Spain Day 2 - Barcelona
Jul 19
We were both really tired yesterday, so we both had a good sleep, which works out well with our long itinerary for today.
Santa Caterina Market
We headed here first for brunch/breakfast. This place reminds us both of Granville Island; it almost looks exactly the same minus the food court. Spanish people seems to be really into seafood and internal organs; it shows in their cuisines. There are a lot of fresh seafood being sold at the market, scallops, octopus, monkfish, razor clams, mussels, and other fish that I can't name (they are so lucky to have so much seafood!) There are also stores specialized in selling offal, with skinned heads of lamb (eyeball attached!) and lamb brains! I seriously think that Chinese people may really get along with Spanish people, in terms of food choices.
Picasso Museum
Having the Audio guide really helps with understanding his background and the ideas behind his paintings. The museum has a good collection of his early works. He rose to fame when he was only 15, winning gold medals in competitions with paintings done in styles that were conventional at the time. It appears that he went through different phases of self discovery, in an effort to develop his own style. He tried different things as there were paintings done with brush strokes that are reminiscent of Van Gogh's style. One of his paintings has a potted plant and it reminds me of Van Gogh's sunflower. He did a re-interpretation of the Las Meninas by Diego Velazquez and it reminds me of drawings by kindergarten students, which is totally cool, I think. I would definitely use those paintings as examples for my students in art classes, telling them that there is no such thing as a bad drawing.
Esglesia de Santa Maria del Mar (St. Mary's church?)
There are a lot of churches in Spain, and there are a lot of "St. Mary's" churches in Spain. This one is special in the sense that its completion only took 55 years, within a century, so the style is consistent. It is all built in the Gothic style (which I need to study about). We walked up the spiral stairs to the roof with the guide, and he gave us a little history lesson on all the signifcant buildings we saw up on the lookout. I was told that this church has the biggest rose window in Barcelona.
Museu Frederic Mares
We were going to visit La Catedral but the line up was WAY too long, so we decided to take a detour and visited this museum as it is on our itinerary. This is a museum with collection solely donated by Frederic Mares, a sculptor. Basically, our impression of this person is that he is a hoarder of antiques. One has to wonder how big his house had to be in order to house everything in this museum. As we entered the museum, we were welcomed by stone sculptures from the 1st to 4th century, and then we werer greeted with an overwhelmingly large collection of Corpus Christi sculptures, some done in different styles, which took up a whole floor of the building. The top two floors were mostly antiques collectibles like, keys, locks, door knobs, hand fans, etc. We finally got to see his own creations, which was housed in one of the rooms in the building. The sculptures were surprisingly well-made, but there weren't many. It's a collection of reasonable size, I guess.
La Catedral (The Cathedral) - every city one that is named "The Cathedral"
When we exited Frederic Mares Museum, the line up at this church has kinda died down. We decided it was a good time to go in. Service at this church runs every hour, on the hour, until closing, so we don't really get to see the whole thing as parts were blocked off for worship service.
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