Christmas in Spain

Christmas approached really quickly this year. Perhaps it's because I arrived in Israel this year 2 months later than last year, or perhaps because my experiment was nearly ready to go when I arrived so I was pretty busy right away, but whatever the reason, I didn't see it coming. Perhaps that's why the phone call from Sara asking if we were spending Christmas together again this year and my subsequent trip to Spain both came as a little of a surprise.

Sara and I chose Spain because it was relatively easy and cheap for both of us to get to. Plus, doesn't Christmas in Spain sound nice? We met in Barcelona, and then spent a few days exploring there before moveing on.

The first stop most days was the market, to pick up ingredients for lunch. This market is La Boqueria and is on Los Rambles, one of the main streets in Barcelona. The markets here are much more organized than markets in the middle east. Look how neat and orderly the frutis are! Perhaps that's why you're not allowed to touch them yourselves.....luckily Sara clued me in on this fact before I made what I guess is a huge faux-pas.



A lot of pour time in Barcelona was spent looking at the Gaudi architecture. I have to admit, in addition to not knowing that you weren't allowed to touch the fruit, I also didn't know who Gaudi was before I arrived.....it didn't seem very polite to me that people were saying how much gaudy architecture there was in Barcelona, but who was I to judge? Anyways, as I soon learned, Gaudi is a famous architect who designed many buildings and structures in Barcelona.

Here is one of the buildings that we went in to explore. It's called La Perdrera, and is an apartment building that has been turned into a museum.



One of the interesting things about this building is the roof. A lot of his buildings have really ornate smokestacks and other structures on the roof.



It's said that a lot of the lines and structures in his architecture are influenced by nature. I could see a lot of the more flowing lines and curvatures that you could say were nature influenced, but it wasn't until I saw a display in a museum that I really saw it. They had side by side pictures of microscope images of diatoms and stain glass windows, and leaf arrangement on plants and staircases, in addition to a lot of the less abstract animals that appear in his work.