What we did on our holidays - part II

My early new year's resolution: update the blog daily. The old blogging has become rather intermittent recently and I hold my hands up - it's just not good enough.

 

 

Work continues on the Sagrada Familia: any chance of being finished by the end of the world chaps?

 

 

Anyway, we've just come back from a visit to Barcelona, which the locals will tell you is in Catalonia, not Spain. As usual, we did a lot of walking and managed to tick off most of the places in our I Spy book. I recommend the Sagrada Familia, the extraordinary church designed by Gaudi which they're still working on, about 100 years after they started. Now I know the Spanish are famous for their manana attitude to work but that's really pushing it. If you've got the builders in, for goodness sake don't let on about this Spanish job or they'll slow to a crawl.

 

We also did the Picasso museum but I'm afraid I was more impressed with the building than the artworks within although the stuff from his teenage years was pretty impressive. I guess when you're that good you get bored after a while and start doing the weird cubist stuff he's most famous for. Well it's either the boredom or the absinthe that inspired it.

 

 

Any time is shopping time in glitzy downtown Barcelona

 

We messed up a bit on the food front. We had a number of tapas type meals, noting an incredible variation in prices between the tourist spots and those just a few yards away but we didn't have a decent meal at a decent restaurant and Barca must be full of them. We also noted that although there are places selling food absolutely everywhere, you don't see too many overweight Spaniards. They must have a different metabolism because we were only there for a few days, didn't eat that much (or so we thought) but still put on weight.

 

But the two things that will stay in the memory more than anything are (1) the Christmas lights, which were down almost every street and put the West End of London to shame and (2) the shops, both in terms of their sheer number and their tendency to be positioned right at the top of the price scale. The brand names seemed to go on forever, like someone had taken Bond Street or Fifth Avenue and cloned it twenty times over. Either Barcelona must be a very rich city or attract a large number of very rich visitors. Mind you, no one seemed to be buying anything, perhaps because all these posh shops had threatening looking doormen which rather puts one off entering.

 

 

Bonkers Gaudi buildings in Park Guell: what was he smoking?

 

 

Well anyway, we're back in Blighty now, just in time for the Christmas shopping season. Luckily our local shops are more Matalan and Sports Direct than Gucci and Prada.