Too much Gaudí in Barcelona
Apparently all the dogs in the region have arranged to meet at about half past six for a good-morning-love-rambla-barking session and are highly motivated to do so. I wake up to an open window and the barking of the dogs in the courtyard. Well, if I'm already awake, then Gerd can be woken up too. We make our way into town. I don't have to mention that our hostel neither offers breakfast nor has a breakfast room.
In the large, covered Mercat, we stroll past colourful spice, fruit and vegetable vendors. Also a lot of fish and meat stalls. Urgs...
We have an espresso at a bakery stand and a little further on we buy a lot of fresh fruit and eat it all. We get tickets for the Gaudí church Sagrada familia and for the Park de Güell. Here, how could it be otherwise, we look at Gaudí buildings. This Gaudí is starting to get on my nerves. As if Barcelona didn't have anything else to offer besides Gaudí.
Admission to the church is not scheduled until 5 pm, so we have time to stroll around Barcelona. Only, in this heat, we don't feel like it.
We decide to take a little siesta in the hostel and after a power nap there we are fit for Gaudí. So we go to this church. To be honest, I would have preferred to visit the Santa Maria del Mar, because I had once read a novel about the construction of this cathedral and now find it much more exciting.
Well, let's go to Gaudí. And as it happens many times in my life and also here on this trip, I was surprised and delighted. I have never seen anything so beautiful, festive, funny, colourful and impressive. It is unbelievably beautiful in the church and I don't even want to go out. We listen to our audio guides completely and then sit for quite a while looking at this beautiful building. You sit there and look in a corner and find new things over and over again. There is no end to the surprises. The play of light alone is so impressive. I briefly try to photograph it all. But I realise that there are things that are so much bigger than my ability to capture them photographically. So I guess I will carry the memory of the Sagrada familia in my heart.
At some point, however, our time here is up and we take a bus that takes us to the harbour and thus also to the Gothic quarter. Now I do get to look at my Santa Maria del mar and afterwards I am allowed to tell Gerd the whole story of the novel in the tapas bar. So I get back into the story and also into the feeling of how it was built. How the little water carrier became the big stone carrier and a free citizen of Barcelona. How he secretly went into the Jewish quarter and later even traded with merchants from all over the world. And always with an eye on the Santa Maria del mar.
I am inspired and happy, and also full from the great tapas. We save the trip to the fountains in the evening, we go to bed and can fall asleep without disturbance today. Tomorrow we leave for the ferry, but not before having breakfast in a vegetarian restaurant we discovered today. We found out that it opens at 9am, which suits us perfectly, because we have to leave at half past ten to catch the ferry that will take us to Genoa.
