BARCELONA Part 2

Hola,

We've made 3 trips into Barcelona and barely scraped the surface. For our future reference, it would probably be best to get some sort of combined ticket to allow us entrance to several venues without queuing for tickets. Also it would be great to see it at night: there are buses all through the night back to our local town so that's on the list for next time.
Park Guell, below, designed by Gaudi and financially backed by Guell, was meant to offer housing in a large park but there were no buyers so now it is just a park.

I suppose it was a sort of Port Merion type experiment. 

Apart from the trouble getting into places, finding places was also quite a problem. A better map would have solved it but we have found the hundreds of policemen in the streets throughout Spain really helpful. They also salute you as you greet them. I seem to remember British police did likewise many years ago but probably stopped when Dixon of Dock Green went off air.

Above is the National Museum of Catalonian Art, housed in a spectacular old royal palace. The interior matches the outside for splendour and the exhibits are exceptional. I thought I had had my fill of old church frescoes, but these have been transferred from old churches which have been demolished and 'stencilled' onto the walls inside the palace with brilliant results. Because of these we only had time for a brief look around the rest of the galleries so it is on our list to return.

Mataro also has its' fair share of Gaudi. Below is his original warehouse building now housing an art gallery devoted to modern Catalan artists.

We also discovered this rather strange dance competition on Sunday morning in the main square. It was quite complex and judges were going from group to group and occasionally waving a team off. It seemed to last several hours so sadly we didn't see the final result. The band were playing some fairly strange Catalan music but the intricacies were lost on us.

The Catalan people although quite friendly are also very proud. I went into a shop and asked for cuatro postres of some sort. The woman looked at me baffled and I repeated. She said, in Catalan, you want one. No! Cuatro. She bustled off to find another assistant to whom I repeated my request. Ah! she said, you want quatre. Rarely has one letter caused so much confusion.

Next stop is over the French border in Narbonne. The penultimate post is next week.

Bona Tarda

J&P