Day 12 - All Over Barcelona

The day began with a trip to a tourist information hut to pick up our Barcelona passes, which enable us to get on the metro, as well as to take various buses and trams. Additionally, the pass gives us free or discounted access to many points of interest around the city.

Once this detail was taken care of, we took the metro to the Parc Güell, which was designed by Gaudí. It was very, very cool and weird in a fascinating sense. He certainly has a distinctive style. I was continually amazed by the wild creativity and detail of the various parts of the park, which is quite large. Fairly early on, we stopped at his casa, which is currently a museum featuring models and furniture designed by him, as well as some pieces/notes on people with whom he worked at various points in his career. Unfortunately, the house itself was not designed by him, but it was designed by one of the people with whom he collaborated (Berenguer). It was very beneficial to have a brief history of his work and style before we continued our wander through the park (and before we visit a few of the houses he designed, as well as la Sagrada Familia). We ended up exiting on the other side of the park into a random neighborhood, and then spent a few minutes locating ourselves on the map helpfully given to us by the tourist hut employees. (In between leaving and our quest to pinpoint our location, we managed to help a few American tourists who were searching for a back entrance to the park.) A friendly Spanish (we think) man came up to us and helped us; he gave directions to Sara in Spanish to the metro station we were seeking. Yay for language skills and helpful locals!

Entrance to the Parc Güell - there was no mistaking it!

Roof of one of the terraces in the Parc; exquisitely tiled

Casa/museo Gaudí

Our next stop was CosmoCaixa, the famous science museum. It was really quite cool. The entrance lobby has two walls painted with various physics formulas, and it was exciting to look and see which ones we could recognize (Sara knew more than I, obviously, but three semester of physics still paid off). (I interrupt our usual program to inform our DEAR READERS that we have opened the doors to the balcony and are currently sitting in front of said balcony, so as to better hear the band that is playing just out of view somewhere nearby. Also, it’s very nice out. Continuing on… ) The museum is quite large and very cool, so we saw just a fraction of its contents. One of the exhibits we spent a fair amount of time on was what I’ll call a contemporary, collaborative science exhibit (Sara’s specific translation of the title on the brochure is “Era of Convergent Technology”), which specifically dealt with cognitive science, technology, biology, and nanotechnology. The exhibit featured exciting developments in each of these fields separately, and then showed examples of various collaborations, with “percentages” by each example regarding how much each of the four fields contributed to that specific development.

Tree in the center of the evolution staircase at the museum

Another one of those... also, as we were leaving, we got to see it knock one of the metal bars down!

All of the jars contained gold nanoparticles; the exact size of the particles determines the color we see.

After this section of the museum, we moved into a section focusing on Newtonian mechanics, including waves and rotation. This was also exciting for me because I’ve actually studied that! Sara read the descriptions in Spanish and sometimes Catalán, while I read in English and occasionally glanced at the other languages (since French has a fair amount of shared roots with them). Regarding translations: it’s very interesting to read announcements or restaurant descriptions in multiple languages, because either one language is fairly poorly (directly) translated, or they phrase things in different ways; either way, it’s fascinating. Back to the museum! We didn’t even see a whole floor of it and we were there for about three hours. Sara says it was a “quality science museum,” and I concur. She also adds that she got to “learn things, as well as be excited about things I already knew.”

Eventually we agreed it was time to head out, so we made our way to Montjuïc, which is a large park on a hill with various museums and the site of the Olympics that were held in Barcelona. Additionally, there is a castle of sorts at the top, from which one can view the city and port. While at the castle, there was a random performance group in the courtyard, doing some sort of short musical theater piece in Spanish. We’re really not sure what it was about. While wandering about near the bottom of the park, we stumbled across Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, which is big and nice and in front of la Plaça de Espanya. We ate dinner on the terrace outside the museum, and then weren’t actually permitted into the museum, since by that point the museum closed in twenty minutes. Instead, we wandered down the various sets of stairs, terraces with fountains, and escalators until we reached la Plaça itself.

View of the sea from Montjuïc; the sea fades into the sky/sky into sea

MNAC

On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at a crep (apparently that’s how it’s spelled in Catalán) place. The menu was in English, Spanish, and French (the front/back also included Catalán). After scanning the English side and deciding what I wanted, I glanced at the first foreign language page and began to attempt to pronounce my order with a Spanish accent; after listening to a few words, Sara stopped me, realizing that I was trying to say the French words with a Spanish accent. (“Wait, how do you pronounce this? Glacé?” “…That’s French.”) Next page! Anyway, I did manage to make my order in Spanish (both the words and my terrible pronunciation), which was an exciting achievement. Sara got a lemon and honey crep (that looks so wrong) (“crep de limón y miel”), which I tried mainly because I can’t remember if I’ve ever had honey, and I suppose that could be construed as rather odd for someone whose name means “honey” in several languages. (I CANNOT BELIEVE that she’s never had honey; I’m making her eat some at breakfast tomorrow if they have it. First ice cream/gelato cones, now honey…what has she eaten her whole life?!?!) Thus, you may have a note in tomorrow’s post about my honey-eating adventures.

We are still sitting outside our open balcony doors, which is lovely and feels European and just… wonderful. The band stopped playing and some religious-sounding singing commenced, but now someone is just talking. We don’t know what’s going on, so our DEAR READERS will have to forgive our lack of clarity and detail on this point.

I will also apologize for our one-day hiatus from the BLOGOSPHERE (which missed us sorely, I’m sure), due to the fact that we didn’t figure out our hotel’s internet until tonight (so Spain has been good to us so far in terms of that, we just didn’t realize it right away); thus, our PATIENT READERS will now have two blogs to go through tonight! This could be a plus (two at once!) or a burden (two of these monstrosities???). I’ll leave it up to you.  (UPDATE: Sara’s decided it’s the Ave Maria, and now it is clear that’s what’s they’re singing… we’re still not sure if this a late Saturday night service or some other type of… something. We continue to be confused about the band bit. It was like a marching band kind of band, with lots of drums and trumpets and such; not really churchy. Hence the confusion.)

Last note: Every time we enter a new city, the first few hours (mainly, navigating the metro and getting to the hotel) are (almost) overwhelmingly foreign and somewhat confusing. However, we get through every time, and by the next morning, everything is more manageable.

Sara is commenting now on how she looks away briefly and returns to discover new paragraphs, and is thus preventing me from thinking of a proper closing worth of our DEVOTED READERS. (UPDATE: Sara saw candles, which again indicates a religious something.)

With that, I’ll close.

- Miel & Sara