I’m stateside now, but hoping to finish blogging some more of our trip before I forget it. We got home Monday evening and I slept 12 hours Monday and then 11 hours Tuesday, which is the day it is now. So I’m almost back to normal from the time zone perspective, and also in the sense that the memories are already slipping. I’m trying to sort through it by the dates on the pictures, but there is a definite possibility that the group of items I cover on this post didn’t actually happen on the same day.

Sometimes I feel like my brain is a bag of sand was a hole in it. There still does to be some stuff in there though, so maybe it’s a very, very small hole, or a poor metaphor.

Our Barcelona trip was entirely spent in four neighborhoods. Eixample, our home base, includes many small businesses, several Modernist buildings, and Sagrada Familia. West of it is Gràcia, which we only visited once, when we went to Park Guell. East of it is the Cuidad Vella, or Old City, which includes La Rambla, Gotic Barri, El Born, and Barceloneta and abuts the Mediterranean. South of both Eixample and Cuidad Vella is the huge neightborhood of Sants-Montjuic, which includes Montjuic, a bluff overlooking the water with both cultural and natural attractions, and the commercial port of Barcelona.

On March 3rd we started with our chef-led tapas-making class, which took place in the chef’s apartment in Barceloneta. It did not seem appropriate to take pictures inside someone else’s house, but we did get one from the balcony, which shows some of the many extra yachts in town to see the America’s cup races.

After the class we decided to take the tram from Barceloneta to Montjuic, a very good cardiac workout for a acrophobe such as myself. The tram ride is about six minutes long, extending between a tower on the beach and a land station about halfway up the bluff. I was clutching a pole in the middle, but my husband got pictures looking north toward the modern city, south at the commercial port, down from the midway point, and coming in for a landing.

Olympic venues from the 1992 games are scattered about the city, and we stopped at a concession near the Natatorium, which has a beautiful view. Sagrada Familia is shown by an arrow in the long shot and then again in a closeup. As you may remember, its highest tower when finished will be a few feet shorter than Montjuic, but the cranes seem to be a little taller than that.

We ended the afternoon at the Fundació Joan Miró, a fun museum at which I took zero pictures of the paintings though they were lovely. I did pose with a friend at the entrance, and took one picture of the Solar Bird, which appeared in many guises and sizes, often alongside the Lunar Bird. The last shot shows the accessible model of the facility, which was designed to be touched. There was another model for the sighted.

In contrast to pretty much all of our friends, my husband and I are visual art challenged, but we both really enjoyed the Miro. Amusingly, Miro also has a large mosaic installation on the street in La Rambla near the Liceu opera venue which we must have walked over at least three times yet never noticed. We looked at pictures later. It is huge, and brightly colored. Feel free to draw any conclusions that seem correct.