Lovely Barcelona, Hostel from Hell

I haven´t been able to post much or do much on email since our hostel, where the rooms resemble jail cells, doesn´t provide free internet for more than 20 minutes a day.

Also, they apparently think we´ll burn the place down or stick our fingers in the sockets if we we are allowed outlets in our rooms, because we have had no way to charge our computer or electrical devices, save from bringing them downstairs near the hoodlums who count as our roommates.

No one else seems to notice the poor conditions due to the fact that they are all drunk off one euro beers and frothing at the mouth for the next hostel-sponsored pub crawl to begin at 1:45am.

BUT, aside from our shit hole hostel, Barcelona has been wonderful. Much easier to navigate than Seville as it has a brilliant subway system and streets that actually follow a grid pattern. We saw some Gaudi (specifically La Segrada Familia) today and plan to hunt out more tomorrow. A torrential downpour eventually made us give up on waiting for a bus after it drove by without stopping so we returned to the hostel with a bottle of wine to wait out the weather.

Yesterday, we realized that dinner at the hostel is much more tolerable if we´re slightly buzzed, so we killed two hours, a bottle of wine, a wheel of cheese and a baguette on a balcony overlooking Plaça Real before heading to our free dinner with the kiddos.

We're checking the sights off the list so tomorrow if the weather is nice, we plan to do some drawing and reading in a Gaudi designed park in one of the nearby neighborhoods and also walk to the harbor.

And I do promise, pictures to come as soon as it´s free to use the internet again, something I´m pretty sure should be added to the constitution as a basic human need, like the right to bear arms.

Update, as my right to internet has been fulfilled for the time being:

Youth hostel armor - Wine, cheese, bread and aforementioned cutting board/collapsible glasses

Exterior, La Segrada Familia, "The Nativity"

Exterior, La Segrada Familia, "The Passion"

Exterior, La Segrada Familia, "The Passion"

Interior. Because I love construction sites and the process of something being built, this church was something more to me. I truly loved it. The fact that there are construction workers and architects and engineers at work while it's being toured fascinates me.

Dad, Gaudi's method for determining where gravity would stress an arch the most: He used strings and sand bags to engineer his structures. Where ever the bag fell is where the arch would bear the most weight. This is an inverted model of a portion of the church. But you knew that already... Thought so.

Gaudi's Parc Guell

Hillside of Parc Guell -- originally, this was a high-income housing development, but since no one rich wanted to live outside the city at the time, it failed and has since become a historic park. He was ahead of his time by about 100 years.

At least a photo from our fruitless attempt to see the fountain show from Montjuic. We missed it, of course (our Spanish luck) but the city at night was beautiful.