We live inside of an antique

90 years old but so cool ..  our new place in Gracia is all windows and space, close to a small plaza, and one of the most famous intersections in Barcelona. What luck. Love it!

Barri Gotic / Gothic Quarter on a Sunday

The Gothic Quarter of Barcelona is old, cramped, dark, and full of charm. Here is the kind of place where you hear of visitors to Europe getting lost in the winding alleyways and loving it. Every turn of the corner varies greatly - street performers here, rows of restaurants or confectioners' shops here, and deserted alleys there. As always, click to enlarge the pictures..

A typical, old Gothic Quarter street.

Lights coming through the Christmas/Nadal/Navidad decorations.

Here you can get an idea of the narrow streets crowded by the tall apartment buildings.

Clásic Gótic Restaurant, on a street leading to the seafront.

Spraypaint artist in quiet Plaza Mercé.

Colors of the walls in the sunset

One of the exterior city walls from the old Roman settlement.

Some oddly-shaped rounded plaza in the Barri

One elaborate Santa/Papa Noel!

Um... curio store? Who knows... they have Phrenology head.

What would Europe be without delicious pastries?

Papabubble confectionary

Who knew there was a market for artisan caramels? The signage is sharp.

Our part of Barcelona

And now, a short trip around our area...

When you turn from one of the main streets in Barcelona, named Diagonal, onto our street, Balmes, you see this building (which reads "CIRCULO ECUESTRE 1856" ...

...directly across from this one.

There are a lot of buildings from the early 1900s and then the late 1930s in our area. This is under a doorway, looking up.

These apartments are across the street from where we live, but ours doesn't look anything like these!

Some of the interior streets around us are very quiet. Here´s an old car repair shop.

Cookbook store!
¨Know Food¨ in the Gracia section

This basically means bakery in Catalan.

So elaborate!

¨1905¨

There was a market yesterday for the local shops on this street. They had a chance to display some of their wares to draw people inside. I think the most unexpected one was a shop that sells only olive oil.

New construction, old posters, major street, a grouping of little cafes and restaurants...

Motos are the way to travel in this town.

One day I have to go to this creperie!! Along with a few crepe places close to us, there are 4 or 5 sushi restaurants, a Polish bar, an Uruguayan restaurant, 2 Mexican restaurants, and plenty of traditional food and pastry shops!

It ends here, at our nice entrance.

ok... ready for some photos? (PARIS part 1..)

So, we've finally returned from a great and unexpectedly long trip to Paris. We were supposed to leave Barcelona on Tuesday and return on Friday, but we didn't make it back until Sunday night. It took us two days to take trains home to Barcelona, with stops in Toulouse and Narbonne. We have SO MANY photos ... We won't bore you with everyone else's postcard views of the Eiffel Tower and other Paris monuments. Instead, we have more interesting views from this beautiful city. But first, to get some of the "normal" pictures out of the way..... :)

**check back as we'll be updating this post often with new photos**

Carlos and I on Pont Neuf over the Seine River. Next time we need to go with other people so we don't have to take pictures of ourselves!

Well I had to put this one in, right?

Venus de Milo at the Louvre, which is going to be the subject of another post.

Arc de Triomphe on a beautiful afternoon.

And of course, the Louvre with that Pyramid.



. . .
1. The people

Accordion players by Notre Dame.

The people of Paris are in love with people watching. When you go to a cafe, half of the restaurant is outside, under the terrace, with all the chairs facing the street. People eat and then will have coffee at a cafe until late at night, smoking, watching life on the streets pass. At this time of year, the sky isn't dark until 11pm, so there's more time for being out and observing the city at night.


Ha!
I just like this picture.


Live jazz at the park beside the Notre Dame.


The street where we stayed in an apartment from the 30s.
From wikipedia...
Montparnasse became famous at the beginning of the 20th century, referred to as les Années Folles (the Crazy Years), when it was the heart of intellectual and artistic life in Paris.
A few of the other artists who gathered in Montparnasse were Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, Ossip Zadkine, Moise Kisling, Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, Marios Varvoglis, Marc Chagall, Nina Hamnett, Jean Rhys, Fernand Leger, Jacques Lipchitz, Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars, Chaim Soutine, Michel Kikoine, Pinchus Kremegne, Amedeo Modigliani, Ford Madox Ford, Toño Salazar, Ezra Pound, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti, Henri Rousseau, Constantin Brancusi, Paul Fort, Juan Gris, Diego Rivera, Marevna, Tsuguharu Foujita, Marie Vassilieff, Léon-Paul Fargue, Alberto Giacometti, René Iché, Andre Breton, Pascin, Salvador Dalí, Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Joan Miró and, in his declining years, Edgar Degas.