November 8, 2007
Barcelona was excellent!
I left unbelievable early Wednesday morning. The flight was less than an hour – Barcelona is located in the north east of Spain, on the Mediterranean – and I was checked into the hostel by 2 pm. I went first to the cathedral, where the exterior was inevitably covered completely by scaffolding. No matter, the interior was beautiful and there was a great cloister with a garden attached. It was a Gothic cathedral, but very different from French style Gothic cathedrals, with a focus more on width than height. It was interesting to see the differences.
After walking around Las Ramblas and the Barri Gotic, I headed over to the Picasso Museum. Picasso spent a number of years in Barcelona, and they’ve created a really well-done museum in his honor. Built within a row of five medieval aristocrat’s homes, the museum displays his work chronologically. As Picasso was such a diverse artist with so many distinct periods, this set up gave you a feel of how his work developed and changed over the years.
Later that night, as I tried to take a nap in my unbelievably noisy hostel, Jen finally arrived with Mo and Jacky, two of the other girls studying in La Coruna. We stayed up way to late talking and woke up early the next morning, ate our included breakfast, stuffed our bags with crackers, oranges, and anything else portable the hostel put out, and were off to Montjuic, a huge hill at the center of the city. (You can take outdoor escalators up to it! But we walked.) Catalonia is the region of Spain Barcelona is located in, and it’s particularly “nationalistic” about its regional language and culture. (Jen was shocked at how much the Catalonian language was used in all the museums and advertisements.) So not surprisingly, at the top of Montjuic there was a grand, palace-like building that housed the MNAC, or National Museum of Catalonian Art. Yet another very well done museum, it had a great wing full of Romanesque frescoes taken for preservation from the many ancient Romanesque churches that dot the nearby Boi Valley in the Pyrenees. They were beautiful – there’s some thing entrancing and almost a little foreboding about Romanesque art. Jen and I thought it would be an awesome trip to hike through the valley and see all the original churches these came from.
Later that day, we made it to the Sagrada Familia, an icon of Barcelona created by the city’s most famous architect and designer, Antoni Gaudi. It’s a massive basilica that was started at the end of the 19th century, although work continues on it to this day. It was unusual but striking, and I hope someday I will be able to return when it is completed.
Friday was my last morning in Barcelona, as my flight was Saturday midday. We decided to take a day trip to Montserrat, this beautiful outcropping of hills and cliffs about an hour away from the city. Montserrat has for hundreds of years been home to Benedictine monks, and a beautiful basilica is still maintained on the main part of the mountain, with various monasteries and hermitages dotting the hills. Jen and I took the funicular up to the top, and walked a short way to the St. Joan hermitage. The view was insane and it was so interesting to be up there, and to imagine all the monks who had been climbing to that same place for centuries. Afterwards, we returned to the basilica and waited in like to see La Moreneta, the Virgin of Montserrat. A Romanesque statue supposedly found in the hills of Montserrat, it was one of the reasons Montserrat became a site of significance to the church.
When my flight took off Saturday afternoon, I was sad it had gone so fast. It’s so exciting to be abroad and just hop a flight to a brand new country, and in one weekend learn so much about the history and politics of someplace completely new and different. It makes me excited for all the traveling I’ll be doing in the future, and sad that I can’t stay longer in so many of these places.
