Day 11 Getting to Know Barcelona

We love 🌹Barcelona. What a friendly, elegant and sophisticated city. People are so nice. On the subway, they'll give up their seat so an elderly person can sit down. The bad news is that I am that "elderly person". Oh well, it beats getting mugged.

Our first activity today is a tour of the Gothic Quarter with Matthias, shown in the dark blue shirt below. 

He is the consummate guide. Along the way he gives lots of insight into the history of Barcelona and helps us understand why things are the way they are today; from early Spanish Kings, to the commissioning of Columbus's exploration, to the Barcelona Olympics of '92. 

He even introduces us to the acronym for the poorest countries in the EU. PIIGS, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain. 

One of Barcelona's activities is human tower building. They recently set a record for 10 layers. Here's a monument to that.

In the evening we all went to the Palace of Music .

It's a wonderful bit of Modernist architecture that looks a little like Gaudi's, but isn't.

We got a chance to hear these guys in concert.  Most of it was classical guitar jazz. 

But for an encore, they did Billy Jean with six hands on one guitar; one set for percussion, one on lower strings for accompaniment and one set of hands on the upper strings for the melody.  Unforgettable!


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