Barcelona and back to France

Barcelona



Barcelona is Gaudi town. Lots of nice moderism including Park Guell (top two pictures) and the Sagrada Familia. Gaudi spent the end of his life working on the cathedral and a hundred years later and it's still in progress. And what was I singing the entire time we look at these? "We're From Barcelona" of course.

One thing I like about the modernists is their obsession with natural light. This is the stained glass ceiling at the music palace. It's a little blurry cause I had to take the picture on the sly.


Best part about Barcelona. We rented a moto and went all over the city.

Beauvais

Typical European male fashion. This from a store in Beauvais, near Paris. I have tried to incorporate as much pink on pink into my wardrobe as possible since returning.

Inside the Beauvais Cathedral. It is supposedly the tallest gothic structure ever attempted (160 ft. in some places, 20 ft. higher than Notre Dame) and it fell at one point so they have internal supports.

Southern France

We probably had the most fun on this leg of the trip. We started in Marseille, where we flew from Paris from there we went through Avignon to Montpellier by train then to Nimes and Carcassonne via rental car. (We would eventually take a bus to Spain to as to cross off all forms of transportation.)


Marseille

Arab Market surrounding the obligatory European triumph arch. Lots of Arabs and people of other ethnicities in this Port town. Kate has some better shots (although not all at the link) of the harbor and the Chateau d'If, where the Count of Monte Christo was fictionally held.


Kebab. This was my second that day from the same place.

Avignon

This is the Pope's palace at Avignon. Kate opted not to go inside and enjoyed the gardens. I thought it was facinating. The Popes were homed here during the 14th Century due to some issues with the Italians.

Montpellier

Kate and I met up with our friend Hillary in Montpellier where she was working on some sort of econ research. The city gets extra points for being famous for fountains made of moss.

We rented a car, which took some convincing since both Hillary and Katelin and have been driving with me before. The car we rented was supposed to be a Twingo (pictured) but instead we got a citroen C3, similar but not as good a name, thus not pictured.

Carcassonne

We went to Carcassonne mostly for the board game (secretly I was hoping they would be selling it everywhere ... they weren't), but it ended up being our favorite place on the whole trip. We were told it is one of the best preserved medieval cities in the world. Kate also has some great pictures of this place.

Pictures from Paris

We've all seen great pictures of the Eiffel tower and the Louvre (if you are feeling deprived, please download this application and type Paris into the Fliker search bar, it's amazing). Here are some of my favorite moments.

Immediately Katelin stumbled onto something that looked like home. We opted to eat crepes with nutella instead.





La Défense pictured above was probably my favorite place in Paris this time around since I had already been to the typical places. It's basically a giant box/office building big enough to fit Notre Dame inside the hole. We went to the top and they had a museum on the history of technology including this hard drive, which fit something like 32K.



Finding bathrooms was always a problem. I can attest to the statement from this photo taken in a mall on the Champs-Élysées. They also sold silver plated toilets seat and patterned toilet paper inside to subsidize the 1.5 euro per person entry fee.

Trip to Europe

I have out of the country for the last two weeks without computer, without smartphone and for the most part without the internet. I was starting to get a little jittery toward the end but after some time syncing my task lists, downloading drivers and catching up on my favorite blogs I am feeling much better. The trip of course was amazing. I was hoping to get more pictures posted as we went along, instead it's all after the fact. I hope you enjoy them, and Please leave comments if you feel so inspired. I'll be attempting to put up pictures over the next few days with a series of posts.