Barcelona: Gaudi, Wine & La Liga

After a good night of rest we headed out to the Gaudi Experience, which is a movie about this artists’ work and includes a chair that moves along with the 4D experience as well as water that sprays at certain points in the movie.  It was an interesting and creative interpretation of Gaudi’s work, but we had really hoped to learn more about him and his inspiration and it turned out to be more of an animated film.  We headed across the street to Park Guell and enjoyed a self-guided walking tour and the views from up top along the famous mosaic tiled benches overlooking the city.  It was a beautiful day and before leaving we enjoyed some sangria and tapas.

Group photo with Antoni Gaudi

Mom and kids overlooking the cross

Grandpa with our oldest - BUSTED on his tip toes :) 

Sitting along the benches with Gaudi's famous mosaic backing, overlooking Barcelona

Gaudi's famous mosaic gecko

G with the gecko

Beautiful tile and stone work

When in Spain, enjoy sangria & tapas like the locals!

Sweet SJ - always twirling in this favorite dress!

Grandma, Grandpa & the kids inside Park Guell

We took the kids back home and set them up with pizzas, homework and a movie and then us adults headed out for a night of wine tasting and tapas.  Unfortunately we arrived late as we couldn’t find a taxi anywhere.  We later learned that Barcelona was playing in the final game of La Liga and everyone, including the taxi drivers, were watching the game!

We had a fun group with two couples, who were friends, from Scandinavia. The woman from Norway almost exclusively wanted to talk about "The Donald" and was "very afraid of him".  Our sommelier, who kept trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to steer the conversation back to wine,  explained to us  interesting facts about Spanish wine as we sampled and snacked on some tapas. It was a very fun evening filled with lots of laughter. We learned that Cava, previously called “champagne”, is named after a cave, the underground place where it's made.  Champagne in France costs roughly 10 Euro/kg of grapes and it takes about 1.2 kg to make a bottle.  Spains largest wine competitor is Italy and then France.  A little known fact is that in the mid-19th century, the majority of European vines were killed by insects and, to their dismay, the only way to save them was to graft American root stalks (which were resistant) to them.  As for wine over the last 300 years, the French have aimed for quality while the Spanish have aimed for quantity.  However, the last 15 years, Spanish wine makers are trying to improve their quality.  We were surprised to learn that China is the #1 producer of wine, while the US is the #1 consumer and Luxenborg is the #1 consumer per capita.

A fun evening of wine tasting and tapas

Our tapas were jamon iberico and traditional stale bread that we spread halved tomatoes on and then poured some olive oil over and sprinkled with salt.  This is a typical snack for school lunches and sometimes jamon is added to it.

A fun adults night out!

After our tasting we went next door for a few more tapas and then mom and Grandma returned to the apartment and children while the guys went in search of the Barcelona festivities as this very night they'd won La Liga - apparently we are good luck for major sporting events (with the All Blacks having won the Rugby World Cup when we were in New Zealand).

Police out in full force as Barca wins La Liga title