Kingdom of Gaudi

After you’ve travelled in Europe for a while, you get a little jaded when it comes to churches. It’s sad, because every old European city is crowded with beautiful old churches, each a masterpiece in its own right. When I visited Italy as a teenager, I think my chin spent more time on the floor than it did attached to my upper jaw. And yet these days I don’t find myself as gobsmacked as I used to be when entering yet another spectacular church. There are just so many of them everywhere here.

I guess it’s similar to my complete lack of appreciation of sunny days growing up in Sydney. It was only when I moved away that any glimpse of blue sky made me want to throw a party.

So in the lead-up to my visit to Barcelona, I wasn’t too wound up by all the rave reviews I’d heard of its most famous landmark, La Sagrada Familia. After all, it’s just another European church to check off the list. My prediction: It would be beautiful, fo’ sho’, but probably nothing particular unique. Right?

Omg.

The church of La Sagrada Familia is nothing less than the most exquisitely designed building I have ever visited. It was designed by the legendary Catalonian architect Antoni Gaudi, whose unique creations are studded like jewels all over the city of Barcelona. La Sagrada Familia was his magnum opus – only one-third finished when he died, and still a work in progress to this day, over 120 years after the first stone was laid. This is a building for the ages.


(Picture from Wikimedia Commons – mine did not come out so good.)

It really is hard to know where to start describing this thing. Basically Gaudi took all the things that make the old European churches so impressive and gave them a modern twist. For example, he wanted to capture the grand feeling that a lofty ceiling lends, but didn’t want traditional weight-bearing arches blocking the sightlines inside the church.

So he carefully studied the structural properties of trees, and instead of hefty arches, he installed gorgeous white, slender, tree-like columns at regular intervals. The twisting shapes of the columns and the branches that sprout from atop each one are modelled on geometric forms in nature. The roof itself is studded with giant golden flowers. The effect is of walking through a tall, silent forest.



Then there are the two completed facades at the front and back of the church (as I mentioned, it’s still under construction). The Nativity facade is the more traditional-looking one. It’s meant to represent the hope brought to the world by the Nativity – I thought of it as the Happy Facade. The intricacy of it is just mind-blowing.

Every inch is so detailed that I had to pause my audio guide about twenty times to pick out each mentioned detail from the visual torrent of stone animals, plants and people. And I think I still missed about half of them. Again, my photos don’t even do 20% justice to this place.



On the other side of the church is the Sad Facade (ok, it’s actually called the Passion facade). It was created some decades later by a different artist, although still in the spirit of Gaudi’s original design. It definitely looks more modern, yet still exudes tradition. And it’s very sparse in contrast to the riotous exuberance of the Nativity Facade, but no less dramatic for it.



Here’s a cool fact that appealed to my nerdy side (that’s all my sides, to be exact). Gaudi made these upside-down models to figure out exactly how the parabolic curves of his buildings’ towers should be constructed. He would weigh down each part of the “roof” with little bags of sand that were proportional to how much weight would be borne by that part of the roof once the building was up. Awesome, non?



There is so much more I could say about this place, but there’s no point. It has to be seen to be believed. I am not a church person. And I loved it. I’d heard the hype, and I’d heard the meta-hype (ie. people saying “it lives up to the hype!”), and was not disappointed. (Hereafter, anyone who reads this entry and then goes to Barcelona will be testing whether it lives up to meta-meta-hype. Whoa.)

Once you’ve seen La Sagrada Familia, you enter a trance-like state where all you want to do is walk around Barcelona looking for more examples of Gaudi’s genius. And there is plenty more where that came from. Barcelona is like a living textbook of the quirky, whimsical Modernist movement in architecture, whose buildings make you feel like you stepped through the looking glass.



Although the church is definitely the most epic and impressive of Gaudi’s contributions to Barcelona, I think my personal favourite was Park Güell, a big garden in the hills north of the city. It’s already blessed with an amazing location, offering panoramic views of the city from all sides. It was a beautiful sunny autumn day when we visited, and the park was full of people and music.



On this bright canvas Gaudi added his magic, with cool spots to sit and chill out, like this Jurassic-looking bridge lined with benches…



… colourful balconies overlooking the city…



… and some generally crazy-looking stuff that makes you wonder whether there was something not quite kosher about that pitcher of sangria you ordered at lunch. Whatever that Gaudi guy was smoking, I want some.

