Montserrat

Last weekend we went to an amazing, place, Montserrat. It is located west of Barcelona, not too far inland. Translated into English its name is "serrated mountain." It is the location of a very old monistary, and walking paths that have endless great views. We thought it was going to be a little touristy but when we got to the paths there are so many places to explore. It is almost like a series of mountains that form a mountain maze, except I hesitate to use the word maze because it is a free and liberating experience. It is probably the greatest natural wonder I have ever seen before.

Tomorrow we are departing for our second trip. We are taking a train to Valencia, Spain, which is further south on the east coast of spain. Then we are going to Granada, in southern spain, which is the home of Alhambra, the palace of the Moorish monarchs who ruled Spain for 700 years. Then we are going to Seville (Sevilla) the main city of the southern region of spain, Andalucia. The trip will last one week.

My Trip

I'm sorry I took so long to make a new entry, this past week since getting back has been the busiest of my life probably. But I will quickly summarize my trip. First we went to Madrid. Madrid is an amazing city. We enjoyed picking out all of the little differences from Barcelona. In short, Madrid is a lot more like New York City. The buildings are bigger in scale, there are more cars, and it is much bigger. Barcelona is smaller but more dense, and the roads are more narrow.

Madrid is a little bit cleaner. The main places we went included the Museo Nacional del Prado, the Botanical Garden, outside the Royal Palace, and the Reina Sofia, where Picasso's Guernica resides, except I didn't see it. We are thinking about maybe returning to Madrid to see Guernica and maybe also take a day trip to Toledo. The best part about Madrid was walking with the rest of the class all over the city and seeing the many modern skyscrapers there. They are so much more beautiful than the ones in New York City, which are quite plain compared to these. They are also smaller than NYC's which I like because they don't overpower you.














We also took two day trips while we were in Castile. One was to El Escorial, north of Madrid, where the Monestary of San Lorenzo resides. It was most likely the largest building I have ever been in. There are so many things to see inside, including religious art and a royal palace. What I liked best was walking down a staircase cladded in green marble to see the coffins of about ten kings/queens and ten princes/princesses along the walls. We went to the city of Segovia the next day which was my favorite day in Spain so far. This medieval city is so old and compact and has so much character. There is a cathedral, a fort, a city wall, and most famously a roman aqueduct, which is the only remaining roman aqueduct in the world (i believe). Any attempt to explain the amazingness of this city would do no justice to the experience I had in this great place.














Then afterwards we flew to Bilbao, Spain. This is the largest city in Spain's Basque region which is famous for its separatism and claim that it is a country of its own. We also visited a beach resort town called San Sebastian. The weather for the most part did not cooperate with us in the Basque region but it was a great experience nonetheless. It was so much quieter that both Barcelona and Madrid, which was an interesting change. By far the most amazing part of the trip was experiencing Frank Gehry's amazing Guggenheim Bilbao museum. We didn't get to see all the art but we spent a full day sketching the dynamic building that put Bilbao on the map. I used to think the building was more of an object than a building but after being there in person I know now that I was wrong. It was amazing to walk around the building and experience it from every angle, and then walk inside and see its beautiful space. Frank Gehry is brilliant.














The trip overall was a lot of fun. It was tiring having 21 of us run around to catch trains and such but it was something that I hadn't experienced before in my life. I can't wait for the next trip in two weeks to the southern region of spain.

Also from November 9 through 20 all of us are supposed to come up with our own travel trip, which can be basically anywhere in the world (although most of us are just going elsewhere in Europe). My friend Joe and I are going to Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, for the first 5 days, and then we are going to Italy for the second 5 days. We agreed to each pick a place, I picked Italy and he picked Prague. But that's not to say that we're not both excited about both. We will be in Prague, a city my teacher likes a lot, visiting all the modern architecture and also some small towns. Then we will fly into Rome and spend one night there. Afterwards we will take a train to Florence where we will spend the next four nights. We'll only spend maybe a day or two experiencing Florence and will take day trips to other smaller tuscan towns, including siena, pisa and one or two others that I haven't decided on. Finally we will fly from Pisa back to Barcelona.

