Cruise day three Barcelona, Spain

Cruise day three Barcelona, Spain

                                                We spent a lot of time in lines today .<

On our second day in Barcelona I decided that we needed to hit all of the major attractions of the city. On the plus side the city of Barcelona has a fantastic subway system that will take you to any place in the city cheaply and efficiently. On the downside as they are the major attractions of an international city the lines and the price for entry were outrageous. We ended up going to many of the tourist destinations only to take pictures from the outside. Also there is the whole “mission creep” phenomenon. That is you see so many wonderful things it is hard for you to wait in line to see yet another wonderful thing. I have to say that I enjoy(ed) stumbling around and finding thing that may or may not be “major” destinations as much as if not more than hunting down specific “major” sites. It seems a bit more interesting to happen upon a site and then explore it. If it happens to be a “major” or minor site does not matter as you are just exploring having fun!

                                                         Sagrada Familia
That being said on the second day in Barcelona we decided to go after the big sites that we did not see the day before. I have to say right out that it was not as fun as the day before, but we did run into some fun things on the way and enjoyed them.

                                    David and Tita posing at Sagrada Familia- the kids refused !

The first thing on the bucket list was the Sagrada Familia the famous cathedral that is always being worked on!  “the Sagrada Família (Catalan pronunciation: [s?'??að? f?'mi?i?]), is a large Roman Catholic church in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, designed by Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926). Although incomplete, the church is a UNESCO World Heritage Site,” It was a nice place to visit and see but the work on it was still quite extensive so the outside was as not as beautiful as it is in the pictures. AS far as going into the inside the line was something like ½ way around the building and it is a huge building. Also as I have mentioned before you get a bit of overkill on all the cathedrals and it just gets to be a bit too much of the same.

                                             Andrew waiting in line at the Picasso Museum

After our obligatory visit to the Sagrada Familia I decided that I wanted to actually go to a museum. You have to understand that all of us in the family have become opposed to going to museums and cathedrals as the majority of them are ok but far from worth the $20 per person entrance fee. But I was sure that the Picasso museum was going to be different! How wrong I was!  
The long wait in line at the Picasso Museum!

I was a much better Picasso exhibit ( at traveling exhibit) at the Detroit Institute of Arts back in 1989. And I have to say that many of his more famous works of art were not even in the museum, sure they had a bunch of his early work, but not much of the historical works. I did enjoy seeing his early work as it showed that he was trained in classical painting and sculpting. It showed a side of his work that is usually not focused on. I did not enjoy the countless rough sketch work as it usually did not include the final work just the rough sketches and the studies that he had done. It would have been wonderful if they had a full collection of a few pieces of his more famous art. That is it would have been great if they had the rough art, the sketches, the studies and then the buildup to the final piece of work, but usually they had the sketches and that was about it. What was most disappointing to me was the collection of his work from the Blue Period, at the Detroit show it had a poignant selection of this period showing the melancholy that the artist was experiencing. All in all the museum was almost random collection of his work that did not show the true genius of the artist, which is sad as he had spent some informative years of his life in Barcelona.

  As I said at the beginning the day was not as much fun as wandering around aimlessly like we did the first day. If anything I felt it was a waste of time and money to try to track down the “must do” sites and attractions of Barcelona. Well not a waste but the hype overs shadowed the actual experience of the big sites while the smaller “found” sites easily were worth finding.

                                                         Train Station Barcelona