Barcelona

6/6
Buenas Noches from Barcelona!  We have the exciting opportunity to be here on the night that Barca won the championship, and we listened to the entire city celebrate.  It was amazing, and very VERY loud.

Dining area and living room

We arrived earlier today and found our vacation rental - though it was a lot more complicated to find it than we thought it would be!  Next place we will have a map ready, or the GPS, or something.  It was totally worth it though.  This is the biggest place that we will be staying at, purposefully, since we are here for 10 nights.  It is a wonderful apartment with three bedrooms and two bathrooms.   I would guess it is maybe 800 sq ft, but it is a lot bigger than a hotel room!

Our room.  Michael's "nap"

The good thing about flying over to Europe at night is that you are completely confused about the time instantly.  We checked in yesterday, went to the market, and then found a tapas bar for dinner. Yum!  Then we headed back to home base, where Michael lay down for a quick nap (which lasted three hours!) while I got everyone showered and in pjs and then got the munchkins into bed.  I got Michael up and we were able to watch Barca win the championship and be amazed at the celebratory noise afterwards before we headed for bed ourselves.

The girls' room.

Luke's room.  Does he look like he is concerned about the butterflies?  Nope.

This view gives you an idea of how the space is maximized.
Between the little table up front and the lamp in the background
there are two bedrooms, a bathroom, and the living room.
The kitchen, another bedroom, the laundry room,
and another bath are up front.

And these are the keys!  What do you think ACE would do if you brought these in for a copy?
The building is on the modernist registry and it was designed by Gaudi as a student.  It is beautiful.

One block over.

6/7
We are staying in Poble Sec, which is an area of Barcelona just up from the coast and not to far from Montjuic, which is where we wandered out to today, after sleeping in to 10 am.  The children got 13/14 hours of sleep last night, and we had to wake them up this morning.  Of course Colorado is 8 hours behind us, so who knows what their brains were doing!

This is our lovely building.

This is the view from one block over - I loved the seemingly endless throng of humanity and the copious amounts of clean laundry!  Michael wanted to take a picture of me taking in our dry laundry through the window today, but I was done before he could get the camera out.

The entrance to Montjuic.

This morning we ventured up to Castle Montjuic, which is one of the highest points in the city.  It is built on the top of a hill and there were a lot of stairs to traverse!  Gabi was less than thrilled with the number of stairs.  It was only about mile walk each way from the apartment, but the entire way there was uphill.






But the views were amazing!














What a beautiful city this is!



We grabbed a quick snack for lunch and then headed over to the Museu Picasso.  Can't beat seeing Picasso in his homeland.  Plus there was a visiting Dali exhibit too - though the melted clocks that Michael and I love so much weren't there.  Unbelievable number of pieces though - the girls were quite fond of Picasso's Pigeon pieces.

The children were pretty scandalized by the nudes, and there were a couple of Picasso's works on display that I wish that the kids would have missed, but they came out relatively unscathed - probably on par with Bourbon Street in New Orleans a couple years ago.  Michael and I tried to get them to marvel over the ability of the painter to depict the life in the human body - we helped them to look at feet and hands and then compare them to their own hands - I think it helped.   Of course I have no pictures from the Museum, I should probably have taken one of the line we waited in for 35 minutes to get tickets, and then the arch we sat under for 45 minutes waiting for our entry time!  Wow that is a popular spot!

Today was our anniversary, and this is the first one that we have celebrated on another continent, so I think it will be fondly remembered just for that.  Plus the day was pretty spectacular too!

Hopefully we will get to the beach tomorrow.