Yes, there is a Bar in Barcelona.

Barcelona is, if nothing else, a very surprising city full of beauty, controversy and almost a comical lack of Spanish people. :)

The first thing you notice when you get out of the airport and head towards the city is the amazingly beautiful architecture. The streets are lined with unorthodox architectural wonders with odd corners and colorful tiles. The mad man behind this wonder was Antoni Gaudi. That name probably sounds familiar because it is pronounced "gaudy".

gaudy
adj 1: tastelessly showy

Unfortunately, Chris and Melissa were under the impression that there was a link between the name of the artist and the word, however, the word predates the artist by several hundred years. It's easy to see how this mistake could be made by someone either having nonmainstream sense of taste or a less than firm grasp of the word "gaudy." :) The pictures are from La Sagrada Familia which is Gaudi's unfinished masterpiece. It really is very beautiful and I have never seen anything like it anywhere else. It's scheduled to be finished in 2026 from what I heard which would be 100 years after the death of the man behind it, and 90 years after the last remaining blueprints were burned.... think about it. This building alone is worth the trip to Barcelona. I really hope I get to go back and see the church if it is ever finished.

An interesting note about Gaudi is that he was run over by a tram in 1926 which eventually led to his death three days later. The taxis wouldn't take him to the hospital because of his appearance and he ended up in the hosptial with the poor people of Barcelona. He was found there by his friends and refused to be moved to the better facilities. Ironically, in today's Barcelona the public hospitals are better than the private hospitals due to the government funding of the public hospitals which allow them to get better equipment for major traumas. (I sat next to a nurse on my way back to Copenhagen, the only Spanish person I met in Spain!!)




Architecture aside, Barcelona can stand on it's own with any major city in Europe with its Mediterranean climate and breathtaking natural beauty. It's no wonder the people I met there were from all over the world, who wouldn't want to live in this beautiful city?

We spend a lot of time just taking in the views and trying find food and figure out how to eat and order tapas at a tapas bar. Chris and Melissa resisted the urge to get the easy and familiar fast food options like Burger King, however, I embraced the fast food culture that has become something of a treat for me in my current living situation.

The people of Barcelona are what I would call... tourists. December between Christmas and New Years is not really tourist season in Barcelona which is known for it's beaches and nice weather, however, we didn't stumble across any people from Spain while we were there. I'm sure there were locals somewhere, but they didn't jump at the chance to interact with us. In attempts to make contact we did run into:

• A older woman from Georgia.
• A couple from Texas
• A bartender from Ireland
• A waitress from Czech Republic
• A woman from Mexico
• 3 rather short Australians

There were signs of Spanish people but we suddenly felt a little unwelcome when we saw things like a 40ft mural saying that tourists are terrorists

and that they were not welcome in Barcelona. Instantly you realize you're in a different country and that maybe the people they're depicting with the baseball hat and camera riding the tour bus, is YOU! So after I took this picture I put my camera away and got back on the tour bus thinking how I would have made the Tourorist a little more hansom in the mural to better depict me. :)

I have to give them credit for the decent art work in their hate message. :) I think maybe they're just upset that none of the buildings that make their city so great are actually finished yet, but since the money the tourist bring to the city is directly paying for things to be built, they should be very careful about which hand they are biting. (the church above is being built on completely anonymous donations which you pay for admittance)

Another interesting thing about Barcelona is that there are apparently nonspanish speaking indigenous people in Spain that want to make their own country inside Spain or something like that. I don't really know too much about this but they were yelling at the tour bus so I think they might also be the same people that don't like tourists. :) This group of Spanish people likes to demonstrate and yell and close streets. The protest appears to have been peaceful but the amount of heavily armed police seemed more like a military presence. The Spanish lady that I sat next to on the plane gave me a more in depth explanation about what this is about, going back to a dictator named Franco and his attempt to unify Spain's people and outlawing the other languages. I think my explanation was biased but she said they're very rude, she was really nice to me so I'm taking her word for it. She also told me a story about how her mom's sister was pulled out of her house and into the street when she was 12 years old and shot in the back of the head and left in a pile of bodies by the government (I think like 50 years ago? WWII? Her English was not perfect but she spoke at least 3 other languages better than me).

More pictures can be found on my picasa page.