May 14-15 & June 7-10, 2007.

The parental units arrived in Barcelona on the 14th of May and Shanti and I had a day to show them a bit of our Barcelona before the trip to Morocco was to begin. Barcelona is such a great walking city so that’s exactly what we did, we walked to the Boqueria for some tapas ingredients and calamari after taking in the titillating architecture of Gaudi’s La Pedrera.

La Pedrera is an amazing architectural feat as it almost entirely consists of non-load bearing walls. The only structural walls exist in the stairwells. Gaudi imagined future tenants to be creative in their living arrangements and gave them the ability to move walls around at will; with no worries about structural considerations. Now if only today’s architects could be so daring!

The building’s skeletal structure is based on steel and iron columns and the look is entirely organic with undulating living forms which is most clearly seen on the roof with the various tiled chimneys and railings.

(Gaudi would like to thank his dependence on hallucinogenic drugs. More on this later.)

Next up Morocco! woohoo.

We were able to hang out more with the parents after they returned from Portugal, where they went after our Morocco trip completed. Of course, most of our experiences as new Barcelonians included food. Lunch at La Boqueria was great, but even better was the tapas dinner Mary prepared for all of us. I sous-cheffed again, and as always learned many new things about this thing called cooking.

We also took in an outdoor art exposition on consumerism and waste, where an artist built hundreds of generic figures out of waste items such as Coke cans, computer and car parts, paint cans, and much more. Very interesting.

And of course, the paella!