Sagrada Familia

One quick blog before leaving tomorrow. The class went to Antoni Gaudi's Sagrada Familia Church, which is the most famous building in Barcelona and one of the most famous in Spain. I have been interested in Gaudi's work and Sagrada Familia ever since I studied them in high school. Gaudi spent half of this life working on this church and it is still not finished. Because his plans and models got destroyed in the Spanish Civil War it has been a difficult job finishing the church the way he wanted it. Now because of CAD (computer animated design) technology they are replicating Gaudi's craftsmanship digitally and the church should be completed by 2026. And they are working really hard to do so, there were cranes and drills and all sorts of things at work when we went. What was there was amazing though. The amount of geometry and structural craftsmanship that went into the building is mindblowing. I sat there sketching the columns for about an hour and just walked around the building for a half hour. I didn't stop to look at the museum exhibits with the tourists because i didn't want to detract from the building's affect on my experience. The Passion facade in the back was the most stunning.

Work and other stuff

Lots of work has been piling up over the past few weeks. We visited these buildings, the Santa Caterina market and the MACBA (contemporary art museum) and did case studies on them as well as the big fish sculpture near the beach. We had to do digital case studies on each of those buildings and compose a video of our experience. I don't understand my teacher's obsession with the beach area. It's really artificial....the sand is put there by the city council after it washes away each winter. If it wasn't for the gehry fish (pictured in my first entry) which I like a whole lot I would not have any reason to go there. The MACBA museum was really wierd and had obscure modern art. One was a video of an overhead view of a small four-walled room with three hooded monks walking back and forth. It was a waste of my money. In fact I think the building is overrated. I like the design of the Santa Caterina market much better.














MACBA is on the left and Santa Caterina is on the right. I've done quite a bit of analysis and sketching of these over the past few days. I hope to be excellent at sketching at the end of this semester, which is what my field studies course pushes you to do as our teacher encourages us to sketch what we see on our travels and expand to different sketching mediums such as markers, pens, watercolor and pastels. I think I already have gotten a little better. Here is a sketch I did of the Gehry fish. I did it in my new pocket-sized moleskin sketchbook, which is small but great for travel sketching.

September 11 was a really interesting day. It is the National Day of Catalonia (the autonomía / autonomous region that Barcelona is located in). About 7-10 of us headed out of the dorms to see the festivities and we literally lost each other in a sea of people. It was amazing, the amount of national pride displayed in the people there. Catalonia truly thinks of itself as its own country with its own history. If you want to read more about that I produced a more in-depth blog at the class blog, http://archelona.blogspot.com .

Also on Friday we had a little get together for the whole dormitory building here and I met a lot of Spanish students. That was an interesting experience. Communicating with Spaniards is so wierd, they all know at least some English and we all know a good amount of Spanish (I have taken 5 1/2 years of spanish so I know a little more than the others) so often you have to switch languages in the middle of conversation. I thought that we would all get a negative reception because of the whole America image problem thing, but actually not really, they were all very interested in where each of us was from. A lot of them have better knowlege of American geography than some Americans (read: Miss Teen South Carolina). I thought one thing was strange....every time we mentioned that we go to school in South Carolina they say "isn't that where Michael Jordan is from?" and then we correct them and say that's North Carolina. One person even had heard of Philly Cheesesteaks which I found amazing.

On Wednesday we are going on our first trip. We are going to Madrid first, which I think will be interesting because it is historically the center of the Spanish kingdom. Then we will see the polar opposite of that when we explore Bilbao and San Sebastián, which are located in the Basque region. Basque country is another autonomous region that is perhaps more seperatist than Catalonia. We come back Wednesday of the following week.

I only have time for one quick entry....We have had tons of work. Every week we are expected to do a case study and two mapping sheets on top of our normal studio work, and we also have a huge paper to do for one class and a spanish culture project to do for another.














This week we all went on a bike ride down the port. It was a really relaxing experience. The smell of the Mediterranean sea and the breeze complimented the recreational fun of bike riding. Our site for our project is at this port. We also went to Parc Guell and I saw Antoni Gaudi's architecture for the first time. It was one of the things I was looking forward to most about going to Barcelona, and it was amazing. I was impressed by the intricate details in every corner of the park.

