Yet more Barcelona. Sorry.

Well, I am certainly using my blog a lot this week. Possibly because I don't quite know what to do with my evenings other than book, diary and internet. And because I actually have something legitimate to talk about...

Today I went to Santa Maria del Mar, La Sagrada Familia (best site I could find...sadly concentrates onl on the facade of the Nativity but the Wikipedia page has a pic of the facade of the Passion) and the medieval shipyard now housing the Museu Maritim, including seeing John of Austria's galley which was built there and was involved in the sea battle which (apparently) ended Ottoman rule of the Mediterranean.

Santa Maria del Mar is rather gorgeously austere inside and I liked it more than La Seu, I think. La Sagrada Familia...well, is astounding. I had only seen pics of it taken at a distance and they simply don't do it justice. For a start it is huge...and that's at only just over half the height it will eventually be. But mostly the detail in everything in it is just stunning...the carvings on the facades are a brilliant example and I think some of those photos gve you close-ups. Now, firstly let it be said that in general I dislike any religious architecture later than, say, 1700. :) I'm a medieval girl where churches are concerned. But somehow Sagrada Familia gets past the uncomfortableness I usually feel when confronted with cuboid-headed Jesuses suspended from curiously skewiff crosses. Because, somewhere along the line, it just gets it. Something about the symmetry, and the asymmetry, and the way that things flow into other things...it feels like a church. Not some 'let's make religion look cool for the kids' modern rubbish that I feel so uncomfortable with. The interior of the naves, with columns branching like trees and gilded mosaics on the ceiling, is beautiful and pure. The carved marble doves on the tree of life are absolutely perfect, caught in flight. Jesus lecturing the doctors (that's a translation...I can't remember that bit of the Bible too well...:/) looks like a precocious but brilliant child. And most of all the words! Words everywhere. Spanish and Latin, crawling all over the building...the Ave Maria carved into the stone around the recess containing her statue, the words of the New Testament on the doors through the facade of the Passion, 'hosanna' and 'excelsis' on the tops of the spires...ahh. Yes, I liked it. Can you tell? I will have to come back in 2020 or whenever it will finally be finished...although judging by the progress made in the last century it may not be finished in my lifetime...

The Museu Maritim was...well, it was okay. I would have benefited from a little more information in english...I got an audio guide in engish but would far have preferred there to just be a little english version of all the notes beside each item. John's galley is magnificent...if dreadful - looking at it and thinking about galley slaves was somewhat uncomfortable...were galleys used into the C19th? Because if that's the kind of 'galley slave' that Valjean is in Les Mis...*shudders* The other reason I went to this museum is that it currently has a display of objects excavated from Pompeii. Fascinating, and also frightening in that they have the plaster moulds of the dead people and dog that are so well-known...but all it really did is make me decide I must actually go to Pompeii one day.

Tomorrow I think I shall attempt to make it to Montserrat.