We started our 2 day hop-on hop-off bus tix today and had researched the 3 routes they offered, trying to determine where exactly we would jump off. Knowing it was busy season we were a little worried the buses would be packed and there would be long waits even to get on the buses, but it was tolerable and there was rarely much additional wait. We rode the blue route north past the 2 famous Gaudi houses we’d seen the day before. Kate had packed the ipod Touch and we hadn’t set foot on the bus for a few minutes before Theo was begging for it. She relented and Theo and Maeve attempted to take fair turns with the video games. The rest of us watched as the audio described some of the more famous landmarks and history of the city. We reached our first stop. I tried to give Theo as much warning as possible that it was time to pause the game, but still got grief from him. We disembarked and started the uphill walk to Guell Park, a Gaudi work that was conceived as a high-end gated housing development. The park itself was built first and meant to be used as a market area, guard house, and park. However the endeavor was a commercial failure and only 2 of the plotted 60 houses were ever built. We stopped in the Guell Park museum to learn more about Gaudi and the park and learned that the reasons for failure seemed to be the fact that there was no easy transport to the downtown and the fact that the district was competing with a more esteemed housing area further out of town, but interestingly this housing area was thriving because they’d first built a tram servicing the area and connecting it to downtown. Here’s one of my favorite shots of Zeke and Theo looking out of a window of the guardhouse looking up at the central fountain and market area of the park. 
Now it’s time to play where’s the Sebastian kids. Our friends Marty and Mary had come to Barcelona a year earlier, but they visited in the winter. They showed us photos of Guell park and other areas of the city where it was just them and whatever cool monument they were getting the photo with. Here’s what we found at the famous salamander/lizard feature of Guell park… I dare you to try to find our kids… Maeve is trying to make it easy in the last photo. It also helps that we changed directions and shot downhill. Note all the other folks attempting to take their shot by the lizard in the background.
I decided to get a little creative shooting a ceiling medallion in the marketplace, with limited success.
As we headed up towards a shaded picnic area to enjoy our packed picnic lunch at, we bumped into the bubble man, who seemed to enjoy creating huge bubbles evidently for kids to chase. Our kids enjoyed the thrill of trying to keep the bubbles afloat,
much like we’d seen on videos where dolphins have learned to play and manipulate bubbles in the water.
We got lucky and came upon a shaded bench just as a couple was leaving, and luckier still a band was playing within earshot. And better yet, they were really good. So good in fact, that I couldn’t help myself but to buy their most recent CD. Check them out at their myspace page. The mananers (the tomorrow’ers).
After enjoying our great shaded picnic watching bubble chasers and enjoying the music of the mananers, we doused our hats in the water bubbler and moved into the open air serpentine park bench above the market overlooking the main fountain and salamander. It was crowded and we had to work fast to get a section of bench nearly to ourselves for my planned panoramic photo. Not too bad given the conditions.
We meandered our way back out the park and back down the hill stopping at a few tourist shops along the way. Back at our bus Theo once again begged for the ipod. We stopped next in the Alta Zona district, right in the area of nice homes that was competing against Park Guell and beat it out partially due to its built in tram. Since our walk was short, we skipped the tram. The walk was impressive. Very nice home after very nice home. With a few modern buildings stuck in here and there, but seemingly blending into the area. See if you can notice the modern building hiding in this shot. I like the surreal tree floating on top of the building.
We were heading up to the science museum to hopefully give the kids a little hands on break from all the ‘no touching’ we incessantly threw at them at the gift shops. Janie bumped into a famous dead person at the desk.
Just kidding, Kate had noticed the wax model as she attempted to work through their complicated ticket process. The museum was impressive, but the layout and the ticketing process were confusing at best. Back to Albert… check out the stubble on his chin…
We worked our way down to floor 5 (there were 5 floors, most of them underground) and started exploring. They loved all the hands on explanations of scientific phenomenon, so much so that they were battling their own hunger to keep going. Once we made the decision to leave without seeing everything and go outside for a picnic, we would find another area that they decided we had to leave before eating. And then another, and then another. We finally had to lay down the parental law and just march them out seeing that they were getting too hungry and starting to act up.
A quick cute story. At one point Maeve had noticed a big spider at the other end of a series of optical illusions. She was guiding Kate there as quickly as she could as the other kids stopped to try everything out. When she and Kate finally got there, Maeve noticed a red rope in front of the spider and said, oh no it’s closed and became sad. Not a few seconds later Theo’s head popped up in front of the spider and Maeve just shrieked. Not sure if she was scared or surprised or just happy that the spider was still open. She came running to find me and show me the scary Theo spider face.
We intended to exit through the 4000 square foot Amazon Forest exhibit, but weren’t able to quickly find the entrance to it on our way out. The place was a bit of a maze that way, with no public signage in a language other than Catalan. At least the science exhibitions had good English descriptions.
We finished lunch in the courtyard, warning Theo and Maeve, as always, not to feed the pigeons. Then headed downhill back to the hop-on/off bus stop. We hopped on and completed the loop back to our starting point. Then walked the six blocks home to get supp and crash with a little TV and bedtime. Luckily the couch is large enough for all 4 of them
(What did you expect from our crazy family).
Cool, love the hiding building shot.
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