Sant Jordi Day

22 Apr - Day 38

 

Today was an uncharacteristically cloudy day in Barcelona so we had to dress up warm for our excursion. Our first stop was the Parc Guell, a park designed by Gaudi. Situated at the top of a big hill, it is not your typical park, with odd looking buildings and structures and some strange choices in flora but a very nice view of the city. Despite the subpar weather, it was still very busy and full of tourists, runners and buskers.

After this, we walked back down through city. We came across a square called Placa de Revolucion where a human tower competition was being held. In this competition, large teams of people attempted to create the tallest or best looking structure or something like that. I'm not exactly sure what the judging criteria was though, not collapsing and crushing people in the crowd might have been enough to earn a placing.

It was pretty fun watching small people clamber all over the bigger people to stand on their shoulders and build the tower. It's the kind of thing I would imagine monkeys doing if they weren't so busy eating, sleeping and flinging their own poop at each other. The people at the bottom of the tower seem to get a pretty bad deal though: their only job is to grab fistfuls of the butts of the people who make up the lower columns so that they don't get flattened by the 2000 or so kilos worth of people standing on them.

 

We then walked around a bit more before stopping for lunch, looking at some more Gaudi buildings and returning home for the day. Dad prepared a huge amount of fried rice for dinner which was pretty awesome.

 

Apr 23 - Day 39

 

Today was St Jordi, which is like the equivalent of Valentine's day here in Spain. As a result, there were street vendors trying to sell roses at 5 metre intervals throughout the city. It might also have been a public holiday because there was an unusually large amount of people out and about.

 

We started off the day at Catalunya and walked down La Rambla, sticking to the sides as the crowd was far too thick to push through. After reaching the bottom, we headed to the Gothic quarter of the city which has all the Gothic-y buildings. We took a walk through the CIty Hall, during which we stopped to watch a string quartet concert in what I guess was the concert chamber.

 

Afterwards we decided to head to the Catalan Music Palace. It was closed, so we went to go visit the Picasso museum which was also closed.

For lunch we went to a restaurant near the waterfront called La Mar Salada. I ordered veal steak tartar for my main, unaware that tartar is just a fancy word for uncooked slab of meat. Expecting the worst from the way my dad described, it actually turned out to be very good. Conversely, when my dad ordered a pina colada for dessert, it failed spectacularly to meet his expectations. When dessert arrived, he recieved a glass full of fruit cocktail which contained no alcohol whatsoever. He was so upset that I had to eat it for him.

We went back to Sagrada Familia in the afternoon so that I could actually go inside and dad could have a beer while he waited. However, the line for tickets stretched round the corner so I decided to forgo the visit today and instead go back laze around in the apartment.