After a few days of sight-seeing with my parents I realized again how beautiful Barcelona is. The city does have its ugly parts, particularly in the neighborhoods further from the center and suburbs, but the city center is so beautiful. Yesterday we went to see La Pedrera [Casa Milà]. It is my favorite of the Gaudí buildings in Barcelona from the outside, and the inside is beautiful as well, as is the roof. It’s amazing how much thought he put into literally everything, he was a genius.

Today we went to see the Palau de la Música Catalana which is so breathtaking. It is basically a huge glass building with so much natural light, beautiful colored glass and so much detail to everything. We were not allowed to take pictures but you can see a picture of the glass ceiling of the main concert hall here. It is UNESCO world heritage [along with many other buildings and places in Barcelona].

And so many of the residential houses in Eixample, my neighborhood, are extraordinarily beautiful, like this one, just one block from mine [ignore all the trucks on the street]. Today was the first time I noticed it, but I think it was under restoration so you could not see the facade.

Tonight we had dinner at this vegetarian restaurant just a block from my apartment [it was also mentioned in the Lonely Planet: the Amaltea, just in case you ever come to Barcelona], and it was really good. I am no fan of tofu and most foods wholemeal [well, pasta and cake mainly, I do like wholemeal bread and pizza], but the dinner I had [spring rolls and a cheese pizza as starter and main dish, and apple crumble cake for dessert, and a yogi tea] was really good, and good value too [the whole menu, starter, main dish, dessert and tea for €14.50]. My parents also really enjoyed their dinner. The cheese pizza was actually so rich, I had a third left over at the end [that I took back home, I figured I could eat it tomorrow].

We also went to the Pueblo Español [Poble Espanyol] which is basically a little town in the middle of Barcelona compromised of houses from all over Spain. It was really interesting to see all these architectural styles in one place.

Most of what we now have left over to see are art museums, but I have not been to most of them yet so I hope it will not be too much. I am glad I am seeing most of these sights with my parents [well, except for the usual frustrations that come up when I spend a lot of time with my parents], though, because entrance fees are ridiculously high for most places, and with my trip to Madrid coming up next week, I am really thankful that my parents are paying for all of them.

I’ve been continuously uploading pictures from each day which you can see here. I will keep adding more in the next two days.

By the way, I upgraded Wordpress to 2.5RC1 yesterday. It is not the final version but I was too curious to wait for the final version. I like it so far, it did not break my layout [except for the list bullets in the sidebar that were not there up until now] or plugins. I also haven’t encountered any bugs so far, so I will keep this version until 2.5 comes out. I am such a blogging nerd to get so excited about a new version of Wordpress. I had actually been waiting for it as it was supposed to be released on the 10th, but then it got delayed [and boy, was I disappointed!], and RC1 was just released yesterday.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 23:34 and is filed under Blog, Food & Recipes, Life in Spain, Photo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.