¡Xiauxa Barcelona!

Barcelona is a fun town. Its so full of interesting architecture and street art, you only need to buy a ticket there and walk around to experience all of its beauty.
This is Gaudí's Sagrada Familia, from Park Güell, a huge park above the city that he designed. The structure is the most prominent part of the Barcelona skyline, and the weirdest. I didn't go inside but our friends that did said that once the outside structure is finished it will look completely different. A construction team still works on the Sagrada Familia 5 days a week, slowly completing the complex plans set out by Gaudí before he died.
This is Willie (Guille is his name in Catalá) and Erick on the metro at 5 in the morning. Willie was our guide, entertainer and host.
This is Willie and his family and friends from Lleída, a town near Barcelona. They are borrowing the large plastic sign that advertises the film festival we just returned from in Sitges. They gave the poster to Taylor as a gift and souvenir. We arrived at the festival at midnight to a crowd of zombie horror-flick geeks. The tickets that we bought for the screenings (2-5 am) happened to feature lesbian horror flicks like "Lesbians in Outer Space" and my favorite, "Lesbian Vampire Killers." Needless to say, that night was the weirdest night I've spent "out" in Spain, and certainly one of the most memorable.

This is the auditorium where we watched the screenings. Sitges is a beautiful seaside town close to Barcelona and the anual host of the Sitges Film Festival, which features mostly horror films. This year, the film "Zombieland" was the headliner and for the other 46 hours of that weekend smaller or independent films were screened. But back to Barcelona...

Spires on the Sagrada Familia

What I'd like to call the "Gingerbread House" in Park Güell

A replica of Gaudí's statue "The Cosmos," from the Sagrada Familia. This is in the garden of the house turned-museum that Gaudí designed and where he lived while designing the park and for the last part of his life.
A shot of the Gaudí House/Museum that for some reason reminds me of Mom. Do you have something in the garden that looks like this? Or maybe it's just the plants?


The famous bench in Park Güell is most impressive up close, where you can see that each piece of the mosaic is unique. The details on the bench make it seem that Gaudí himself collected tiles from old furniture in garage sales and arranged them on this windy, organic structure. The other cool thing about this picture is that the two girls posing on the bench, although I didn't notice them when I took the picture, look just like my housemate Alison and I.


One last quirky image of Barcelona: This is a Cathedral/ Amusement Park at the top of the tallest peak surrounding the city. You can see this from Willie's apartment and I took the picture from Park Güell. If you look closely you can see the ferris wheel on the left and the rollercoaster circling the Cathedral. hmmm


Words I learned in Catalán:

-ganivet = knife
-pa = bread
-kalimocho = jesus juice = coke mixed with cheap red wine (probably not a catalán word, but I learned it in Barcelona)
-The numbers 1-10 but I can't spell them
-xiauxa (but I don't know if I spelled it correctly) = party
-Vull tornar = I want to go back