The one with all the Antoni Gaudi

Our second and final day in Barcelona, we wanted to get a greater taste of the Gaudi architecture so important to the modern feel of Barcelona.  We headed to Casa Mila, otherwise known as La Pedrera, first because it was only a few blocks from our hotel.  I love how fluid and unique it is.  Each of the balconies was hand-crafted and is a completely unique design.  The whole house is designed without the use of straight lines, which is super cool!

Next, we walked over to Casa Batllo, which includes several unique designs.  The roof resembles a dragon, with scales and a spiky tail.  The actual house is reminiscent of fish and leaves.  You can kind of see the bony appearance of the windows over Marissa's shoulder.  

Casa Vicens, a bit out of the way, was the first house designed by Gaudi.  This is really obvious when you consider its lack of Modernism characteristics.  It shows some of the exploration that Gaudi made early in his career, but lacks the really "out there" appearance of some of the other houses and Sagrada Familia in particular.  The yellow tiles actually have small flowers on them because when Gaudi originally came to check out the site, there were yellow flowers growing there. A family still lives in the house today, though they bought it for something like $20 million!

Casa Calvet was the last Gaudi stop of the trip.  It definitely represents a calmer, more toned-down version of Gaudi, but this is because it was designed for a wealthy family in one of the most upscale neighborhoods of Barcelona, where his more outrageous designs would not have been accepted.  Nonetheless, Gaudi is still present in the curves of the balconies, the unique columns at the base, and the strange figures on the top of the building.  I think if we could do it again, we would try to see everything in chronological order to really get a feel for how Gaudi and his architecture evolved...next time, I guess!

Next we headed to see the Mercat Boqueria, which was filled with lots of yummy foods to buy!  This is the main downside to living in a small pueblo, the food choices!  There seemed to be every fruit and vegetable in existence in this market, and I was having terrible food envy.  More strangely, there seemed to be every meat product available as well.  What you are looking at right now are tongues (cow I think), sheep's head, hearts, and liver, I do believe.  There were also whole rabbits, skinned and unskinned available for sale.  It was creepy but also kind of awesome.  We also headed over to Mercat Santa Caterina, but it was not as impressive after the first market, and we were getting tired and hungry, so it was enough.

After a quick stop for some stir fry noodles (DELICIOUS!) at Wok to Walk, we headed down to Rambla de Mar to watch the Three Kings come into the harbor.  In Spain, January 6th is Three King's day, the day in which the Three Kings come and bring all of the children's presents.  It is pretty awesome and a lot like their version of Santa.  My students tried to claim that the three kings coming was much more believable and credible than Santa, but I think they just don't know how awesome Santa really is!

After some resting in the hotel and packing to go home, we headed back out to check out the Three King's Parade in Plaza de Catalunya.  Let me just say that we seemed to be missing some key cultural knowledge to understanding most of the floats in the parade.  One of the key parts to the parade is that the floats throw candy for the children to collect, but it is actually super dangerous.  In Malaga this year, a six-year-old was run over and killed by a float (going slowly) while he was chasing after some candy.  So sad and terrible.  Sometimes Spain isn't very safety conscious, and the kids LOVE sweets! The parade was ruined a bit for me when I realized that the guy behind was totally touching me inappropriately and pretending that the crowd was knocking him into me.  I scared us both when I went to pull my jacket down only to find his hand lightly around my waist.  People, man!  Oh well, he will live infamously on my blog for the rest of his days.  

After the parade, we grabbed a quick dinner, tried to order salads, only to realize that a greek or italian salad doesn't always include lettuce.  We went home to sleep for four hours, but then it was time to get up to go the airport at 2:50 AM for our 6 AM flight!  We got back to Sevilla without problems, but because of Three Kings' Day, the buses were limited.  We had to wait until after 1 PM to get a bus back to Zafra.  Suffice it to say, we were SOOOOOO glad to be home!!  It was an awesome Winter vacation, but I was definitely ready for it to be over.