This month started with a rather exciting trip to Spain, where I spent about a week in Barcelona.  As cliche’ as it sounds, one of the highlights was absolutely the weather!  I wore flip flops one of the days; it was beautiful.  Anyway, I’m embarrassed to admit that I only just (as in, five minutes ago) realized that the statue in the photo to the left is of Christopher Columbus.  I don’t know how I managed to be there and only realize this three weeks later, but there you have it.

One of the big “features” of Barcelona is the Gaudi architecture, which is really sort of… gaudy, actually.  Ha!  Gaudi is gaudy.  That’s a lovely coincidence.  Anyway, it’s really ornate sort of art nouveau type stuff.  The building below is called “La Sagrada Familia”, and is a really large Roman Catholic church that’s been under construction for the past like, 25 years (…and I thought Florida was bad).

And another Gaudi that I’m not actually sure had a purpose (it was literally hollow inside).

Another thing that was really cool, and reminded me a bit of Edinburgh, were the narrow shop-filled side streets.  While they absolutely contributed to my frequent getting lost, they’re really cool to just wander around and explore.

There were lots and lots of moped/scooters.  They were literally everywhere, it was insane.

I went on a free tour one of the days which was rather insightful as far as little tidbits.  Apparently all the palm trees in this particular square are on”official” loan from Hawaii.  How exactly does that work??

Picasso was from Barcelona, this is the art school where his father taught/he hung out/did other stuff.

And a view from the top of a deceivingly large hill that I hiked to go to a garden that was deceivingly more expensive than their website implied (…it was worth it).

And of course, the beach.

Despite many years of classes, my Spanish was still a bit rusty, but I managed to survive without consequence (hooray!).  I should say that it also helped that a large amount of people spoke English.   Actually, the “official” language of Barcelona is Catalan, which is sort of like a mutated version of Spanish, so there was sort of a weird mesh of different languages being spoken all over.  I found it funny how people picked which language to speak in based on their perception of who they were talking to.  So the days I looked really touristy (ie, had my camera out) people would almost unanimously speak in English, but the times I just went out for a stroll or whatever they would use Spanish or Catalan.  Maybe that’s an obvious observation, but I was really amused, haha.

I think that’s about all I have to say for now!  If you want to take a gander at the rest of the photos, they can be found by clicking here!