Sagrada Familia and Catalan History

Last night we left our hotel after 9 PM and walked a few blocks to a restaurant that was highly recommended by the guy who took our tickets at Dulles. He told us that he goes to this restaurant every time he comes to Barcelona.  Having no other personal recommendations, we found it with his directions -- about a block before you get to the big Columbus statue, on a side street.  We managed to remember the name for a whole day because Benjamin said that "caracoles" means snail.

Just as the ticket agent described it: we went down some steps, past the bar and right through the kitchen to the dining rooms.  It was a well established place, with walls full of signed photos from famous diners like Danny Glover, OJ Simpson, Jimmy Carter, Metalica, Bon Jovi.  We were very glad when the loud-voiced tourists from Boston finished their meal and left.  The food was fine. Not incredibly memorable but made of real ingredients and well worth eating.  Benjamin and I ordered some things that were outside of our safe experience (fish dishes) and Jon had some razor clams for his first time.  We agreed that they were expert at cooking garlic to its exact crispy edge, before it gets burnt.  Dinner lasted until after 11:00 but we were some of the last to leave.  On the way out, Jon and Benjamin took a closer look at the huge stove in the kitchen and saw that it was coal-fired.

This morning we had a very nice breakfast in the hotel (it's much bigger than it appears -- the room was filled with groggy tourists).  There was a machine that made hot milk which made me happy.

Four of the eight completed
towers, out of eighteen, with
the big ones still to come.

The "trees" supporting the vault.

Jon and I took the Metro to the one sight that everyone seems to agree is a mandatory visit in Barcelona.  Of course we had not done our homework, but we have been to enough cathedrals to know as soon as we came above ground that this one is remarkably different.  It is absolutely a must-see, even though we were part of an ocean of tourists, which is unusual for us.  Everyone else probably already knows all about the Sagrada Familia and the famous architect Gaudi, but for us it was a busy couple of hours soaking it all up.  The exterior, while dramatic, is much less exciting than the interior which is filled with light and space and playful color and soaring columns that are like trees.  To our eyes, the inside space is mostly finished while the towers and turrets outside are only about a quarter done, maybe.  The official timeline for finishing is in ten years, the 100th anniversary of Gaudi's death but I cannot imagine them getting that much done in that amount of time. It has been under construction for about 120 years already (it was started before he signed on in 1883), with interruptions for war and fire.

The church has a lot of stunningly colorful light. The
stained glass was designed for the total effect,
not to tell individual stories.

Gaudi designed the vaulted
arches by hanging strings with
weights (to represent the loads
of the building) and then
flipping the result, so what you
see is the structure of the
church, upside-down.

We thought we were finished with our visit so we went outside to admire the building again and finally saw that there is an extensive museum downstairs.  Oops.  Back inside to learn all about the process and the construction and the architect and the materials.  Always so impressive to see what geniuses can do.  The geometry, the building of all those models in plaster, the engineering, and finally the art. Jon says he imagines that Gaudi did not suffer fools.  No time.  Gaudi died in 1926 (I think) after one set of towers for one portal was up, so there have been decades of faithful architects and craftspeople carrying this out.  We wonder how they are paying for all this, but it is so unusual and gorgeous, it seems worth it.  Way, way more worth it than the Crazy Horse memorial, for example.

Then we had to rush to meet Benjamin (who had already been to the cathedral/basilica/temple on an earlier trip) at our next stop -- the Museum of Calalunya.  He had spent his morning walking around and searching for a comfortable chair in a coffee shop.  For some reason, we had the impression that this would be a small museum so we decided to do that before having lunch.

Benjamin, living up to his
younger aspirations.

Now, all three of us like history and we especially like museums that tell the story of the place we are visiting.  But this time, with both Jon and Benjamin and their tendency to check facts and find out the real answers, it took us forever to move through the exhibits.  It started with 10,000 years of caves and bones and pottery, which we walked quickly through as that didn't seem particularly specific to this story.  That was the only part we sped through.  After that it was a long and slow journey starting with the Romans and moving through each century, with narratives about governance, war, civic life, changing rulers, manufacturing, religion.  Because we have been trying to piece together the history of the world for most of our adult lives, it took us a long time to try to fit the facts together with what we remembered (pitifully little).  So there was lots of stopping to use google/wikipedia to help us fit the puzzle pieces together.  After three hours we had made it through the 17th century and we thought we were finished, but Jon pointed out there was another floor above.  We were starving but we decided we had to continue.  We thought we would know a much higher percentage of the rest of the story, since our collective knowledge of the last few centuries is pretty solid.

Luckily, this was not Benjamin's fate, as it was so
many knights in the Reaper Rebellion.

In brief, the museum had a consistent narrative:  Catalunya has always been unique, with an independent language and culture (we were diverted by long discussions about what "culture" actually means, if anything), and it has managed to maintain its identity through the centuries despite the push and pull of wars and empires and religious crusades and sieges -- it absolutely deserves to be an independent state with its own government.  Since about 1980 it has enjoyed the most autonomy since about 1715.  

We ran out of gas by 4:30 and had to find something to eat.  If the crepe vendor right outside had offered anything but dessert fillings we would have stopped there.  But we found an acceptable restaurant to have tapas and ordered all the vegetarian options, for simplicity.  Later the boys looked up the ratings and it got a 3.5.  Pretty accurate. The padron peppers may have been the best thing (to them) and the bread with tomatoes was the worst (to me).

Walked back to the hotel for naps, and now we are debating whether we actually want to go back out tonight. I am voting for Benjamin heading to a supermarket for fruit and chocolate.  But everyone is just lying around with computers right now so there are no guarantees about dinner.  

Benjamin is hoping that we will stop comparing everything to places we have seen before.  I am sure that once we get out of this European city, Spain will begin to take on an identity of its own. That's tomorrow.