Gaudi, St. George, and the Black Madonna

Our last couple of days we hit Barcelona, and there are so many things I want to go back and spend more time at. Some of the highlights I hit:

1.     Monserrat is a monastery located outside the city on a hill. We went up to walk around, take in the views, and see the Black Madonna. Unfortunately, the picture I have of the Black Madonna was taken from behind glass, so it's not that great. I bought the postcard picture. But the ride up was worth it, if not just for the scenery. The hills are beautiful, all wrapped in fog and clouds.

2.     Park Guell: this place was cool, but absolutely mobbed. You could barely walk. I was really excited to see this park, but I’d love to go back to Barcelona on the off-peak (or maybe just not Holy Week) because the crowds at this place were unbelievable. I bought postcards that had pictures because it was really difficult to get good ones and it was hard to get a sense of the place when you can barely see anything not right in front of you. The project designed by Gaudi was supposed to be a housing development for the wealthy. Can you imagine living in a house like this? Looks like a gingerbread mansion. When the idea didn’t catch on, the city turned it into a public park.

One of the houses that was never actually lived in

Gaudi was really into sustainability: the town hall/benches on the roof actually collects rainwater for household use, and the tile work is all made of broken ceramic that factories in the city were throwing out.

Part of the cistern system, on the ceiling of what would have been the town hall and market area

 Highlight: I found the place where America’s Next Top Model with Tyra Banks held their final runway show in the season that ended in Spain. Fabulous!

3.     Gaudi’s famous houses La Pedrera and Casa Batlló. La Pedrera looks a little sinister, with its metal balconies (not very well featured in the photograph below) and Casa Batlló looks like a snake or dragon with its colored scales.

La Pedrera

Casa Battlo on the right, with the curved roof. You can't see the colors of the facade as well in this picture. That's why I bought the postcard.

4.     I was in Barcelona on St. George’s Day. St. Jorgi is the patron saint of Barcelona and the people love him, he’s everywhere in this city. St. George shares his day with Shakespeare and Cervantes, who both died on this day. To celebrate, women buy books for the men in their life (husbands, fathers, brothers, etc.) and the men buy their women roses (they symbol of St. George)! All over the city there were stands run by different organizations selling books and roses on the street. This is my kind of city.


5.     Palau de la Musicia Catalana: translated as the Palace of Catalan Music. This place is a beautiful Modernista concert hall. I took a tour (unfortunately you can’t take pictures inside) and it was really beautiful! All of the design is made to make the audience feel like they are in a garden, connected with nature. The beautiful ceiling in the middle of the room dips into the concert hall and is decorated to look like a sun. It’s stained glass and lets in a lot of light, which is incredible considering the concert hall was surrounded by tall buildlings and narrow streets. Aside from a small courtyard entrance, it still is. Even though I didn’t get pictures of the inside (again, I bought postcards), the outside is still pretty remarkable.

And that’s my tour de force of Spain! Being there for Holy Week was interesting--it was cool because there was so much energy and excitement in the cities we visited, but things were closed or altered due to processions which, if you're only visiting for a day, made it hard to see certain things, like the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. The Sagrada Familia is a Mondernista-style neo-Gothic cathedral still being built according to the designs of the architect Gaudi, who designed the two houses that I mention above. The cathedral is not even finished yet! All the more reason to go back!

Granada and Valencia

I was really looking forward to time in Granada. This city is so important in terms of history; it was the last stronghold of the Moors in Spain, and in 1492 it was all over with the capture of Granada. The change from north to south, even from Madrid to Seville, is telling. Madrid, like I said, is very mainstream European. The south of Spain is European as well, but with a lot of Moorish influence discernable in their architecture and decorations. For example, tiles were nonexistent in Madrid, but in Andalucia they’re everywhere!

So back to Granada. I really liked the city and wish I could spend more time there. The good thing about a tour is that you see a lot, and you don’t have to figure it out yourself. However, you can’t spend as much time as you want in certain places. We drove through the morning from Seville to Granada and only had the afternoon in the city. It’s a small city, with little shopping streets, plazas, and the Gran Via through the center. We went to the Royal Chapel in the morning (the cathedral was closed) and saw the tombs of Ferdinand and Isabella, the two Spanish monarchs who united Spain (from a conglomerate of kingdoms) and outsed the Moors from Granada. They still celebrate mass in the little chapel every day, even though they have a cathedral with services, because Isabel wanted it that way. They even have a candle burning all the time because she wanted it that way. Can you imagine? Being so powerful and influential that what you said 500 years ago still matters to these people? It’s amazing.

We then went up to the Albaycin, the old Muslim quarter of the city built onto a hill. It was picturesque—whitewashed houses, with iron balconies and colorful flowers. 

House in the Albaycin

View of the Alhambra fortress from the Albaycin

View of Granada from Albaycin

We walked up for a great view of the Alhambra and the city. These two guys were singing in Spanish with guitars, but their song was a little weird.

“Look at the Alhambra, how beautiful”—sounds normal, right?

“The Alhambra, the Alhambra, it is falling”—Wait, what?

