Spain: Day 3 Part 1

Playing: Til the Sun Came Up-Michael Holborn
Reading: Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

On our third day in Barcelona, my family and I skipped breakfast because everything in Europe is just too expensive for us. We ended up walking down the Passeig de Gracia in the morning, which is Barcelona's equivalent to Los Angeles' Rodeo Drive, I think. All of the buildings were built beautifully, which is typical of Europe. I love the statues gracing this particular building that housed the Cartier store, if I remember correctly.

The main reason we visited Passeig de Gracia was to take a look at Gaudi's Casa Battlo, which cost a lot to get in, but was worth it. In my opinion, it was one of the best places we visited on our trip. The inside felt like you were underwater the way the light filtered in through the stain glass windows and the sloping ceilings felt like an underwater cave. Like the Sangria Familia, it felt like Ariel's cave, where she keeps all her treasures in The Little Mermaid. Wow, I'm eloquent.

Once we were finished exploring Casa Battlo, we crossed the street to visit Burberry. I am a hardcore Burberry fan, so I can safely say I've been to Burberry stores in over seven different countries right now. This has to be one of my favorite Burberry stores ever, since it houses everything including Burberrys, Burberry Prorsum, Burberry Sport, Burberry London, and Burberry Brit. Plus, this was the first Burberry I went to that had ballroom gowns! Definitely worth a visit!

While walking around Barcelona trying to hunt down a specific restaurant for two hours, we eventually gave up and stumbled our way to Bar Funicular on Carrer de Girona. (Let's hope Google got the right street for me!) No one spoke English there, but the people that worked there were more than friendly and showed us all of the food they had and let us point and choose. For my first dish, I got a delightful pasta salad that was refreshing and filled with delicious vegetables such as: red bell pepper, tomatoes, and green bell peppers. At first, the huge glob of mayo freaked me out, but if you mixed it in with the whole salad, it wasn't too overwhelming and was actually very good.

With their prefixed meal, you could choose two dishes, so for my second dish, I got a steak, which was served with crispy French fries and fresh tomato. Although the steak was tough, it was not inedible and the flavor was still pretty good. Considering, I ate a lot of poor meals in Spain that tasted rather bland, I was shocked to find that this little cafe served me one of my best meals in Spain. This blog wrote a full write up of it, which I can't read, but it even has a picture of the people that work there. The lady he has pictured was so friendly and treated us like family, offering us chocolate afterwards.

Right next to Casa Mila, our next stop, was Lolita Bakery. I took a quick look in and was stunned by the array of cupcakes they had, so my brother, dad, and I all got ourselves a cupcake. My brother got the banana and pineapple, which he said tasted just like a banana muffin to him, while I got the Mora Vanille one, which was fluffy semisweet blackberry icing on a dense vanilla cupcake. My dad's Tiramisu was pretty good for a chocolate cupcake, which always seem to be disappointing. The interior of the store is adorable and if you're visiting the Casa Mila, you might as well grab a cupcake. Half the people in the ticket line were munching on cupcakes anyways.

When we got to the front of the line for the Casa Mila, we finally bought our tickets and got in. I suggest looking around for the elevator to get to the top of the building because walking up eight flights of stairs is not a fun way to start your tour. By the time my brother and I had finished racing each other up the stairs, my legs hurt like crazy. Out of all the Gaudi places we visited, this was definitely the least impressive of them. The roof offered a beautiful view of the city, but then the tour took you to the attic, where it explained how Gaudi built all of his structures. Then it took you through a time capsule of what an aprtment of his might've looked like at the time it was built. We spent some time, sitting in the court of the building staring upwards and I tried talking to some Italian tourists, but all they wanted to talk about was Disneyland once they found out I was from California, so I didn't get to figure out from where in Italy they were from. Thanks for reading and do leave a comment! I'll get to writing up the rest of day three as soon as possible!