Last Day in Barcelona

I have a very heavy heart as I think about recounting our last day with Becca and Joey in their wondrous new home. They've taken a huge leap of love and faith and landed so gracefully. The language, the metro stops, the side streets, the menus: they're absorbing it all and making it their own. We were overjoyed with the prospect of spending time with them here and the visit exceeded all of our expectations. Three great days! If only it could have been three dozen. We love you guys!

Katrina and I spent the morning at the Museo National d'Art de Catalunya. It sits high and regal on the side of the Mountjuic hill overlooking the Placa d'Espanya. A long promenade of fountains and waterfalls and statues and stairs (oh, the stairs!) draws you up from the bustling plaza to the forested middle-heights of the hill where you can turn around to see the city sprawling out below you.

The inside is rich with marble, light, and wide-open spaces. The modern art wing was closed for renovation so we spent our time slowly walking through the Renaissance collection and then less slowly walking through the Medieval wing (museum-ing is tough on the feet). Both sides are vibrant and proudly regional cross-sections of their time periods.

The Medieval side of the museum features dimly-lit spaces recreated to emulate the 10th and 11th century churches that once housed the frescoes on display. You feel as if you are seeing the vast murals (the swaths that survived) from the same perspective that a Catalonian church-goer 1,000 years ago might have.

Afterwards, we met Joey back at their apartment and then found our way to the neighborhood of Gracia for lunch. It was a classic tapas experience in an understated place bustling with mother-daughter pairs and businessmen in suits. We had tortilla espanola, pulpo a la gallega (octopus grilled and seasoned until it resembled a mouth-watering bacon-oyster hybrid), skewers of spicy pork, and the fried cod balls which proved so irresistible (even to those normally lukewarm towards seafood in our party) that we ordered a second helping and fairly limped from the restaurant.

A long, meandering walk through this neighborhood gave us a better sense of the less-seen side of the

city before taking the train back into the heart to visit one of the most-seen sides: la Basilica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Familia. Becca met us here after her second full-day of school and, bearing the tickets we had bought ahead of time to skip the surely-hours-long line that snakes around the block, we headed up the steps

The building's scale defies photography, but thousands of visitors swarmed around us with phones and cameras extended anyway. I tried capturing it too until I became self-conscious. Just being there seemed enough. Gaudi started work on the basilica in 1883 and spent the last years of his life utterly devoted to it before his death in a tram car accident in 1926. Construction has continued since then

The intimidating host that looms over the entrance

but vast areas of it remain unbuilt. While Gaudi may have intended the project as a testament to Christianity, I was left with an impression of nothing so much as the fervent, fevered mind of Gaudi himself.

Obsessed with natural forms and merging the organic with the structural, Gaudi filled his plans with a menagerie of faces, fruits, fractals, birds, beasts, and bugs. In 88 years since his death, the builders have been bringing those plans into reality. Every inch of the interior and exterior is densely wrought. The sum total can feel crowded -- almost gaudy -- and certainly overwhelming. Joey noted wryly that if an advanced alien race had been picking up Christianity over the radio waves that traveled through deep space, the church they would have built to impress us might have looked like this. "Out of this world" is a pretty fitting descriptor.

The interior is a forest of chromatic light and exotic shapes like hyperboloids and helicoids, all rendered with exacting precision. Ornamentation is in turns majestic (colossal pendants of luminous glass depicting the Gospels) and baffling (light-up grapes and bassoons). Small areas of the sanctuary are reserved for quiet prayer but the dominating air is that of an overrun drive-by natural wonder. The sheer enormity of the space does soften the bustle and chatter but can't erase it, and I found myself missing the intimate silence of Girona's cathedral from our first day.

For dinner we walked down Carrer de Blai, a pedestrian-only avenue of open-door tapas bars. Joey, showing how thoroughly Barcelonan he has become, scoffed at our unheard-of dinner time of 7:30 pm. They'll wonder why we're eating lunch so late", he grumbled. Nevertheless our eatery of choice agreed to serve us from the dinner menu.

We ended the night with a movie back at home and will begin the next morning bright and early at 3am to see how Massachusetts residents voted in the gubernatorial primaries. Go Don Berwick! With him at the helm, our state could really become something to be exceedingly proud of.