Oh Barcelona, Barcelona (Part 1)

On Wednesday morning we left Italy and flew over to Spain. We got to the apartment we were renting, put our stuff down and headed back out for our 1st stop, La Sagrada Familia.
The Sagrada is probably Barcelona's most famous attraction, and as such, there were warnings of lines taking hours to get in, but by the time we'd flown in, unpacked and got to the church it was already 2:30ish and the line didn't take more than half an hour.
The Sagrada Familia is a massive church designed by the famous architect Anton Gaudi. Construction began in 1882 and was completed in....well that's just the thing. They're still building it. So why pay something like 15-18 Euro per person to go inside an unfinished building? Well, it's simple really. I can unequivocally state, in my personal opinion of course, that it is THE most beautiful and breathtaking building I've ever seen and been inside of. The design is majestic, stunning and awesome, in the awe-inspiring sense of the word. It's kind of the feeling we'd been expecting to get when viewing the Sistine Chapel, but didn't exactly get. The stained glass windows on the inside are extremely bright and vivid. (At least the ones that have been installed so far)
La Sagrada Familia is kind of like what Hogwarts might look like if Dr. Seuss designed it. I'd go on describing it, but it's impossible to do it justice. In fact, before we came to Spain, I'd seen pictures of the inside and outside of the building, and I was still completely blown away by it in person.
Amazingly, as huge and beautiful as it currently is, they still have an estimated 26 years of construction left, but 1 tour guide I asked said he thinks it probably won't be finished until the 2060s.

This is only one facade of the church, but the others are partially covered by scaffolding

Those green and orange lights? That's what the ceilings and floors look like when the suns shining through the windows

After spending a few hours walking in and around, we headed towards Park Guell, an enormous park overlooking most of Barcelona which famously has statues, buildings and bridges designed by Gaudi. Best of all, it's totally free!
From the closest metro stop, we actually had to walk up an enormous hill, but pretty awesomely, there are escalators that take you up almost the whole way. The park is really big, full of twisted paths, and with no clear objective in mind we wandered around for a while. We eventually found the house that Gaudi used to live in when he lived in the park, which was the only attraction that cost any money. We had a look inside, but it wasn't really anything to write home about.

We headed from Park Guell to Las Ramblas, which is basically like a much bigger version of Ben Yehudah.
 Before we came to Spain, we were told that Kosher food is even harder to find and buy here than in Italy, so we'd brought extra pasta and other food from Italy hoping it would last. Amazingly, when we landed in the airport and got our bags, the 1st person outside was a lady handing out flyers for a Kosher restaurant and mini-market type situation.
Anyway, the mini-market was right off of Las Ramblas, so we headed over to check it out. We stocked up on some essentials like bread, cheese and Heinz ketchup. We then headed over to a different Kosher restaurant (not connected to the market) also on Las Ramblas. The food was pretty good, Chaya got a big juicy burger with fries, while I went with the more traditionally Spanish dish of "paella."
Paella is very popular dish throughout Spain. Traditionally, paella is rice, vegetables and shrimp or other seafood, served hot in the same frying pan it was cooked in. In this case, my paella was with chicken breast, and it was delicious. The menu also contained a Jewish take on "tapas," which is another famous Spanish dish. Tapas are basically starters, which can be more or less anything.
We learned that originally tapas, or "top/lid/cover" was a piece of stale hard bread that people used to use instead of a cork, to protect their wine from flies. Eventually someone decided to snack on that bread. And then someone else decided to snack on that bread but with a tomato spread, or sausage on top. And so on and so forth. Nowadays tapas can be anything from bruschetta with ham, to roasted potatoes with spicy sauce, to squid on toast to something called "dogfish." Some restaurants have almost 200 tapas on their menu, mostly ranging from 2-5 euro each.
Anyway, the Kosher restaurant we ate at had like 5 tapas to choose from, from 6-8 euro each, so we passed.
We walked home and passed some beautiful fountains and more buildings designed by Gaudi just scattered around.

The plan for Thursday was to spend the morning in the city and head out in the early afternoon to the 2nd biggest water park in Europe, which happens to be in Barcelona. Unfortunately, we both woke up feeling pretty sick, so we quickly scrapped the idea. We decided to stay as local as possible, and given the location of the apartment we were renting, that wasn't too bad of an idea. From the balcony in our apartment we could see Camp Nou, the stadium of Barcelona's famous football team. (That's soccer for all you yanks)
We went over in the morning to walk around, take some pictures and check out their ridiculously large and overpriced gift shop, featuring the usual posters, jerseys, and hats, but also plaques with pieces of turf from the stadium, Barcelona potato chips and Wine.
 

By far the strangest (and in my opinion best bang-for-your-buck) item we found were little statues of each player taking poops.

I uh...kid you not....

This was actually something we saw a lot of in Spain. Apparently, one of the biggest signs of respect that can be afforded to someone is to have a "caganer" made of them. Throughout Spain we saw these statues made of celebrities, artists, the Pope and Darth Vader. Unclear what's going on, but we'll just proceed...

Before things get too Messi...Ey-Yo!

 We didn't do the stadium experience tour (23 euros each) but got a cool experience walking around. After Camp Nou we headed over to the Picasso Museum. Now, you may assume that the Picasso Museum is a museum about the life of Picasso featuring many of his original paintings, but you couldn't be more wrong. No I'm just kidding, that's exactly what it is! We got to see some pretty famous works, and learned a lot of interesting facts about Picasso's life.
After the Picasso museum, we partook in another extremely popular Spanish tradition, the Siesta.
For those who don't necessarily know, a "siesta" is a nap. While we were here we learned that the Spanish have a slightly different daily schedule than what we're used to.
Hearing it from a born and bred Spaniard, the daily schedule of a working adult in most of Spain is as follows.

Light breakfast of coffee or toast with garlic and tomato spread
9:30: Start work
11ish: Snack/beer/wine break
2:30 Leave work, go home, eat a major meal for lunch, and then take a siesta, maybe 15 minutes, maybe 45 minutes.
5:00: head back to work for a few hours
9-11: Eat dinner at some point

It makes for a really interesting society when some stores might be randomly closed from 2-4 p.m, but open until 11 at night and some restaurants won't serve dinner before 9:30 or 10.
 A guy we met in Barcelona told us that he was out the night before in a club. People started slowly streaming in at around 3, the place got full at around 4, and most people went home at around 8 in the morning. And that was just a random Wednesday night.

 Anyway, we pulled a "when in Rome..." and took a nice nap, ate dinner and headed out again.
I had heard that there was a festival that was starting that night in the neighborhood of "Gracia."
It was unclear what exactly the festival was all about, but basically every year there is some theme and the people who live on every block decorate their street in a competition of best decorated street.
This, in addition to random street performers, concerts and shows made for a really fun and interesting night.

After enjoying the festival, we went over to the "Magic Fountain of Montjuic."
We went not really knowing what would be there but were completely blown away. At least 5,000 people were crowded around an enormous fountain, which was beautifully lit up and choreographed to different famous classical pieces. The pictures don't do it any justice, but it was really really cool.

 We finished up our night by stumbling upon what looked like a huge arena, and was called "an arena," but turned out to be a huge mall. Either way, we took the elevator to the roof and got to see a really cool 360 degree view of the city.

All this from less than 2 days in Barcelona. There's way more, but I'm gonna just have to break it up into 2. Hope you're all okay with that!
Grathias!
Chaya and Zvi