“We will rob you while you sleep”—Excuse me?!?!

Probably trying to impress the non-Spanish speaking tourists, but I was laughing the whole time at their ridiculous (awful) lyrics.

Our next day took us to Valencia which, like Granada, I wish I had more time in. Again, the drive was beautiful, with little villages wedged into the side of mountains, some of them covered in snow. Our first stop in the morning was in this little town to see a Troglodyte cave. You enter the cave like a normal house, only the house is actually made out of the walls of the rock surrounding it. People would just dig into the sides of hills to make their house. It was pretty cool to see.

We resumed our scenic drive, past the Mediterranean. You can make out little towns in the hillside with a walled fortress on the top of a hill, with the tower of the church peaking out from the town below. Terraced rows of fruit trees cover the hills and the valleys in between them.

Our visit to Valencia started with the Ciudad de Artes y Ciencias, a grouping of new museums. 

It was a rainy day in the city unfortunately, so we walked around and hung out in the main plaza of the city. 

Main plaza

One of the cool things I learned about Valencia is they have these falles (like big comical floats) on St. Joseph's Day. Each neighborhood works really hard on one float, and then the day of Falla, the festival, they burn all but one of them! It's really something to see, another reason to go back. 

My next installment will be highlights of Barcelona--stay tuned!

Return to the US and Continuing my Tour of Spain with Sevilla

Update: I am back in the States and busy enjoying 75 cent candy bars and not paying 7 dollars for McDonalds. But there are some things about Denmark and Europe that I miss/have noticed that are different here:

• Most people in Denmark don't wear jeans. They wear skirts, tights, black pants, leggings, everything except the elusive blue jean.
• Not having a castle towering over a lake on my way to school. 
• Flights between countries are no longer 4 hours max. 
• No more cobblestone streets
• Hoardes of small children taking the public bus in the mornin

I'm sure I'll think of even more as I get back into a routine here. I'm looking for an internship in Washington, DC this summer, have a paying job lined up there too, and moving into a new apartment with new roommates. Busy busy! But I realize that I haven't been good the past few weeks (really, ever since I got back from Spain) about updating on my travels and things I've seen! So I'll try to give you the abbreviated version in a few posts, because I'll probably be talking with most of you very soon!


Continuing chronologically, my next stop in Spain was Sevilla!

Seville has as many churches as they do orange trees (a lot). I walked around the area near the hotel the evening we got into town, and I took pictures of at least 3 churches in a 4-block radius. Amazing. I feel more at home in Spain after being in Denmark, where everything is Lutheran and in a language I cannot understand a bit of. With Holy Week, pictures of Mary are all over the place. I got to see two of the huge floats that they use in the famous processions. There is so much riqueza, richness, in texture, in gold and silver, in expensive fabric. The size of these things is amazing! I wonder how people manage to carry them for hours. One of the processions starting near our hotel began at 12 am and returned to the Basilica at 5 am, just in time for all the Sevillians to go to bed. 

Seville was a lot more colorful than Madrid, in terms of its buildings.Walking through the old city was really beautiful. 

Our hotel was right near the old city walls (which, as you know by now, I thought was really cool)

Church near hotel in La Macarena neighborhood

Building in the center (white) is la Basilica de la Macarena, where I saw the floats

Courtyard in the old city

Our tour guide decided to have me demonstrate how to wear a mantilla (the comb and lace monstrosity on my head).

One of the other places I visited that I could have spent hours (if I wasn’t on a tour de force!) was the Plaza de Espana in Seville. It’s decorated in incredibly detailed tiles, with all the different areas of Spain represented. I took pictures of the ones on our itinerary, but that ended up being more than I thought it would be! There were lots of families out enjoying the sun. You can rent boats and ride them around the little river that runs through the plaza. 

 
Next episode: Joint post on Granada and Valencia, with the highlights of both.

La Mezquita en Cordoba

We depart from Madrid and make our way south. The drive, while long, is beautiful. Vast fields of olive trees in perfect rows, with mountains in the distance. Later we drive into those mountains, the Sierra Morena, right through the only natural pass in the area. There are rocks all the way up on either side of the view from the bus.

We reach Cordoba early afternoon and visit the Mezquita, which is a weird mix of buildings. First a huge mosque, one of the Spanish kings allowed a church to be built physically inside the mosque. You had the sense that the church was trying to outdo the mosque, the styles were so different. First of all, the clocktower of the church is built right on top of the Muslim minaret of the mosque. 

The arches of the mosque were simple, yet repetitive. 

The church had a lot of decorative features, which was a sharp contrast to the simple double arches of the mosque. It is said that the king who gave permission for the church to be built visited the site after construction had begun and regretted that he had allowed part of such a unique structure to be compromised. 

Altar of the church--stark contrast to the arches

The depth of the place was what made it so awe-inspiring, given its lack of height, and it’s so hard to capture the depth on film.  Here's a little bit, with a close-up on the mihrab of the mosque.

Visiting this place was like checking off one of the sites featured in my old Spanish textbooks—I kept thinking of the pictures I saw in those books and being in awe that I was actually there, visiting one of those sites.