Barcelona 9/3/2008

We slept a little late today and then walked around aimlessly toward the water. We ended up at the entrance to the zoo, home of Snowflake the albino gorilla, but we decided to walk around some more instead. There was a nice park that we strolled through for a while and then we headed toward the water. Frank O. Gehry (best architect EVER) designed a sculpture that looked like a giant goldfish overlooking a public beach. We hadn’t originally planned to stay at the beach, but it was really hot and sunny and the water looked like it would be fun. At least that’s what I told Kelly. I really wanted to go to see all the BOOBIES!!!!! So, we ran back to the hostel and changed clothes and brought our towels. Of course when we arrived, clouds had rolled in and it was hardly sunny anymore. We tried to get in the water once, but neither of us made it past our knees because it was so cold.

So, after becoming even more tan and more beautiful than we already were to begin with (hard to believe, but true), we left the beach. Next we went to the Contemporary Art Museum designed by Richard Meier. The art in the museum was disappointing, but the building itself was pretty cool. We have studied several examples of Richard Meier buildings throughout our schooling, so it was neat to finally see one in person. Outside of the museum, there were at least 69,000 skateboarders in the plazas on both sides. There was also a large group of Spanish high/middle schoolers that were freestyle rapping to that new “hip & hop” music that the young people listen to these days. It was amusing.

It was our last night in Barcelona so we decided to go back to Tapa Tapa because we enjoyed it so much the first night. We got different food and it was very good again. Also, Win had gotten a recipe for sangria when he had been there a year ago, yet lost it afterwards because he’s a big idiot. So, we traded an ink pen for a copy of the recipe to give to him.

Barthelona 9/2/2008

We started the day by heading to Sagrada Familia. This is one of the most popular things to see in Barcelona and it’s architecture!!! The night before was like Christmas Eve for Kelly and me and we woke up at 4:30AM because we were so freaking excited.

Sagrada Familia is also by Antoni Gaudi. Construction began in 1882, and it still isn’t finished yet. Gaudi became the architect and created this really ornate and detailed design heavily influenced by Christian symbolism, geometry, and nature. Then he died. Eighty years later it’s still being built. I relate the design to a ‘tall tale’ because Gaudi died in 1926 and all of his drawings were lost in 1940, so since then the design has been passed down from generation to generation through word of mouth.

There were a whole bunch of people all around it. The four towers that you see on the façade are part of a total of 18 towers that will be built, two that are almost twice as tall as the existing towers. We walked around the interior perimeter of the church because the rest was filled with scaffolding. It was interesting looking around at the modern construction equipment all around, yet the project began 125 years ago.

After Sagrada Familia, we went to Parc Guell, which is a big park that has great views of the city. There were lots of people all over, and we walked around a while. There is a sculpture of a multicolored lizard (Drac) which 69,000 people absolutely had to have their picture taken with so that back home everyone would believe them when they said they went to Barcelona.

We took a little nap before heading back to Barcelona Pavilion to sketch like good architecture students are supposed to do. While we were there, several VW concept cars were being photographed with the Pavilion in the background. So in a few months when you see a VW ad in a magazine, look closely at the background and you’ll probably see an extremely attractive male nonchalantly grabbing his crotch. We ate a cheap dinner to save room for our pitcher of sangria before calling it a night.

Barthelona 9/1/2008

When we woke up our legs were achy from the hiking the day before. We have done plenty of walking over the past few days, but not with nearly as much elevation change. Kelly’s feet were worse than mine and she had to wear shoes instead of sandals due to her blisters.

First we went to the Barcelona Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe (a very influential modern architect). It was designed originally for the World’s Fair in Barcelona in the early 1900’s. I know that if I start going into any detail about architecture, or any other element of culture, I am liable to severely confuse and disorient some of my less learned relatives from back home (Avid-day Etty-pay). Therefore I will just say that it is a very famous and influential structure that we walked around for a while. We have studied it many times and it was pretty cool to see in person. We wanted to sketch some, but forgot our sketchbooks so decided that we would come back again later in the week.

From the Pavilion we walked up some big steps to the Olympic Park from 1992. There was a large plaza surrounded by the stadium and aquatic center that had a great view of the ocean and the city. I think it would have been really exciting to have been there when it was full of people before an event, but when we went there were probably 10 other people there. I went up to each one and told them “Michael Phelps #1” but most of them didn’t understand. There was a giant telephone tower at the plaza designed by Santiago Calatrava, who is a famous Spanish architect who does some amazing things with the engineering of his buildings.

