Trip to Barcelona

Ah sunshine. It has been a long time, too long. Jo and I had planned a long time for a winter break to Barcelona. We had a relaxing 6 days checking out the sights, enjoying siestas and the local food and wine.

I am not normally taken by arcitecture. A building is a building right? One of the big draws in Barcelona is the work of Antoni Gaudi and you can't help but admire his work. The man can only be described as a genius. He managed to combine amazing creative vision to come up with outrageous, unconventional designs, innovative construction techniques and superb functionality and liveability. Above is his greatest work, the great temple of La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona's most famous icon. It is a construction zone as it is only half finished, even though it was started over 100 years ago. We have seen a lot of amazing cathedrals in Europe, and you get a bit jaded of them. There appears a prestige in having the biggest, the grandest, the most ornate, the most sparkly. This seems to come from a different mold and stills made us go WOW.

And this is a lowly apartment building he had remodelled. I was wondering why I queued up to pay heaps for a look around, but it was pretty amazing. Every detail, from the animal skull balconied, to the light filled, tiled courtyard, to the mosaiced, dragon like roof and fantasy chimneys had been carefully designed and built to tremendous effect. A pretty cool house.

We did take a day trip out of Barcelona. Here we are going for a walk in the hills of Montserrat. There is a monastery perched on the side of steep wierd limestone cliffs and pinnacles. We wandered around in canyons and on clifftops feeling like we were in the wild west.

Pretty sad to come home really. Have got a new photo site going, so check out more photos here.