We left Barcelona this morning via rent-a-car almost event free. The phone charger did catch  fire before we left the parking lot and filled the car with an acrid and no doubt toxic mix of noxious fog  however we pressed on determined to leave the city dent free.

Despite the left hand drive car, no signs in English, seemingly no real road rules, and a car still emitting fair volumes of malodorous gas we finally made “The Freeway”.

“The Freeway” is a clever contrivance designed to frustrate you by requiring regular stops at strategically placed intervals where you are required to insert your credit card in exchange for multiple pieces of paper which are probably receipts, but who knows they’re in Spanish, as are I might add all the instructions. Learning by trial and error we now have a wad of chits about the size of a raffle ticket book and probably no credit on the well used credit card. On the plus side we only had to back up out of one of the many cash extraction bays once due to not converting the Spanish symbols to English symbols quickly enough.

By the way the purpose of all this was to get to Figueres a delightful village just short of the French boarder and home of the Salvador Dali museum…. WooHoo liquid clocks and long legged elephants who could resist that?

Cadillac convertible with the mother of all hood ornaments and a boat on a pole in case of really, really heavy rain.

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Welcome to Barcelona,  city of speciality shops

I spotted four of these shops and only two McDonald’s. The Spanish are obviously more enlightened consumers than the rest of the world. Five female shoppers and one male who appeared to be window shopping.

Jen was unsure of the services supplied at this Salon, it appeared well patronised.

A place where people with acute coulrophobia can live secure in the knowledge that they are safe from predators, no smiles here and balloons confiscated. Definitely no public clowning without a licence. You can’t run from the law in Barcelona (not in clown shoes anyway).

On the city tour bus yesterday we narrowly missed a large explosion in the main street followed by a cloud of smoke and automatic weapon fire. Presumably this is a  normal occurrence  as there was no news on the net about it.

If that wasn’t enough on the way home from the gay pride festival (walking past not attending) we witnessed about twenty police including the riot squad arresting a side walk Rebok/Nike salesperson, there was a good crowd just like football, split about fifty fifty in their support. The police,using their batons to great advantage, won the match   when the salesman kicked an own goal by falling backward down the nearby subway stairs……Shoes everywhere what a match!

Spanish facts.

The first “modern’ novel came from Spain, Miguel de Cervantes. wrote “Don Quixote”  in 1605.

Chocolate. During the fifteenth century Spaniards traded with the American continent and North Africa, and introduced oranges, avocados, cacao, potatoes and sugar to Europe.

Spanish is the second most used language in the world, just after Chinese and ahead of  English. Despite this Spain has four other spoken languages, Catalan, Basque, Galician and Aranese.

The Pacific Ocean was once called “The Spanish Lake”

By the way seventy percent are catholic and about thirteen percent of the total population go to church. God will be happy about the seventy percent but a bit miffed about the thirteen percent.

And most importante:

Gaudi. Antoni Guadi, Spanish architect best known practitioner of Catalan Modernism. Gaudí’s works have a highly individualised, and one-of-a-kind style. Most are located in Barcelona including his the magnum opus The Church of the Sagrada Familia, due to be finished for the 100th anniversary of Gaudi’s death in 2026. If you think that’s a long time to build a church, forget it! The Ulm Cathedral in Germany took over 500 years.

Gaudi’s work is a absolute artistico and ingenieria delight, blending surreal imaginings with engineering genius, they are mathematically precise and aesthetically alluring……………..

A fair climb

But the veiw

Isn’t that bad from half way up

Sagrada Familia

I think Gaudi deserves a separate page maybe later.