Modernista

A busy day today left no time for actually blipping. We started with a metro ride to the Sagrada Familia. We last visited thirteen years ago, and the interior hasn’t changed much if at all since then. They’ve mostly been building extra towers. We went up one tower, but sadly the weather, as so often on our sightseeing trips, was dismal, so the view wasn’t that great. I’m not blipping the cathedral because a) I’ve blipped it before, b) the sun wasn’t shining and c) we visited a new to us site after lunch.

When we came out of the cathedral it had started to rain: crowd of glum tourists in extra 1. We didn’t have an umbrella, but I’d identified two possible lunch spots very close by. The first one was an Italian place and the waitress told us we’d have to wait outside for a table. The other was only a few doors down and I could see a free table, so that’s where we went. Excellent choice! The food was very good, much better than you’d expect in the most touristy place in Barcelona after las Ramblas. We shared delicious artichokes from Tudela in a salad, a fabulous piece of bacalao, and the obligatory pan con tomate. It was so good that we ordered desserts, which we don’t normally do in Spain, and they were excellent too. A flan made of mató, a fresh cheese from the Pyrenees, and a wicked ratafia-soaked pistachio cake. El Tastet de l’Artur, for future reference. It wasn’t particularly cheap, but worth the money.

From there we headed to our next stop, the former hospital of Sant Pau, designed by modernist architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner. A discovery by S — we’d never heard of it before. It’s an incredible complex of pavilions set in formal gardens and connected by underground tunnels. Built between 1902 and 1930, it was still in use as a hospital until 2009. It’s vast and stunning. Just a glimpse in my blip, and a couple more in extras. I took scores of photos — I’ll do an album when I get home.

We spent quite a while there, and then went back to the hotel for a rest before heading off for the main event of the day … a blipmeet! Barrioboy and digitaldaze live only a 10-minute walk from our hotel. We had a tour of their gorgeous Tardis-like house before heading across the road for drinks and tapas in La Peatonal. So funny to see these much-blipped places in real life. It was lovely to meet Bb and Dd in real life after all these years, and we had a great and very sociable evening. The staff were tactfully pulling the shutters down by the time we left.

I didn’t blip the blipmeet because both BB and dd did … I’ll try and link to them below.
Barrioboy: https://www.blipfoto.com/entry/3354437024294636753
Digitaldaze: https://www.blipfoto.com/entry/3354418823112428367