Barcelona, part VI - Basilica of the Sagrada Familia, part ii

I've been revisiting a lot of my old blogs recently. Partly inspiration, a lot of escapism, and an attempt to recapture that which has been all but lost. I noticed that I tended to skim a lot over the pictures and focus on the words - partly because I usually read my blogs in a place with zero privacy, but also because words are the soul of wit. Next time I really, really should type up my stuff when I'm still fresh.

Sagrada. Not much I can remember from that morning. I do remember sleeping slightly fitfully that night though, because the person who slept in the bunk above me, kept on tossing and turning, and everytime he did that the bunk would shake as well and it was rather annoying. He told me that he was going to the Sagrada today as well but we were going at very different times - I wasn't leaving till about 8:30 but he was up at six and planned to go there at like 8. Oh well.

Sagrada was located fairly closely to my hostel, and I chatted with the lovely hostel owners before I left as I always do. They told me to walk there - "it's only a 20 minute walk!" and even gave me a map, but I took one look out at the scorching sun, another look at my ride-all-you-can Hola Bon travelcard, and decided I'd be better off taking the metro, nohow.

Sagrada Familia has a metro station all to itself (unsurprisingly) and is located on both the blue line (L5) and the purple line (L2).

Anyway, picking up from last entry, there was a nice little museum right next to the Basilica which was dedicated to Gaudi and the process of the construction of the Sagrada, so I grandly present another medley of pictures.

A photograph of a photograph of the great man himself, Antoni Gaudi

Included in my preordered tickets were a trip up one of the Facades, the Nativity Facade, which is 50 metres high. I was scheduled (people numbers restrictions again) for a 12:00 entry and went up with a lovely English family who had two adorable little boys. Cute as the kids were and much as I was looking up to going to the facade, something pretty disgusting happened whilst we were going up in the elevator - it lurched and stopped, and the elevator lady was just as freaked out as any of us, saying extremely unhelpfully, "Well THAT'S never happened before!" and looking rather scared. We stayed in limbo for the longest 10 seconds of my life before the lift groaned back into life again and went up. The English family and actually all of the other lift passengers looked just as rattled as I felt, and one of the little boys said to me, "I think I'll be taking the stairs when I go down!"

A nice view of the city from one of the peepholes in the Nativity facade.

And, true to my word, I'm taking the stairs.

More stairs.

Some sort of architecture sticking out from the Facade.

And more pictures of the Sagrada Familia before I say adios.

The Sagrada Familia entries ended up being splitted into two entries after all, not three. Oh well, I still have heaps of pictures left for them, will do a picture recap if I ever get round to it somehow.