This apartment has started to feel small after a few days. It is a duplex, with a kitchen and living room / dining room on one floor, and then a tiny staircase that leads down to two bedrooms and baths. How tight are the bedrooms? Well there’s this:
We do also have a small balcony and a roofdeck, but it’s been very hot and so we haven’t spent much time there. Fortunately, there’s the pool, and there’s also lots to see in the city (of course). So yesterday we took the Metro down to the eastern end of the Bario Gotico where the Picasso Museum is housed in a series of beautiful repurposed 15th century merchant houses.
The museum is very heavy on his early work, starting from when he was 14 years old and painting very realistic portraits of his family, himself, his dog. The permanent collection is arranged chronologically, but large gaps start to appear just at the time that his style shifts away from realism, when he went to Paris in his late teens and early twenties and encountered Matisse, Toulouse-Lautrec and others. Still, it includes his Las Meninas from 1957 (which is his take on the Velasquez painting of the same name that hangs in the Prado), as well as more than two dozen of the studies that he did for that painting.
After the museum we walked to see the Sagrada Familia. But Dios Mio! The crowds at 3 PM were enormous and tour buses were circling. The next available tickets for entry were at 7 PM, so we played in the park and then went home to swim.
And of course, we saw a few iconic sights of Barcelona: Gaudi’s Casa Battlo and some extremely tasty churros con chocolate. Muy ricos!
And then there’s also the view from the top of the hill in “our” park. This time away from the city and the sea and back up to the even higher Tibidabo.
The Nut Bus 