After the Olympic Park, we went to La Pedrera, an apartment building designed by Antoni Gaudi. The apartments look like they were molded out of giant hands. The railings were very interesting, and looked like a train wreck was molded onto the outside edge of the balconies. There were curves all over the building, which was drastically different than the orthogonal geometry of the Barcelona Pavilion.

From there we walked to a restaurant which Win had recommended us from his stay in Barcelona called Tapa Tapa. It was our first taste of tapas, which comes in smaller portions and is meant to be eaten family style so that you can order a wide range of foods. More importantly than the tapas was the sangria, also recommended by Win, which we loved. That night we made the goal of drinking a pitcher of sangria every night we were in Spain.

The food was delish, and afterward we walked down Passieg de Garcia, which is full of shopping (my FAVORITE!). Kelly got some girl stuff but I was way too manly to buy anything. From there we walked down La Ramblas, which was full of street performers dressed up as tons of different things, from cowboys to angels to flowers. We walked all the way till we came to the waterfront and we ate some ice cream on one of the piers before calling it a day.

Marseille to Barcelona 8/31

When Kelly and I were planning where to go on our journey several months ago, we settled on Marseille because it was as close to halfway between Paris and Barcelona as we could find. We didn’t have any real intentions in spending a lot of time there, or doing anything really cool. However, it definitely was one of my favorite things that we did on the trip.

We got up early and our host drove us to the metro station. From there we went downtown to the main train station where we rented a locker and stashed our bags. Then we took a metro and a bus (We drove by a Le Corbusier building AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!). We ended up at the outskirts of town at some university. From there we entered an area like a little state park and went hiking up this trail. The trail was hot and dry, the vegetation reminded me of a lot of Philmont. There were a fair amount of people on the trail for a Sunday morning, but it wasn’t too crowded. When we reached the top of the hill we were on we had an excellent view of Les Calanques.

Les Calanques are these giant cliff peninsulas on the Mediterranean Coast. They stretch up the coast for a few miles and there are lots of trails up to the tops and down to the bottoms (haha ‘bottoms’) where there are beaches. We didn’t have a lot of time to spend there so we hiked to the top of the nearest one. We stayed for a short while and relished the beautiful view, then began our descent. The lower we went the bluer the water became. We finally made it to a very small “beach.” This beach is nothing comparable to anything in North Carolina. There was no sand, only small smooth pebbles. The total size of possible space to lie down was about 30 feet by 50 feet, and pretty much all of it was already staked out. This didn’t bother us because it is physically impossible for our skin to get any tanner than it already is, so instead we went swimming. The water was extremely cold and felt very good after hiking in the midday sun.

We swam for about an hour. There was a small steep little rock island that we jumped off of into the water. Kelly wanted to go first. She got out of the water and walked to the edge, looked down, and took the walk of shame back to the water. It took some convincing and reminding her of how she chickened out at Long’s Peak 12 months ago before she finally jumped.

The hike back up to the top was very hot, and our feet rubbed against our wet sandals giving us blisters, but it was well worth the journey. We took the bus back and made it in time for our train to Barcelona. When we arrived in Barcelona we were extremely tired and went straight to the hostel and to sleep.

Marseille turned out to be one of the best days of our trip, and we are very excited to see Barcelona tomorrow.

Paris to Marseille 8/30/2008

We checked out of the hotel and took the metro to the train station. We had never ridden the train before in Europe and had to ask several people until we figured out where we got our pass stamped. We were also new at reading our train ticket and when boarding the train went right to where we thought we should belong, at the front of the train in the first class car. We didn’t take a closer look at our tickets until we got to the very front of the train and our seat numbers were not in the car, and then realized that we were not in car 1, but car 15. I got in a long argument with the conductor about how it was an outrage that such high class citizens like Kelly and I would be required to sit in the back with the commoners, but I decided to take the high road and we ultimately sat in the back.

The train ride was probably like 4 hour or so. It was very pretty to see the countryside and the small towns. We saw an old aqueduct.

We arrived in Marseille and took a bus from the train station to Chateau Gambert. I think this would be like a neighborhood within Marseille, but it was much more rural than downtown Marseille. We walked up a hill to a large house that was to be our hostel. We found out that it was basically a bed and breakfast type place. There was a couple with a child who lived upstairs, and rented out rooms downstairs to travelers. They were extremely nice and spoke pretty good English.

