Places You'll Go: Barcelona Photofest

In today's posting we will continue with the trip to Europe from November of 2008 and I'll try to put a lot more pictures in. So, get ready to look at lots of photos!

On our first full morning in Barcelona we hopped on the HOHO very near our hotel. By the way during this trip something happened to me that happens from time to time but when it does I just don't understand it at all. I totally lost my sense of direction. It usually happens if I'm in a place that I haven't seen a map of. I had seen a map of Barcelona so, I don't understand what happened to me. But it felt like we always were turning in the wrong direction and my natural inclination was always to turn and go the other way, but Jenny seemed to know where she was going so I followed her and she never steered us wrong.

Once we were on the HOHO, the first real stop was Sagrada Familia. It is the gigantic catholic church in Barcelona designed by Antoni Gaudi on which work began in 1882. They are still working on it. I suppose when the buildings on your continent average about 500 years in age, you don't think it is too crazy to spend more than 100 years building them. I just think you really have to respect someone who is able to start a project knowing that his grandchildren might not ever see it completed. So, here is Sagrada Familia.

There was an option to go inside the church and tour it, but we chose to only walk around it. Even with that we were probably there for more than an hour. It takes up a full city block and as you walk around each side of the church looks very different from the others. It was planned to have three facades. The first is the Nativity facade on the east side of the church representing the birth of Christ. It is pictured to the left. The Passion facade is on the west side and is harsh and meant to portray the suffering of Christ during his crucifixion. It is actually sort of disturbing to look at which I suppose explains why neither Jenny nor myself took a lot of pictures of that facade. The third facade, Glory faces south and is the one currently under construction. Construction on Glory began in 2002 and it will be the largest and most striking of the three facades. It represents the road to God. Purgatory and death will be depicted here and there will also be representations of the Seven Deadly Sins and the Seven Heavenly Virtues.

Gaudi's design called for 18 spires. To this point 8 have been built - 4 each on the Nativity and Passion facades. Those 8 represent 8 of the Twelve Apostles. At completion there should be 4 more representing the other 4 Apostles, 4 representing the four Evangelists, one representing the Virgin Mary and finally the largest one will represent Jesus Christ.

It is really hard to imagine how imposing it will be when completed. Currently, with only 8 spires completed, it is an amazing thing to see. Reading about the other 10 spires that still need to be completed, the work that still remains to be done on Glory and knowing how long it has taken to get this far, would make me believe that it will be under construction for a couple of hundred more years. But there are projections that the project could be completed by 2026 in time for the centennial of Gaudi's death. Other projections say it will be complete in 2028. I guess that is all thanks to the marvels of modern construction.

After leaving Sagrada Familia, the HOHO took us through the Gracia neighborhood which I absolutely loved. It is nothing but a residential area in Barcelona but it just seemed so European (which was good since it is European) to me. We got off the bus there and took a few pictures in the park that was positioned down the middle of the street with lanes of traffic on each side. The photo at the top of today's blog was taken there and it is one of my favorites from the trip.

From Gracia we went to Tibidabo. You can see Tibidabo from all over the city and we knew that we must get up there. But in November when the tourists aren't around, things shut down a little. Apparently, if you are there while the Mediterranean is abuzz with tourists in the warm months, there is a train that you can take to get to the funicular. We walked up what seemed like the side of a mountain to get to the funicular. The photo below is what Tibidabo looks like from the HOHO stop.

The photo to the left was at the top of the funicular as we reached Tibidabo. In the distance you can see the city below. The name Tibidabo comes from the Latin Vulgate bible verses: "…et dixit illi haec tibi omnia dabo si cadens adoraveris me" which translates to "And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me" (Mathew 4:9) The following comes from Wikipedia. "This phrase, meaning I will give to you, was said to Jesus by the devil as they looked down from an exceedingly high mountain upon all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them. The name of Barcelona's hill thus refers to the popular tradition that it was in fact the exceedingly high mountain itself."

So, at the top of Tibidabo are a catholic church the Temple de Sagrat Cor, an amusement park which dates to the turn of the 20th century and still has many of it's original rides and a huge communications tower. Jenny and I arrived at Tibidabo before noon and were pretty thirsty from our trek to the funicular but this is the point in our trip in which we discovered that beer and wine are cheaper in Europe than water and Coke. So, we had a beer instead of water and toasted our brothers who each were celebrating a birthday while we were there. When we returned home as I showed the photos to my brother he quipped "leave it to the catholics to build an amusement park around a church." I thought it was pretty ingenious.

After leaving Tibidabo, we spent the rest of the day on the HOHO making a few other stops with one of them being a monastery in the city. It was too late in the day to go in. So we went back the following day. I'll show you those photos tomorrow. We also stopped at a small neighborhood church that was really pretty. It was not opened when we arrived but was supposed to be opened 10 or 15 minutes later. So we waited outside until it opened. Photos of that church are the two at the bottom of today's blog.