Trip wrap-up
It’s been about 2 weeks since I’ve returned to Melbourne now and I’ve had a bit of time to organise my thoughts regarding my 7 week trip around Europe. Firstly I should do some recapping of stuff that’s happened since the last entry.
The soccer match was pretty amazing. Barcelona dominated Mallorca 3-1 in a pretty rough match with 11 yellow cards and 1 red. We were extremely lucky to catch Henry just back from an injury and even luckier to see him score a goal. The atmosphere at the stadium was pretty amazing and I’d hate to be a player from Mallorca on the field there where 99% of the support is for the home team, Barcelona. We were only in Barcelona one night for this match before leaving on the overnight train to Madrid.
Madrid is a fairly new city actually, so there wasn’t alot of architecture to see there like there is in Barcelona (I’ll go over that later…) What there is to see in Madrid is the Royal Palace and also alot of modern art museums. The Royal Palace was particularily notable for its massive armoury with a ridiculous amount of medievil weaponry. The modern art museums were full of art which I didn’t really understand but it was pretty interesting in its own right. We spent about 4 days in Madrid then we returned to Barcalona via overnight train again.
Now that we had some time to wander around Barcelona, there is actually alot to see there. After talking to some people at our hostel we were told to check out all the Gaudi buildings in the city, particularily the Sagrada Familia Cathedral which has been under construction for 200 years and is still only 50% complete. It’s still ridiculously large and awe inspiring. Also, while in Barcelona, we met up with some people from our tour group who also happened to be around. Together we visited the other Gaudi buildings which are just on main shopping streets and serve as bank buildings or clothing stores. It’s really easy to walk right past them but they’re actually quite unique. I heard that there was also a Gaudi building in Madrid but we didn’t know what to look for so we didn’t see it… There’s also a park to the north of Barcelona which has been designed by Gaudi. Pretty interesting stuff all round.
After Barcelona we returned to London for 3 days before heading home. I used this time to visit some museums we missed in London while we were staying at Jon’s house. They have a fairly large science and technology museum with a pretty children’s activity room. I spent quite alot of time in there trying to build bridges and arches and stuff like that. This happened quite alot over the course of our tour actually… I’d get stuck at festivals and markets if there was a stall selling puzzles… Anyway, next to the science museum there’s a natural history museum which we walked around in for a bit but ultimately didn’t spend much time in. One good thing about London is that the museums are free. Other than that the food is expensive and not particularily tasty and everything is generally more expensive than the rest of Europe. I did buy a nice coat though.
So now that I’m back home everyone asks me what my favourite city is, but I’m not really sure how to answer them because each place that I visited is so different and each place has their own culture and history. Not being a historian myself, I learnt about most of these things through tours or museums and so my understanding of each city’s culture is not always on the same level. If forced to select I would have to say Munich but you might hear Rome or Barcelona if you asked me on a different day.
Someone also asked me what I learnt about myself, from my tour of Europe. I told them that it made me feel insignificant in comparison to the sheer history of great people inhabiting every museum I visited throughout Europe. If I want to make a mark in history I’ll have to try harder…
This will be the last entry in this blog, but I’ll leave it up, so that anyone who might be interested in my trip can read about my experiences. Thanks for reading.
