Barcelona: Modernisma

Well, this was our first photo in Barcelona because our train was late (surprise!) and it was dark and we were hungry.

First stop next morning had to be Basilica Sagrada Familia because we figured we would not be able to get anywhere close once all the tourists arrived. Sadly, John didn't think to get tickets to go inside a month ago, because that's how far out they are sold out.

You can look at our photos, find more online and/or read the story of 

Antoni Gaudí on Wikipedia. But if you have to see it in person to get any appreciation of this miraculous church. Buy tickets before you go!

Not too exciting is John posing in front of a famous flower shop:

This cathedral may have been in Lyon, but wherever - another ornate place for Eleni to get her spiritual fix for the day.

It appears John needs fixing to walk this corridor in Park Guell, another one of Gaudi's projects. It was rainy, crowded, and under a lot of construction so it turned into a bit of a disappointment.

A necessary photo to prove we were there! Note the mud.

The friendly dragon, centerpiece of the park. You know it's a nice dragon because St. George (Geordie) hasn't killed it. St. G has statues of him slaying dragons all over Europe, including Barcelona.

Two structures near the bottom of the park taken from a point to show less tourists.

Gaudi also created houses for rich people. Here is one of the 3 in town:

The Rick James tour said that the town walls had been torn down to expand the city, but we found a lot of pieces of town wall on our touring.

This is what your mailbox looks like if you live in Barcelona. I guess they had airmail and turtle (rather than snail) mail.

You'd think Sagrada Familia would be enough, but here is another exotic cathedral.

This is a monument to 5 people that got executed for resisting Spanish tyranny a while back. Barcelona is in Catalunya and has been trying to secede from Spain since forever.

The streets worked out OK for John when they weren't overcrowded with tourists. Tall and thin!

The Catalonians keep their Roman relics inside to protect them. These are 3 of 4 arches still standing from the time of Augustus.

And just a few more amazing sights:

A unicorn!

We finally got paella on our last night. It's supposed to be a lunch dish, but we had leftover dinner for lunch. We had to go to the same great restaurant near the hotel 2 nights in a row because of the threat of severe weather. We got back to our room before it hit, but it must have hit hard. The next morning the city was just plain screwed up. 

This gargoyle thought it was great:

This is evidently how pigeons look when they get washed off by heavy rain:

The metro was flooded and inoperable. Buses weren't running. Cabs weren't picking up people. We tried Uber and waited over a half hour until we stopped believing one would show up. We finally walked the whole hour to get to the trains. Cue the next nightmare - As one policia had warned us, trains were dead. Tracks washed out. The train company didn't send any updates about our reserved tickets. The inside of the station was mobbed. Police were only letting people into the departure area a few at at time and we had to brave the crush to get to that point. That was when our train, which had said it was leaving in a few minutes, disappeared from the board. So they made us leave the area near the departure area and go back to the crush. Our train finally came back up on the board, we maneuvered through the crush, and barely got on the train. It was only about 45 minutes late arriving in Madrid, but we were beat from the stress and from carrying our heavy luggage on our backs for hours. And then we arrived in Madrid . . .