Casa Batllo


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Europe » Spain » Catalonia » Barcelona
July 22nd 2016
Published: June 4th 2017
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Yesterday's activities have worn Issy out and she says she wants to spend the day sleeping. She tells me that I should go out on my own, so I do, to the convenience store to buy some laundry detergent. We're all out of clean clothes and I'm not confident that I'll know how to operate a laundromat if I go there on my own, so I wash the clothes in the bath. There's bright sunshine outside so I drape the wet clothes over the chairs on the terrace to dry. When Issy wakes up it's after midday. She looks outside. It's now raining, and the clothes aren't too dry any more. Issy points out that there's a clothes line in the light well outside the bathroom window and that all the apartments have them, and I think she's trying to suggest subtly that maybe I should have used that. Then again maybe not. We don't have any pegs, so if the clothes fell off we would need to go down from the seventh floor to the ground floor to get them back again. Issy says that the clothes wouldn't fall all the way to the ground. She says they'd get caught on the clothes line belonging to the people in the apartment on the floor below us, and we could then use this as a way of meeting our neighbours. I'm not too sure what the neighbours might think about this.

It is now raining quite hard. Today we have skip the line tickets to Gaudi's Casa Batllo and we can turn up any time we like. We catch the metro and get off at the station that looks like it should be right next to our proposed destination. It's now pouring, and despite Casa Batllo's apparent fame we can't seem to find it anywhere. Issy has an umbrella, and I don't, so by the time we do find it I'm soaked to the skin.

Casa Batllo was designed by Gaudi for the Batllo family in the early 1900s and is a renovation of an earlier building. It's on six levels, and includes an outdoor courtyard at the back of the second level, and a roof terrace. It appears that Gaudi went out of his way to make sure that there were as few straight lines in the building as possible. All the walls and ceilings are curved, as are all the window frames. The facade is amazing, and is apparently regarded as a Barcelona icon. Issy is captivated by the building. She doesn't like straight lines, and I'm already sensing some pressure to remodel our house with curved walls and ceilings when we get home. I'm now worried about how I might be able to do this. I don't think it would be as simple as going down to the hardware store and asking for some sheets of curved plaster. Hopefully Issy will have forgotten about Casa Batllo by the time we get home.

It's stopped raining and the sun is out, so we head down towards the waterfront. We pass the restaurant that we ate at last night. About an hour before we left it the previous evening, a family of five came in looking distraught. One of their children, a young girl, had gone missing. The parents were frantic and the siblings in tears. The police were called, and they came to the restaurant to organise a search. When we left, the little girl still hadn't been found. We were struggling to imagine how the parents must have been feeling, and we contacted all our offspring when we got back to the apartment to make sure that they were safe. We go into the restaurant and ask a waiter whether the little girl had been found. He tells us she had been, and was safe and well, after being missing for about an hour. We feel very relieved.

We walk around the edge of the harbour and climb a tower where we board a cable car for a trip across the harbour to Montjuic, which is a hill overlooking the south end of the waterfront. The city is now bathed in bright sunshine again, and the views from the cable car are spectacular. We learnt from Arne yesterday that Montjuic means Mount of the Jews. The name arose hundreds of years ago when Christians and Jews weren't allowed to be buried together, so the Jewish population was forced to establish its own separate cemetery. The cemetery is still here and is now used by all religions. Most of the area is now a large and very attractive park and the views over the city and harbour from here are excellent.

Back at the apartment it's now my turn to sleep. When I wake up it's well after dark and there's a serious thunderstorm doing its stuff outside. The clothes I put out to dry on the terrace this morning are now saturated. We decide that we're not hungry enough to venture out in the pouring rain so we settle for toast, as bread is about the only food we've got in the apartment. I struggle with the pop up toaster; I can only get it to cook the toast on one side at a time. I'm not entirely sure that gnawing on a few pieces of unevenly cooked toast was exactly what we had in mind for a romantic last evening in Barcelona, but c'est la vie (or whatever the Spanish equivalent of that might be).

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