Sunday-Tuesday

Sunday
This morning I slept in a little, but still got going with enough time to go to La Sagrada Familia right when it opened at 10:00. It's the dominating feature of the Barcelona skyline, and is master architect Antoni Gaudi's opus. Basically, La Sagrada Familia is a modern day incarnation of the great Renaissance cathedrals, all the way down to the fact that it's been under construction for over a century and still isn't finished. They are shooting for a 2026 completion date, but whenever they hit it, it will be impressive. The cathedral is massive, and a math scholar's dream. The whole thing is full of parabolic curves and double helicoid columns. To me it is exactly what the Italian masters would have done if they had access to calculus. At first I wiped it off as all being too modern for me, but then they had a little exhibit about Gaudi's nature-influenced design philosophy, and I fell in love with it. Not only was Gaudi an artist, but really an incredible engineer. Pictures will have to come later, since I left the camera-computer cable at home. On the outside, the apse (rear) and two of the three facades have been finished. The Nativity and Passion facades were each done by different Spanish sculptors, and I liked them, but I think they are both dead and am not sure who they have commissioned to do the final Glory facade.

That whole experience really piqued my interest in Gaudi, who I had not heard much of or read anything about before the trip. So I changed the plan of the day to visit his other big project, Parc Guell. This public park was originally supposed to be an upscale subdivision, but that flopped so the city purchased it and turned it into a garden/park area. The same ideas from the cathedral were carried out here, without the constraints of needing to be reverent or reserved. There are still plenty of sine waves and catenary arches, but add to that loads of colorful ceramic tilework and the result is stunning.

Those two stops used up the morning and most of the afternoon, so I journeyed over to the house of god for most Barcelonians, home of the Barca Football Club, Camp Nou. There was a Spanish league game that night against Valencia with tickets still available, but I decided that if I wasn't willing to pay $75 to see Auburn football play then I wouldn't pay that much to see FC Barcelona play either. And for all the talk about the veracity of European soccer fans, that's really the comparison I would make. It was basically the same as an SEC game in Auburn, except if Auburn was a city of 2 million people. Barca won 3-0 on a hat trick from one of their forwards, but hated rivals Real Madrid (read as: Alabama) did the same against their opponents to stay a game ahead in league play.

In the end I wound up skipping Barcelona's big gothic cathedral. I saw it from the outside and didn't read anything that said it was anything special from any of the other big gothic cathedrals in Europe I had already seen. If I was Catholic maybe, but unlike Rome, Barcelona's sights didn't really make much effort to explain the symbolism that make these places different from just some old stone building.

Monday
Monday was my last day in Barcelona, and the flight to Mallorca was scheduled for 7:15. However, I had to check out of the hostel at 11:00, so that took a little bit of sorting out. The budget airline I arranged the flight with charged €30 for any checked bags, so I just packed my backpack with the things I needed for Mallorca and rented a locker at the airport for the other bag. This was a good option, and I may do the same thing for the last leg of the trip, it's just so much easier to get around. Getting to the airport and taking care of that took most of the morning, but I decided to go back into the city and check out a few last things. I'm glad I did too, because I got to complete the Gaudi triangle, the private home he did when an incredibly wealthy patron needed a new house after marrying an even more incredibly wealthy widow. La Perdera, or La Casa Mila, was everything I had come to expect from Gaudi, this time in a residential setting. Everything flowed and curved, with every empty space oozing with class. Even the doorknobs were rethought, because the weren't so much knobs. They looked more like broken-off tree branches with holds for each one of your (or your small army of servants') fingers.

After that it was a quick ham sandwich and patatas bravas lunch in a local dive and back to the airport. The flight went smoothly and I just caught the last bus from the airport out to the string of hotels on the beach.

Tuesday
Mallorca is the largest of Spain's three autonomous Balearic Islands. The sheer number of hotels are a testament to the fact the Mallorca is the hotspot for summer vacationers. It's pretty much like Panama City for all of Europe. This also includes a large number of dance clubs that are dormant for a few more weeks until the high season begins after Easter. Right now the only real city on the island, Palma, is dominated by a veritable peleton of Lance Armstrong wannabes. Both mornings I've been here, literally thousands of cyclists (90% of them German) pour out of the seaside hotels and head en masse for the hilly interior of the island for some early season training. It isn't just amateurs here though. Before the pro season started in February, several top flight teams like HTC-Columbia and Saxo Bank had their training camps here.

You can tell the German influence on the island, both from the lighter skin tone and germanic tongue of the people and the large number of “biergardens”. I slept in late today (it is the beach) and focused on the Spanish side of things. Went for a super run out into the countryside, past the harbor and by some of the rocky parts of the beach. Then a went into town and wandered around a bit until coming cross Mallorca's own 14th century cathedral, complete with a central nave reworked by Gaudi around 1910. That led to a big late lunch and an early retirement to bed.