They recommended a pizza restaurant down the road for dinner. We walked to it and they spoke very little English, so it was fun for me to try my best to talk with them. I found out that I knew surprisingly more French than I would have anticipated, since I hadn’t used it since high school. We talked a little while we waited for the pizza, and then took the pizza back to our room at the bed and breakfast to eat. The room was very large and very nice. It was filled with a bookcase with French books, and paintings that a friend of the family had done. Just outside our room was a nice sitting area where we ate our pizza and coke (which was the cheapest meal by far of the trip so far). Using the G.W.M., (Grant Williard Method, commonly used for creating spreadsheets but can also be applicable for photographs [see exhibits 2, 4, 78]), I took a picture of us at dinner.

After dinner we talked with our hosts for a little bit. We asked about a picture in our bathroom of a place called Les Calanques, and they helped give us directions there for tomorrow before we left for Barcelona. We told them that we would be staying in Prague for three months and they gave us tons of restaurants and recommendations about the city, since they had recently visited. One of the restaurants was one that Kate’s boyfriend Oliver had also mentioned, Klub Architectu, so we would be sure to see that.

We went to bed early in anticipation for our journey to Les Calanques in the morning.

Paris 8/29/2008

We went to the Eiffel Tower again today first thing, to beat the crowds. We took the stairs up as high as we could, which is about halfway to the tippy-top. I counted 708 steps. Kelly had trouble counting (as usual) and got 716. There were pictures around the whole edge of the level we were on that had pictures informing which buildings were what in the Paris skyline. I looked and looked but couldn’t find the Eiffel Tower which was disappointing. There were also some really cool photos of lighthouses around the world, but they left off Cape Hatteras (snobby Europeans). It was cloudy when we started, but by the time we were ready to go down it was sunny.
We walked around the city some more trying to kill time until 6oclock when the Louvre would be free to students. While walking around, we looked for a place to eat. We were sick of paying a lot for food, and wanted the cheapest thing possible that would keep us from being hungry. We finally found a place that had a few good sandwiches and decided on it. Cost was most important to us, and when he asked us for our drinks we both got Orangina which said 5 Euros on the menu. When he asked medium or large, we both responded immediately with the obvious answer: medium. We were so proud of ourselves for finding the one decent place in Paris when we got the bill back. We then learned that the “small” was 5 Euros and the “medium” (probably about 20 oz with no refill) was 10 Euros, or about 15 dollars. It was the best Orangina I have ever had.
Disappointed in ourselves, we moved on to the Louvre, this time to go inside. It was busy, but navigable. We entered through the pyramid. We went pretty quick through the Renaissance Paintings exhibit, and saw the Mona Lisa. We also saw a lot of Egyptian artifacts. We also saw the Venus de Milo, which I missed the first time. A friendly man took a picture of Kelly and I in front of this which was nice. My favorite was the French sculpture. There were two spaces that used to be outdoor courtyards that they converted into an indoor sculpture garden. We saw it right at dusk so that there was still some natural light coming in. It was very pretty and probably my favorite space in Paris. When we left the museum, it was night and the Pyramid was lit and very pretty.
Today was our last full day in Paris. We did a lot of things and had a lot of fun, but we were ready to leave and go to new places tomorrow.

Paris 8/28/2008

The robot eater was out again this morning.

The first thing we did after getting up was we walked to the Cartier Foundation. It is a contemporary art museum that was designed by Jean Nouvel, that we learned about in school. It was built on what used to be a small wooded lot, so instead of destroying all the trees to make room for the building, he set the building back from the street and put a glass wall on the street creating a wooded space for art between the building and the street. We didn’t go in (this is the last time, Phillip), but looked around the outside. We then decided to go to the Rodin Museum, which my sister had recommended. We took the metro and on the way there we came across the Musee de l’Armee. We didn’t know what it was, but saw that it was a really old building so we walked through it. It had a big courtyard with a statue of some dude with his hand in his jacket. It turned out that that same dude was buried in the adjacent building.

We continued on across the street to the Rodin Museum. I had seen castings of some of his most famous sculptures when the exhibit came to the North Carolina Museum of Art several years ago. The museum consisted of an outdoor sculpture garden with large scale bronze castings and originals inside his home. According to Encylcopedia Mary the French government realized Rodin’s value while he was alive and gave him this wonderful home to live in, in agreement that he would leave them his work when he died. Some of my favorites were the smaller simpler sculptures like the hands in this photograph.

After Rodin Museum we went to the Pompidou Center, another building we had studied. This was one of my favorite things in Paris. It is a modern art museum that has a very unique look to it. The concept is that the building is basically inside out. All the things that are normally hidden within the wall are celebrated and expressed on outside of the building. So the façade is covered in brightly colored piping and structural trusses. To go to the exhibits one has to travel up an escalator that is in a giant tube attached to the outside of the building, and overlooks a large courtyard. The exhibits were fun to look at, especially one on a French architecture firm and several models they had created.