Sunday, September 15: Catalan, Barri Gottic, Mont Juic, Park Guell, La Sagrada Familia

I promise you a more exciting day today.  We are off on our first full day of adventure with our tour.  After a lecture in our hotel about Catalan history and culture we embark on a walk through Barri Gottic (old town)
passing the Cathedral.
It is Sunday and we encounter a group who meets here every week and does a group circle dance.
We pass El Born, originally to be a modern shopping area.  But during construction of the foundation Roman ruins were found turning the site into an archaeological dig.
This is Road Scholar so it must be time to eat.  This time at a tapas restaurant in Barri Gottic.
After lunch we take a bus tour up through Mont Juic with a sweeping view of the Barcelona waterfront
and passing the Olympic tower.  In Barcelona, time is measured by either BO or AO (before Olympics or after Olympics).  [I apologize for this and foregoing the photo.  They were taken through a glass window from a moving bus.]
We stop for a visit to Park Guell, a Gaudi masterpiece in which there are no straight lines.
The very famous lizard mosaic sculpture.  We visited in the middle of the day and it was extremely difficult to get a photo without throngs of people crawling over sculpture or in the frame.
And the famous "gingerbread houses".
Next up is my highlight of the entire trip, a visit to Gaudi's incredible masterpiece, La Sagrada Familia.  As you can see, it is still under construction with construction scheduled to be completed in 2026 on the 100th anniversary of Gaudi's death.
We visit in the late afternoon.  The sun shining through the many colored glass windows creates an ethereal feeling in the church.
We were there.
 This is a very tired Bill outside La Sagrada Familia.
Lunch tonight is on our own and we choose the hotel rooftop and cava, chicken and goat cheese pizza.
It has been a great day.

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