Walls in Spain: September 2019

The Gracia Festival is an event that takes place in our neighborhood in Barcelona each summer. The actual event is about a week long, but people in the neighborhood work on the decorations for the festival all year long! And they are really spectacular! Entire blocks are decorated with a specific theme dreamed up by the people who live there and competition is fierce. It is fun to walk through the streets and discover what our neighbors come up with. I tried to document some of the sites in the photos below, but they really don't do the experience justice. For the real impact, you will need to visit the Gracia neighborhood mid-August some year!

Plants floating in the sky.

I loved this one - paint swatches!!

A huge, much larger than life, hardware shelf!

People are getting ready for a parade!

Buddha!

Giant flowers!

Vegetables galore!!

A mining scene!

My dear friends from high school, Taryn and Annette, made plans to visit this summer. The original plan was for the two of them to fly to Lisbon and I would meet them there. Unfortunately, Annette was unable to do the trip. It was for a good reason though - she got a job teaching which is really exciting, especially for her students. She is an amazing teacher! Anyway, back to our trip.

I met Taryn in Lisbon on the morning of August 6. We had two nights scheduled at a boutique hotel we found on iescape.com, called The Independente Suites. We were happy to discover the hotel was in an amazing location and had multiple options for food and beverage! We highly recommend it! We didn't have much of an agenda in Lisbon other than visiting the tile museum and wandering around to see the sites. It did not disappoint, we enjoyed wonderful meals and lots of laughs in this lovely city. We then took the train to Porto for two nights.

In Porto, we had an Airbnb apartment, but no real agenda again. This was my first time to Porto and I was totally impressed. The city is small and focused on the river that runs through it. The buildings are quaint and colorful and the city is teeming with cable cars. We were good tourists and took a couple of cable car rides and we also did the hop on hop off bus to get our bearings. We again ate well, tried green wine and enjoyed just hanging out. Porto is definitely worth a visit!

We then headed to Barcelona to hang out with Bucky before Taryn had to go back to her home in San Francisco. She and I made the required trip to Sagrada Familia and she was duly impressed. We also spent the day in the Born district, with a visit to the Picasso Museum and lunch at one of my favorite eateries, Story. We did some shopping and visited the beach for a traditional tapas meal. It was a wonderful few days.

I loved seeing Taryn and am so glad she came to visit. We had lots of laughs, a few tears and made memories to last a lifetime. It was a wonderful visit with a lifelong and true friend.