The First Week

Hola Everyone! I've decided to keep a blog of my semester in Europe. It's been a little over a week here in Barcelona. A lot has happened over this past week for me to talk about, and I'm not doing anything right now and have a lot of time to write, so this first entry may be a little bigger than the average entry. I promise to keep them short and simple in the future!

Well, I guess I should start off with the plane ride over. Joe and I left from Charlotte on Tuesday, the 21st, which was about ten days ago. The plane left about two hours late due to some weather problems, but luckily we left a three hour layover time for our next flight. The flight was not so great...I didn't get any sleep and my head kind of hurt in the end. But we landed in Frankfurt, Germany about 9AM their time. I thought the language barrier would be a problem but the airport workers and Lufthansa were very good with English.....some of them speaking better english than some Americans I can think of. But our flight from Frankfurt to Barcelona was easy and incredibly comfortable, and we were in Barcelona about noon on Wednesday.



From the airport we took a taxi to our new residence. The weather was incredibly nice...about 70 degrees and without any of the humidity that I am so accustomed to living on the East Coast all my life. We checked in to our dormitories and I was incredibly disappointed to find out that all of the Clemson students were living in single rooms in all different parts of the building, which sort of has a big negative effect on our overall cohesion, both socially and educationally. The first thing we did on Wednesday was walking along the Rambla, which is a big pedestrian road here stretching across the Gothic Quarter, and ate at an overpriced Catalan restaurant. The food was great though.


The next day we met our architecture professor, who so far seems like a really nice guy. He bought us all dinner on Thursday which was really, really nice of him. Friday we had off which gave us a three day weekend to explore as much of Barcelona as we can. We managed to explore most of the major parts of town, including Port Vell, The Barceloneta (aka the beach), Montjuic (the hill/park area where a castle and many of the 1992 summer olympics facilities reside), Port Olympic, the Barri Gotic, and our own neighborhood, El Raval. I have seen most of what I have wanted to see except for Gaudi's architecture and some cathedrals, which I hope to see as soon as I can get someone to go with me. I can say from all that exploring that Barcelona is an amazing place......way, way different from America. You can literally get anywhere you want in the Barcelona area by walking or by taking the Metro (subway), which is very inexpensive. The streets are really crowded but they are, surprisingly, incredibly safe. The only thing you have to watch out for is pickpocketing, which Barcelona is known for.


It hasn't been perfect here, though. A lot of things have bothered me, mostly the cost of this trip. I have already spent hundreds of dollars, most of it on just food. We have been eating out almost every day, which has been really expensive. We have been able to find places to eat for under ten euros, which is not bad compared to what I have heard about other European cities, but the conversion of approximately 1 Euro = $1.40 has been killing us. This is something that I just need to adapt to.....probably just need to find the less expensive places to eat and go to those places for lunch (which is usually had at 2PM) and just make something in my kitchen for dinner (which is the smaller meal of the day, had at around 10PM). Also I have been disappointed in how little I have seen the other Clemson students. I had always imagined that we would all live on the same floor or something....but it gets lonely at times when it's just me and Joe. I'm hopeful that this will change as the semester goes on and we start working with each other more. So far only two of our classes have started and we are only working on one assignment. Next week is when our true work load begins.


Maybe I am just a little disappointed because I have been looking forward to this study abroad trip for, literally, years. In fact it was one of the main reasons I wanted to come to Clemson....I have known since senior year in high school the strength and high participation rates of Clemson's study abroad programs for architecture. Also, maybe I'm a little jealous of the Clemson group in Italy that lives in their own building complete with studio, cooking crew and maid. But the city of Barcelona itself is everything and more than I have ever expected it to be...I want to experience this not as a tourist but as someone who is part of this amazing culture here. Anybody can visit Europe but the opportunity of living here with the people is a once in a lifetime experience. And I'm pretty glad I started this blog because it gives me a chance to reflect on that.

That about wraps it up....if you actually read that whole thing then I applaud you. I haven't started traveling to different cities yet....I probably wont get into that until after September. I'm sort of disappointed that our first group trip to Madrid, Bilbao and San Sebastian got pushed back to the 19th of September, but whatever. I'll keep this updated, probably with a new post every week or so.