Barcelona

Hello to you from Catalonia.

I have been in Barcelona for the past week, and will be until about eight tomorrow morning. Meaning I have to get up before five tomorrow. So that's gonna be fun.

Anyway. I have some random things about Barcelona for you, because writing a coherent text about it seems a little too much after all this vacationing.

Barcelona smells. Not in the way you'd think of smelling at first, probably, but the traffic is everywhere so the air is terrible, and if that wasn't bad enough, there are so many people smoking everywhere, so for a lot of the time it feels like everything smells like tobacco around here.

Gaudi is kinda cool. He's the architect who has designed all the buildings that look like what you think of as Barcelona from all the pictures you ever see from here. A couple of the buildings are close to where we're staying, just on our way to the city center. Though one of them is covered right now, I guess they're doing some reconstruction on the outside. But they've covered it with a sheet that has a live-size picture of the actual building, so I guess that's kinda nice.

Then there's Parc Güell, which has all the mosaic stuff that is in all the pictures. It was actually pretty disappointing, since I always somehow imagined a large area in the city to be build like that, and then in the end it was a small area, with not as intense mosaic surfaces as all the pictures suggest, and actually nothing more than I've seen in the pictures. I never realised how little of it there was.

And then, of course, there's La Sagrada Familia, the famous unfinished basilica that they've been building for almost 130 by now. I never realised how much unfinished it is until I saw a video of what it will look like finally constructed. It should (unlike Ted Mosby says "remain forever unfinished", also, Gaudi didn't get hit by a bus, it was a tram) be finished by 2026, a hundred years after Gaudi's death, or if not then, then maybe 2028.


A little bit continuing on the same subject, I am once again reminded of the thing I realised standing on the hill of Acropolis in Athens (with you) some years back: the enormous flow of tourists flooding every inch everywhere completely ruins places of great architecture. And I'm not even an architecture fan, it would probably be worse if I was. Anyway, we didn't go inside any of there Gaudi buildings, simply because there were too many damn people everywhere. I wish there was a way to go see those places some time when there isn't anyone else. (Yeah, right, like there is a moment like that, except in the middle of the night.)
The point being: tourists ruin all great places by being to many.

There are about 250 000 pigeons in Barcelona. Or something. We started to wonder about it after we visited Placa di Catalonia (just a huge square (well, circle) filled with pigeons. Also there's a fountain and a metro stop), which is filled with them. So I did a little Googling and it turns out that in 2010, if I recall correctly, the city of Barcelona decided there are too many, and to get rid of a quarter, meaning 65 000. The problem was pigeon poop apparently isn't too good for all the buildings and statues and stuff all over town they want to preserve.

On Tibidabo hill, which is the highest hill nearby at 512 meters from sea level, there is an amusement park and a church. I'm mentioning it because I think it's simply a weird combination.

I'm hungry and want to go get pizza now. I'll give you one more picture, though:

 

 ~matu