Barcelona and Figueres

On our second day in Barcelona we actually left the city. We went to a nearby town called Figueres where there is a Dali museum. Salvador Dali was born here and designed the museum/ gallery himself.

The outside of the museum....



There's not a lot of structure to the museum itself. The tour books all say that it's not organized at all, and although there does seem to be some organization (some groups of paintings are in the same area) maybe what they mean is it's not chronological. The order you go through it doesn't really matter--the suggested path is just so you don't miss anything.

One of his famous 'rocks as people' works (you'll notice that I know a lot about art).


We got back to Barcelona later in the day, so in the evening we decided to do one of Rick Steve's walking tours (thanks for the book Jason!). We did quite a few of these during our trip. This one was a walking tour of the Barri Gotic (gothic quatre) and ended up in the Catedral de Barcelona.



These geese are outside the Cathedral in the cloister. They've been there since Roman times (although I'm assuming it's not these particular geese) and were used as a security system--any honking would alert the monks that someone was trying to get in. There's supposed to be 13 of them (in memory of the patron saint of Barcelona, Eulalia, who was tortured and killed by the Romans for her relegion when she was 13....you'll soon notice that my blog is quickly reverting back to the "Jennie's sketchy version of history that if you're really interested you should look up yourself, because she likely has many of the details wrong" that I was so well known for last year) but we never found all of them.



We ended the night at a cafe for "churros con chocolate", a speciatly all over Spain we soon found out. Churros seem to be Spain's version of the doughnut (I've been told that most countries have some sort of a doughnut-type snack). From the looks of it I had thought it was just churros and hot chocolate, but it ended up being a really thick chocolate pudding. We've been told it's a Spanish tradition, which made that a good enough excuse for us to come in out of the cold.