How's your day going?

78 degrees here on the Mediterranean =)

La Sagrada Familia

Antonio Gaudi's master work: La Sagrada Familia. It's been under construction for... like almost 200 years, but unfortunately there were a huge amount of cranes and scaffolding out when I took this photo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Sagrada_Familia

Antoni Gaudi

Antoni Gaudi is a very famous architect that has had a massive influence on the architecture of Barcelona. His architecture is notable for its flowing, sinuous lines, as evidenced below.

Park Guell originally was designed by Gaudi to be basically a housing development for uber rich. It was never completed, and was eventually turned into a park.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_G%C3%BCell

La Perdrera, a house designed by Gaudi (above)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Pedrera

Casa Batllo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casa_Batll%C3%B3

Perspective

Just a follow up to a previous post that was expressing the luck involved with randomly pulling into a parking garage that was literally 100 feet from our hotel. This a picture I took of the city from an overlook... There are 1 or 2 parking garages in this mess (click to enlarge to see the city)

Technical Difficulties

The wifi in this hotel is extremely flaky. This is the first time I've been able to use the internet in over 24 hours, so this may be the last update for the blog. If it improves over the next couple days, I'll put up some final info.

Lucky Bastard

A common topic of conversation on this blog has been our propensity for getting lost very easily.

The more we travel this way, the more we have gotten the hang of how to navigate like a Spaniard. The past two or three trips between cities haven't been nearly as harrowing (though not without incident).

I intend to type of a comprehensive review of our dinner at Arzak last night - which was just amazing, but I wanted to give a quick update on today's progress. Today we arrived in our final city of the trip - Barcelona. It was the longest stretch of highway thus far; about 5 hours from San Sebastian.

We made it to the city with little incident (one hiccup on the highway which turned out OK when the road sign didn't match our directions, but intuition and direction sense prevailed).

But getting to our hotel INTO the city was... well, bizarre. As is typical, I am able to navigate us to the city, but once we're in the thrum drum of a highly populated metro area, there either are NO road signs, or the signs that exist are too small to read in time.

But this was freakin' amazing.

Having learned from our Madrid experience, I knew better than to try to drive directly to the hotel. My basic plan was to get us somewhere in the region of the hotel, anticipating the fact that I wouldn't be able to navigate while driving. So I managed to get us somewhere that I thought was close - but unfortunately was very very very lost, and not really recognizing anything at all.

So I just found a parking garage, and pulled right in. We lock the car door, walk out of the garage, and spend a few moments trying to memorize the area because this garage seems to have no name, and there are no street signs on the intersection. The last thing I want to do is lose the car by not being able to return to the garage.

We walk out onto the main street. Pelai street.

I look at my hotel address. Pelai street.

I turn my head slightly to the right.

I look up.

There's my hotel.

Now - I want you to imagine doing this in a large city. You just randomly pull into a parking garage... and it happens to be not 100 feet from where you are trying to go...

If I believed in miracles ;)

The other bit of serendipity is that, once we got checked into the hotel, we are of course starving. Anticipating the typical issue of not being able to find anything open at this time of day, we basically walk into this little deli thing two doors down from our hotel, seeing that it's open. The irony is that, as I've mentioned previously on this blog, the impetus for this trip was Mario Batali's "Spain - On the Road Again" documentary.

Among the four participants of Mario's posse on that trip was New York Time's food critic, Mark Bittman.

This little deli that we walked into had an advertisement quoting Bittman as saying it had the best sandwich he'd ever had.

Now, I'm sure he was being a little tongue in cheek, but it was another funny anecdote.

So here I am, chilling at our new digs. We had a private hot tub on our balcony in Madrid. Apparently the same holds true in Barcelona ;)

I'll type up the Arzak review in a bit. It was pretty unbelievable.

Pintxos

Pintxos, Basque for tapas, seem to be the dietary staple of San Sebastian. Count me a fan.

Above: I think I located the American Embassy.

I took a few snaps of these places. There are no less than... I dunno, 50 of these things within a 5 square block area. These are various different ones that I photographed right quick.