Life’s an ocean with too much commotion

As this is my second time I visit Barcelona, I can now make time for visiting the non – you didn’t visit Barcelona if you haven’t seen these – places.
I took the metro and headed for Palau Reial. Actually, there are two Palau Reials. One at the right upper corner of Barcelona, and one in the center.
The things I wanted to visit were located at the one in the center, but I was heading for the other one (Palau Reial de Pedralbes).
The latter one has a park with a fountain designed by Gaudi (which has only been discovered in 1984). It also had a cool little fountain, as displayed on the picture below.

The Palau itself had three different museums, of which I visited two:

• Museu de les arts decoratives: I’ll quote the description from a folder I received there: “A journey back through history using the arts of the object, mainly of a domestic nature, from Medieval times through to more contemporary expressions of industrial design. Chests, fans, chairs and other items serve to illustrate the trip”. As it’s located in the Palau itself, I could also see the official throne of the president and his bedroom (actually you weren’t allowed to go in there but some guy was renovating the place and left the door open, lucky me). The museum was also nice, you could see things on which we place the tag ‘retro’. Stuff from the ‘60 and ‘70 up to the ‘90. The picture displayed above has been taken in the Palau while visiting this museum.
• Museu de ceramica: I don’t care much about ceramic sculptures, one room was pretty nice where there was a lot of originality and creativity put in a sculpture, but the other things where just ceramic tiles.

You also have the Museu Textil i d’Indumentaria which showed art and techniques of fabric and clothing in western European culture. There was no time left for that museum because I needed to go back to the centre to have lunch with my girlfriend, plus I wanted to visit Camp Nou, which was about 500 meters from Palau Reial de Pedralbes.
The entrance fee for the two musea was 4.20 euros, which is totally worth the price.

I only passed Camp Nou and there were a lot of people waiting and running to a car when it came up from the underground parking lot. Apparantly a practive football match just ended and some guy from FC Barcelona was leaving. I don’t care about football so I went on with my trip

Even if you pay attention not buying food in some very commercial place, you still pay 15 euros for lunch for two persons, for two sandwiches and a pint. Spain is just not the place anymore where you can eat and drink a lot for not much money.

At 5PM I picked up my girlfriend and we went to Parc Guell. You can take the metro and stop on two different stations: Lesseps and Vallcarca. Google Maps (which also has the pedestrian feature now, not only route calculation for cars) showed that using Vallcarca is shorter and a nicer way to walk than Lesseps. It still approx. 1km but it’s the closest one near Parc Guell. Another reason for using this station is that the way up (there is a lot of climbing to do for visiting Parc Guell) has been made easy by placing automatic stairways, which comes in handy when it’s 30 degrees.
Entrance to Parc Guell is free, for the museum at Parc Guell you pay four euros. We didn’t go into the museum because the park closes at 7.45PM, so we only had two hours for walking in the park.
It’s chaos! I think half of the people in Barcelona was in that park. They all wanted to have a picture at the famous lizard of Gaudi (covered with trencadis-mosaic), instead of taking a picture of my girlfriend there, I took one of the crowd (below). Right of the lizard you’ll see a guy who was constantly whistling when a tourist was touching the sculpture too much.

In the evening, we went to the ‘Kanelen Creme’. It’s a small restaurant, advised by a collegue of my girlfriend, which serves delicious food. As some things need to stay in mistery, it’s up to you to find the real title of the restaurant here and look up the location of it If you do find the restaurant, I can surely advise you to eat there. It’s totally not expensive, and the food has been carefully prepared and served.

To end this day, we went to Placa Catalunya to see the fountain and the lights in the evening. Unfortunately, the fontains weren’t on. Oh well, still 4 days left…