Gotico. We wandered around for a while before deciding to go into the Catedral of Barcelona and met a very nice man before we went in who told us some great stuff about Barcelona! The Cathedral was so amazing. There is something about ancient churches and cathedrals that is very moving for me and it actually took a lot of self control for me to not cry. When we went into the cathedral's garden, there was a shrine of Jesus on the cross and some old ladies were going in there and praying in front of it. Now that was really special, you could just see the devotion of these women in the way they stroked the feet of the Jesus statue while praying; it was really powerful for me. We headed back to the hostel and the Portuguese guys told us they were planning on going to a club that night called Razmatazz. My friend, Hawke, had told me to go there when I went to Barça, so we were excited and glad to have friends to go with. The club is huge, like five stories tall and tons of different rooms with different music in all of them...but I wasn't really diggin the music that night. It was all techno and not very good for dancing, so Elley and I felt like we wasted our money and left earlier than everyone else.

Sunday we first went to the Sagrada Familia Cathedral, designed by Gaudi and is still in the process of being built. We didn't go inside cause it was expensive and looked really busy...we just couldn't justify it when we didn't know if it was going to be good or not. It was really pretty, really different from anything I've ever seen before, definitely a work of Gaudi. Then we went to Park Güell, another work of Gaudi and it was great! It's a huge park on top of a hill, so there is a great view of the city from every side and then there is a winding path that takes you to different art forms. The most famous is the mosaic sidewalk and it was really pretty, kinda crowded, but definitely worth seeing. I think Park Güell was my favorite site in Barcelona, the view of the entire city and the mixture of art and nature was fabulous. Sunday night was the next highlight of our trip, we found a Mexican food restaurant! And the food was spicy! It was wonderful because Spanish food is not spicy in any way, shape or form and actually kind of bland most of the time. The food was exceptional and so were the margaritas! Then we went and had a night time walk along the beach, a very good end to the weekend.
Sunday night we went to bed kind of early so we could be on time for everything Monday morning and our trip home was very easy; everything went smoothly.

Hope that wasn't too rushed, it really felt like we did more than we actually did. Lots of walking and trying to relax. It was a good weekend, but in all honesty I was a little disappointed in Barcelona. The city itself was dirty and crowded most of the time, but the beach was surprisingly clean. Plus, the city smelled SO horribly, the sewer system must not be very good or it's super old cause everywhere we went, it reeked of sewage. Our troubles getting to the city didn't really put a good mood to the whole weekend either, but we are happy we went and we definitely learned a lot about traveling and our capabilities of handling problems!

Until next time!