Por favor, nos trae la cuenta

That subject line’s for you, Sean and Jon :)

Pretty much all the countries I have visited in Europe so far seem to have been conspiring to make me the size of a blimp, and Spain was no exception.

I spent two consecutive November weekends in Spain – the first in Madrid with my friends Wei and Alec, and the second in Barcelona with Sean. If you have been yawning through the nerdiness of my recent Berlin posts, rejoice: I simply had no time to do thorough background research on Spain before I went, so my knowledge of Spanish history remains only marginally less shocking today than it was before I visited. You are spared the lecture. My Spain posts are going to be all about food, and pretty buildings, and stuff.

One afternoon in Madrid, Alec, Wei and I visited San Ginés chocolateria, an institution in the city for its mastery of a single dish: churros con chocolate. I’d eaten churros before in California and Peru, and enjoyed them – there isn’t much not to like about hot, crispy sticks of deep-fried sugary dough. Along with Chinese roast pork and mozzarella sticks, churros are one of those things I eat only once every two or three years, simply because most of the time I don’t feel like eating them – I feel my arteries clogging up at a mere glance.

So I was pretty blown away when I found out that in Madrid, churros are not sufficient on their own. No, in Madrid you must take these giant cholesterol delivery mechanisms and smother them in a bowl of oozy-goozy molten chocolate. I was simultaneously intrigued and repulsed at the idea.

At the counter at San Ginés, we simply ordered “tres” (there isn’t anything else on the menu), and sat down elbow-to-elbow with the locals in the cosy, green-and-white basement.



It was good. Don’t get me wrong, it was GOOD. Yet at the same time it was just too much oil, too much sugar, too much cream for a Women’s Health/Runner’s World gal to handle intellectually. The entire experience was a weird disconnect between my mind and my body. Obviously homo sapiens is hardwired to enjoy anything calorie-dense, so my taste buds were sighing “Oh, baby. Oh, baby.” My brain, on the other hand, was saying to me incredulously: “Err… I’m not sure if you noticed, but this is death. You are eating death.” I just couldn't quite enjoy it with the abandon one needs on such an occasion.

So, maybe the churros-and-chocolate concept is a bit over the top, but really I can’t complain about any of the meals I had in Spain. Quite the opposite. For one, I love the Spanish concept of tapas. Whenever I go to any restaurant, I end up wanting to order everything on the menu, so for me a meal structured around sharing many small plates of deliciousness rather than each person ordering a big plate of one thing is a dream come true!

One night in Madrid, we ate at Restaurant Botin, which claims to be the oldest continuously operating restaurant in the world. Ernest Hemingway used to eat there, apparently. It was not technically a tapas place, but the portion sizes still lent themselves to sharing many dishes. We tried the local specialties of squid-ink rice and roast suckling pig. Delicious!

Every tapas place we went to was as meticulous on presentation as it was on taste. Here are the amazing desserts Sean and I shared in Barcelona the following weekend – washed down with a big jug of sangria, naturally…


It was nice to be in a place where eating outdoors is doable all year. In Munich, the restaurants packed up their patio chairs weeks ago, but in Barcelona and Madrid the outdoor tables were still going strong. On many streets, the two car lanes are separated by a broad pedestrian strip full of dining tables. The waiters have to cross the road to bring you your food! Gives a new meaning to the phrase “drive-thru”.

I know this post makes it sound like all I did in Spain was stuff my face, but that’s only about 92.3% true. There’ll be more in my next post about art galleries and architecture, and such things that might lead you to conclude incorrectly that I am cultured.

In the mean time, I will leave you with this not so high brow observation: In Madrid, buskers make money by scaring the shit out of you. Wei and I almost died of fright when these street performers in Plaza Mayor yelped at us. When we recovered from the shock, we realised would be supremely easy to take revenge by running off with all their money. They have no legs to chase us with!



We were about to execute the heist when we realised that the severed heads had brought backup, in the form of Joker and Winnie the Pooh's love child. Luckily we both had necklaces of garlic around our necks to ward off the evil eye.



So yeah, don’t mess with Spanish buskers. They will probably come to your house and club you to death with Bratz dolls and colourful balloons.