Everytime I told someone I was coming to Barcelona, all I heard about was Antoni Gaudí, a famous architect, long since dead. "You can´t miss it. You have to see ´La Sagrada Familia´ and his museum. He is amazing. Blah, blah, blah."

Well, call me uncultured and crude, because I just wasn´t impressed. Gaudí is the guy who didn´t like straight lines and right angles. He said that nature wasn´t like that, so he didn´t want his work to be like it either. This doesn´t make for an easy life when you design and build huge buildings, but whatever floats your boat, as long as the roof doesn´t come crashing down on me. And, for the record, he skirts the whole "no right angles thing" a bit in ´La Sagrada´. There are lots of places where I was looking and thinking, hell, all he did was round the corner of that square. Sure, it´s not a right angle, but it´s pretty fucking close.

What´s more, he couldn´t survive in today´s world of budgets and deadlines. He took over ´La Sagrada Familia´ (an enormous cathedral) in 1896. Surprisingly, it isn´t finished today, not even close, and won´t be for decades. Spending more than 100 years to build something seem insane to anyone else? With their luck, it will finally get finished and then we´ll have an earthquake or something that bring it crashing down to the ground.

I imagine Gaudí was like the workers in "The Money Pit".

The King of Spain - "Hey Antoní, how long is this going to take? My daughter is getting married soon and I want it to be in this church."

Gaudí - "Hmm...Two weeks!"

While I was not impressed with the church, I did like his park and museum. It is filled with pillars and the ground is layered so you are constantly looking out on a different level. He also used lots of tiles on the pillars and they were arranged in various designs with multiple colors. I felt like I was walking around Bug´s Bunny Land at Six Flags or something.