Serene Barcelona

The choice was unequivocally in favour of Barcelona: Gaudi, a cheerful modernist heritage, non october's warm Mediterranean sea...

Slow sellers, waiters, traffic lights and motorists.

Large green parrots, together with pigeons eat cones on quay.

For a week we have forgotten, as men in jackets and girls look at a make-up: in Barcelona other air denying a dress-code and straight lines. Gaudi could appear only here as Ren should make happy with the creations London.

The city is friendly (behind a minus of pickpockets from all Europe, inopportunely grown fond of Barcelona).

Be not afraid to refuse "crutches" persistently offered by tour agencies in the form of the transfers, the organised excursions and the tourist buses ready прокатить of you накатанными by routes by real and fine Barcelona.

The city is compact, ready to help you always, and as in English of any level, and gestures. The public transport is simple in use – to buy in the automatic machine the travel card on the necessary number of trips. On cards distributed free of charge it is easy to find only a local McDonalds – in them half of streets is not signed. But a good card - and you safely wander on narrow streets of huge Gothic quarter.

You are surprised to fancifully moulded drains, churches with tremendous stained-glass windows, to small second-hand little shops. The linen hung out on balconies aggravating medieval twilight will flutter from above.

Stumbling about tourists on bicycles, hundreds driving about on a quarter, we have passed on other party of parkway Rambla, on market Bokerija where amateur photographers more than buyers and not really to pass, without having photographed mountain of the fruit which is creeping away from trays of seafood, канючащих in confectionery benches of children …

It is all preparation for Gaudi, attempt to reduce rate and to feel that process is more important than result. You are irritated with scandalous incompleteness of Sagrady of the Surname? It is terrible to enter into the house, where all curve, and the most curve that column on which, judging by architecture laws, all and should keep?

Come before, to tourist crowds, to park Guel, pass along the freakish stone arcades which columns are inclined to a hill under the most improbable corners, sit on the well-known bench from which the fine kind on Gaudi's gingerbread small houses opens.

Still it is possible to make out freakish collages from crocks, having remembered that on the instructions of Gaudi workers selected in the street old ware, tiles and bottles, the special brigade crushed them, and the second brigade covered with crocks a parapet and a ladder. The guidebook pays attention that in a mosaic the deep blue shade - splinters of bottles from under the pink water which colour especially was pleasant to the mad and ingenious architect with blue eyes prevails.

Now it is a high time to pass direct quarters Eshample, modernist style kingdoms.

Do not pass the House of Mila, Gaudi's last finished work before immersing in abyss of a construction of the Temple. Gaudi has told about the construction: "... Corners will disappear, and the matter will generously appear in the astral rotundities: the sun will get here from all four parties and there will be an image of paradise... So my palace becomes more light light".

The poor industrialist Mila! If Gaudi has created such palace, having received the order for building of the profitable house that to expect from the genius who undertook to construct a temple?

And we hasten to Sagrade of the Family and we try not to see an environment from tower cranes and crowds of tourists, we bypass its circles, again and again coming back to a facade of Christmas which has had time to construct, endlessly reconstructing and exhausting workers, Gaudi.

Temple building proceeds and now.

You demand activization of process and end of building orgy? "My client does not hasten", - Gaudi answered it, glancing at the sky. Week – is not enough, if you are occupied by routine. We had time to go to mountains, in a monastery of Monserrat, in a hurry having jumped in the first electric train. Have sat at steps of an old chapel, have amicably ignored the oldest in Europe chorus of boys, could not resist a temptation to think of desire at the Black Madonna.

We have passed on a grief Monzhuik, having sniffed at all Mediterranean flora and being surprised with extremely prolific orange trees in the Spanish village.

Have exhausted hundreds shots, photographing underwater living creatures in the Aquarium, have eaten a paella and tremendous local ice-cream, have not estimated сангрию and madwomen, on envy to a photoshop, dawn over the sea have estimated.

The idle, weakened city with an obligatory siesta and the natives who are taking a shower in drinking fountain in the centre of Barcelona.

City with the foolish schedule of work of shops (on Sunday ALL is closed – from the market to expensive boutiques with Pasech де Grasija) where traces of former rebellious spirit are hardly distinguishable in crowds of tourists and heaps of not cheap souvenirs … And do not try to be in time all – to try to return better.