We woke up fairly early Tuesday morning. Our moms grabbed some breakfast and croissants for us from the hostel’s breakfast room and we packed up our bags. We got all of our things together and left them all in the hostel’s luggage area and went out to explore some more of Barcelona. First stop - a Gaudi house!
Gaudi was a BA architect back in his day. He started the Neo-Gothic movement in the early 1900s and his work has inspired several modern artists, most notably Picasso. He was commissioned to design the Sagrada Familia cathedral that we saw the day before (which is still under construction btw) and several parks and buildings around Barcelona. He’s kind of a big deal. At one point, he was asked to design an apartment building. It has now been converted into a museum to showcase all of Gaudi’s work and inspiration. The attic of the building is where there are several displays, models of buildings and cathedrals he designed as well as a collection of inspirational items he used to help define his work. There is also a terrace, full of winding stairs, tunnels and funky chimneys. The scenery looks like it was taken out of a Dr. Seuss book! A couple floors down from there is an apartment that is furnished as it was back in 1912 when the apartment first opened, full of art nouveau furniture and period décor.
The rest of the building is all offices now. After playing a fun game of hide and seek around the museum, we eventually all found each other then headed out to find some lunch. By the time we finished lunch, it was decision time: go see the other Gaudi house-museum and Parc Güell (pronounced: “park way,” a park he designed that is now open to the public) or just the park. We voted to go and see the park because that was our priority in case we didn’t get to anything else. We went to the metro via a little shopping stop and made our way to Parc Güell. When we got off of the metro, we checked our email real quick and received some very sad news: Katie’s dog Nicky had passed away. He was already declining in health but we had hoped that he would be able to stick around in time for Katie to get back. We was a precious and sweet ol’ pup and we will miss him dearly. In the words of Katie’s dad, Terrell, “NickNick was dreaming about chasing bad guys and biting them real hard when his courageous little heart gave out. He was a fearless defender and devoted friend.” We took some time to mourn our loss before slowly making our way up to the park. It’s on a steep hill and is a great lookout point to see all of Barcelona. There were several escalators outdoors next to the sidewalk to make the schlep up to the top easier.
Once at the top, we explored the park and took some great pictures from the different lookout points. If you don’t know anything about Gaudi, you should Google him real quick because he’s designed some pretty crazy (aka awesome) buildings and Parc Güell is another example of his interesting style.
Our train for Granada left at 9:30 in the evening, but we wanted to be back at our hostel around 7pm so that we could get our stuff together and get to the train station in plenty of time to hopefully sweet talk somebody into letting us swap beds with them so that we could all get into at least the same car of the train, if not the same room. We ended up being there way too early and we couldn’t even go through the gate that we needed to pass to get to our platform. Eventually, we talked the guard into letting us pass through but sit in the chairs just on the other side and wait out the remaining 45 minutes or so. We finally got down to the train platform and boarded the train and made our way to our compartments. We were able to swap with one girl so that Marty and Rachael were in the same room but Katie and JL were in separate ones. We were all in the same train car together, though, so all we had to do was open the door to the compartment and go out into the hall to see each other. We weren’t quite ready to crash yet so we decided to rendezvous in the restaurant car to hang out and have dinner before going to bed. The meal there was expensive and sub-par, but we ate it and washed it down with a great red wine called “Sangre de Toro”. That means “blood of the bull” for those non-Spanish speakers out there.
After dinner, we hung out for a little while longer and then headed to our respective sleeping compartments. None of us got much sleep but we did get to Granada at 8:30ish the next morning, so that was cool.
XOXO J&K&M&R
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