A weekend of culture!

I am so behind! I always mean to post about everything, but then somehow two weeks disappear and I have no idea where the time went. Ah well. The story today is that of Barcelona! I went with the program (which was wonderful because everything was already paid for) over Halloween weekend. We get every Friday off here so we left Friday morning and our directors randomly let us take Monday off so we returned Monday night. It was a fantastic trip and I loved Barcelona. Madrid feels more down to earth and I'm happy to be living here, but Barcelona is a fantastic place to visit.

Part of the reason I enjoyed Barcelona so much was because it made me feel cultured and sophisticated. Through my romps across Spain with Americans from all corners of the country, I have learned that I'm a little lacking on the culture front. My knowledge of art is almost non-existent, I have little to say about music, and when it comes to ordering at a classy restaurant, I usually guess and hope for the best. Though I'd love to believe this is part of my charm, I'm also excited to say that my knowledge on all fronts is improving. Barcelona was particularly helpful in the arts department!

So one of the first things I learned in Spain is that there is this really famous Catalan (from Cataluna, the autonomous community encompassing and surrounding Barcelona) architect named Gaudi and people all over love him for his whimsical and captivating buildings that helped revolutionize architecture. I was particularly fond of his use of the parabola-shaped arch. Anyway, Guadi has a ton of buildings in Barcelona and I think I saw almost all of them. First was Casa Batllo. This house was comissioned by some rich family and Gaudi took his inspiration from the sea. There were tons of blues and greens and all sorts of details that made me think of waves and bubbles and other underwater touches. Next, I saw La Sagrada Familia (aka the Sacred Family). It's Gaudi's cathedral and, although it was started over 100 years ago, it's yet to be finished. Apparently Gaudi went a little crazy towards the end of his life and lived in the construction site that was the church until he died. He'd become such a recluse at the time of his death that no one even realized he was no longer alive until days later. The cathedral was really neat and my friend and I took an elevator way up to the higher levels and got to look out at the city. Then we had to climb this dark, narrow spiral staircase all the way back down. The walk down stressed me out, but the view from the top was worth it. After that (remember this was spread over four days) I went with some friends to La Pedrera, an apartment building Gaudi designed. The coolest thing here was the terrace (fancy rooftop) because there were crazy turrets and designed and, again, the view was incredible. Finally, I went to Park Guell which, as you might guess, is a park designed by Gaudi. My favorite part was the really over-the-top fountain with mosaic chameleon that gaurds the entrance. All in all, I can safely say I left Barcelona Gaudi fan.

Barcelona is not only great for building art, but museum art as well. I visited the Picasso museum (I guess there are a lot, but this has a ton of his stuff). The museum focuses on showing Picasso's development as an artist so it doesn't have so many of his super famous paintings, but a lot of stuff from his early years and all the things he worked on before he got to cubism. I particularly liked his blue and pink periods! See, that just makes me sound cool to be able to say things like that. Weird side note: in the Picasso museum we ran into two girls from Hamilton who aren't in the program, but who just happened to be studying abroad in Europe and in Barcelona for the weekend. So random! I also visted the Salvador Dali museum in Figueras (about 2 hours away from Barcelona). Before visiting the museum I didn't think I was a big fan of Dali, but it turns out he is super cool. The only painting I'd know of his were all the melting clocks, but Dali has some really beautiful paintings of his wife, Gala, that I loved. They're still surrealist, but not quite so random. The museum was probably the neatest museum I've ever been to because it was a converted theater and was filled not only with Dali's painting, but with all his many types of art. If I understood out guide correctly, surrealists take everyday objects and turn them into art. This means that the museum was filled with things like cars that rained and a portrait of Mae Wes made out of furniture. It was unlike anything I've ever seen before, but if you're headed to Barcelona, it's worth making the trip to see this museum!

My weekend of culture finished up with a Spanish Guitar concert in the Palau de Musica. An incredible building (unfortunately not designed by Gaudi), it was filled with mosaic-tiled pillars and lots of color. The guitarrist was increidble and I'm so glad my friends and I waited in line for the 1/2 it took to get tickets.

I can't really think of any kind of clever closing (not that I ever do), but I'll just reiterate that my weekend in Barcelona made me so happy to be in Europe and not in the cold countryside of Hamilton!