Saturday, March 19, 2011

Barcelona - 19 March

I think I have died and gone to Art & Architecture Heaven! Everywhere you look in this city there's another famous artists work on display or stunning architecture. Just this afternoon on our walk home I happened across a Salvador Dali Exhibition. I will need to visit that tomorrow.

We started our day with a decision to visit another Gaudi installation Guell Park. Still having a valid ticket for the Barcelona Bus Turistic, we walked to the Placa de Catalunya (Square) and joined the huge queue for the blue line. This took us past the Sagrada Familia and Ron was keen to get back to this church on another day to take more photos. He also got the giggles when a man and his daughter sitting in front of us, started arguing over the difference between the Spanish and Italian announciation of Sagrada Familia. This was especially amusing as they were arguing in Italian and Ron could understand the jist of the discussion!

Between eating too many olives for breakfast and beginning to understand Italian in Spain, I think that there is a danger of Ron 'going meditteranean'.

At last our bus arrived at the bottom of another steep hill and we pushed our paining legs up the slope to the entrance of Guell Park. Wow...


For those that have visited Paranella Park on the edge of the Atherton Tablelands I would suggest that the Spaniard that originally built it was inspired by Gaudi. The similiarities between Paranella Park and Guell Park in relation to the grottos is very obvious.


Again my description of Guell Park which was originally built as a housing development, will be woefully short of its true splendour. However, I will give it a go. In short, it is a fantasy of grottos, gardens and fairy fantasy buildings covered in a riot of massive colourful tile mosiacs.







I did not like some elements of the park especially the rough stone walls and bridges but, I absolutely loved the curved lines of the buildings and mosiacs (what I saw of them between peoples bums!).
I am almost inspired to mosiac terracota pots again. Watch out Annie, you may need to resurect that mosiac teapot fountain idea.






We also popped up to Tibidabo Mountain located behind the city, first by tram and then funicular rail. Here we had commanding views of Barcelona, the coast and the inland region running parallel to the city.

As the afternoon drew to a close we wondered through the very busy shopping squares near Le Rambles. With relief Ron and I popped into a book store to discover they were selling novels written in english and that they were on sale. Ron ran out of reading material a couple of days ago and has found CNN a poor substitute for getting a fix of the english language.

Further along in our stroll we discovered under the shadow of the Barcelona Cathedral, a full brass band, groups of people holding hands and dancing. We have since discovered that this form of traditional dancing is called Sardanes (not sardines; although they are packed pretty close together).

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Welcome to the Dingopups Blog

Dingopups is the Foster families blog. Here you can see what our interests are and what we like to do with our time.

One of our current activities is traveling on a holiday in Italy and the UK.