On our last day, we went up to Park Güell to see the last Gaudi site in Barcelona. Wealthy industrialist Eusebi Güell commissioned Gaudi to design a subdivision for 60 wealthy families on a mountain side. Gaudi came up with suitably wacky entrances and public walking paths, but only two houses were built on the estate, as it turns out that people don't like hiking up a mountainside every single day. The public spaces were built, and in 1925, Barcelona received it as a walking park. Gaudi's work here is inside the Monument Zone, for which advance tickets should be booked (only 400 are available per half hour). If you don't get them (which you should, they're €7), you can see everything at a distance from outside the gates and only miss the colonnade of the washer woman, and the hipostyle room underneath the Nature Plaza. If you fail at even that, just go to the City Museum. Park Güell's curving lines and crushed tile mosaics are straight out of the mind of Bob Cassily (though Cassily is really out of the mind of Gaudi, as he worked some 70 years later). We saw everything but the most ornate mosaics in the hypostile room, which were under renovation, but that's Europe for ya.
And with that, our trip to Spain has come to a close. Tomorrow we have a bunch of awful flights, and get home to snuggle the cat at around 11PM.
I was surprised too; in retrospect, I think rice was what made travelling in Southeast Asia much easier. And now that I know Portugal has it too, I don’t have to prep myself for potatoes again! By the end of the trip, I couldn’t help but ask just how much plain meat someone can eat
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We have only been to one of these - Australia, which was amazing. We stayed there for a week and, as small as it was, we never got bored. Now we have a list to work off of for future visits!
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