Day 11

 This morning we caught a taxi to Park de Güell. Our tour began at 10. We wandered the gardens and viewed all the beautiful art/sculptures and houses. Gaudí built one house as a show house when he first began the gardens with the goal to create a neighbourhood that was within nature. However, because at the time Barcelona city was 20mins away, no one bought the houses/plans. He then left the gardens to the city of Barcelona. Prior to his death, he had built many areas for the “town” including a market place, meeting areas and the house. Gaudí designed his artworks/infrastructure to blend into nature so most fences, pillars and walls look like trees or caves. He signed the meeting area so that water would drain through the sand and funnel into pillars to be collected for drinking water. 

The city now reaches the park and surrounds it but the park remains the same. 

After the tour we had breakfast and then jumped onto the bus. We did the blue loop on the bus seeing the rest of the city of Barcelona and then stopped at the water front for lunch. There are a lot of mega/super yachts parked up as the Grand Prix was on earlier this week. 

After lunch we headed to the Barcelona aquarium. It was nice to get out of the sun but also to see the sharks and different displays. They had lots of walkways underneath the tanks. 

After we had wandered through and seen all the tanks, we jumped back on the bus with the aim to get to the closest stop to our hotel. An hour and a half later we made it to the stop! Making it back to the hotel at 5. 

A fun fact we heard on the bus was that in Spanish culture it is common to bring a dozen eggs to your wedding as a sign of goodluck and also as they believe this will bring good weather for the day. 

I then showered and lucky I did! As soon as I hopped out the mains water pipe up the street from our hotel burst so we had no cold water for a few hours. Barnaby had to wait. 

We decided to have dinner at 6 and headed a block away to a restaurant. It was delicious, by far the best meal since being in Spain. After dinner luckily the roads were no longer flooded and the water was back on! 

Tomorrow we have the high speed first class train from Barcelona to Madrid leaving at 11:20. Corinna flies into Madrid tomorrow morning and belle the following day.

Madrid is a lot hotter than Barcelona, so I’m abit anxious but we don’t have too much locked in so can cruise to a certain extent.

Our favourite spots in Barcelona have been definitely the Segrada Familia and the Park Güell. Gaudí is definitely the main reason Barcelona has any sights to visit.. the top 3 tourist spots are his architecture and he has influenced a number of other sights. 

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