Wet, Windy, Cold... and Closed for Business

Four days into our stay in Barcelona, and we're officially four for four. Being four for four in anything is usually a good thing. In our case, it means four straight days of cold and rain! To top it off, we thought we were pretty clever for leaving Italy on a 4-day holiday weekend to avoid Labor Day. What we didn't count on was the fact that 5/1 is also Labor Day in Spain! Almost all of the stores/attractions and many of the restuarants were closed for business.

We made good use of our time by watching the entire season 2 of The Office (US-version), seasons 1 and 2 of Grey's Anatomy, and catching up on some of our reading (Jaime finished Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts and said it is awesome!).

We braved the elements to enjoy a handful of Barcelona's attractions. It turns out that Barcelona, a pretty small city, is home to 9 UNESCO World Heritage Sites. More on the UNESCO sites later. Seven of the 9 sites are creations of Antoni Gaudi, a Catalonian (people from Barcelona) who is one of the world's most famous architects. If you haven't heard of him, think Frank Gehry of Spain, or Michael Jordan of Architecture... you get the idea.

We started off by visiting Park Guell, a park designed by Gaudi and the place where he lived the last 20 years of his life, while he was building La Sagrada Familia. Park Guell is set atop a hill overlooking the entire city of Barcelona, with clear views of the Diagonol, La Rambla (the main shopping street), Catalunya... all the way out to the ocean.

The day began like all the others, rainy, windy and cold, but then amazingly, as we were strolling through the park huddled under our umbrella , a few rays managed to peek their way through and we ended up getting nearly 45 minutes of uninterrupted sun. Here's some pics...

Gaudi is famous for using these little mosaics of tiles to create a brilliant array of colors. Here's the famous lizard welcoming visitors to the Park Guell...

Gaudi's creations, like the wave cave, were inspired by the beauty he saw in nature. Here's some visitors hiding out from the rain...

These are the benches in the main overlook area...


Alongside the bottom of the benches, you can see some pretty cool sculpting...

As you can see, the storm clouds that passed over us looked pretty ominous...

However, to our amazement, the clouds parted for a brief moment giving us clear views all the way to the ocean...

We ended up leaving Park Guell with a smile on our faces...

... and then it started raining again on our walk down the hill back to our apartment. Boo.