When a city tour by bus takes FOUR HOURS to complete and requires two separate routes, you know that there is a lot of stuff to do in Barcelona. And it doesn't even stop at all of the tourist locations for us to take pictures of them, it just passes through them so you know what they look like. And it STILL took four hours.
It was nice that they didn't stop specifically for all the monuments though. I think the day tour was nice just to see what exactly we can see in Barcelona. I didn't get a lot of pictures, but from this tour, we know exactly which places we have to visit in the coming few days.
We did see something today though, the beautiful Sagrada Familia, a massively mathematical church in Barcelona, a few hundred years in the making. Even in 1886, the main architect, Antoni Gaudi knew that the church wouldn't be finished during his lifetime, so he meticulously described and modeled what he wanted the church to look like and expected future generations to pick up where he left off. Even today, it still isn't done (it's set to be finished at around 2026), but what has been finished is INCREDIBLE.
Yes, just as I suspected. This church is much larger than my monkey.
The inside of the church had beautiful stain glass windows that made the entire church light up in color. The pillars were intentionally designed to be like fractal trees, complete with a canopy-like roof, and Gaudi put SO MUCH detail and symbolism in every aspect of the church that even I felt more spiritual just by being in it, and I'm not even that religious of a person. It really is a beautiful church, and that's coming from a person that felt nothing when he saw the Notre Dame.
The pictures really don't do it justice, like most of the things in the world that are brilliant, but I took some anyway.
I absolutely LOVE the stain glass in here.
More on the multicolored stain glass on the walls.
Everything is so beautiful.
RFotD: If you look up more pictures of Sagrada Familia online, you'll probably find better shots.
Today was yet another transportation day, the final one for this vacation. We traveled from Lucerne to Zurich via bullet train, then from Zurich, we flew out to the very beautiful (and very hot!) airport of España.
That means Spain, for you non-Spanish speakers. I think.
As always, during the trip, we designate the day we arrive to a country as a rest day, where we just relax, briefly walk around the hotel to see where we could buy food and supplies, and plan for what we're gonna do in the country.
Today, however, was not a rest day. Today was exhausting, strenuous, physical labor day. And all because a subway station didn't have an elevator.
So our vacation is for four weeks, and since my family hates laundry with a passion, we decided to avoid it by bringing along enough clothes to last us 30 days without ever having to deal with bleach, detergent, or missing socks ever again. That of course, meant we'd have to bring very large, heavy luggage bags to store it all. Heavy bags which we would have to bring from the airport to our hotel.
On prior trips, this wasn't a huge issue because public transportation was very wheelchair-friendly and the roads were smooth enough that our bags wouldn't vibrate up and down like an Amsterdam masseuse with a really, really good client.
In Spain, however, we were plagued with both cobblestone streets, and the fact that the subway station we had to go to not only had no working elevators in sight, but also happened to be TEN KILOMETERS UNDERGROUND.
So to get to the hotel, we had to drag four suitcases, each weighting approximately three humpback whales each, across sixty miles of stone pavements specifically designed by 18th century Spanish masons to ensure that our luggage bag wheels would sound as much as an AK-47 on full auto as possible, before finally reaching the subway station. Then, we'd have to carry the bags, which combined have the weight of one Christina, down the literal seven circles of hell, climbing down at least 50 stories worth of staircases before finally reaching the trains.
Yeah. We're exhausted. But our lord and savior Booking.com saw our struggles, and rewarded our persistence by granting us the Elixir of Comfort, which today, took the form of an AMAZING HOTEL ROOM.
(Me being the moron I am, forgot to take these pictures, so just imagine that we had a hotel room with these things:
LOOK AT OUR KITCHEN.
WOW!
AND OUR BEDS.
Amazing!
AND OUR DUELLING TOILETS SETUP.
So you can share even your most intimate moments with your s/o.
RFotD: We really did have a kitchen in our hotel room and it was fantastic.
Today was a very very boring day. We visited this famous church with two pretty looking peaks on it:
Some may even describe it as a church with... twin peaks. (I hope you're reading this, Angela)
And then we took a lakeside cruise. I got a few pictures from that too:
God, every picture with Swiss mountains looks AMAZING.
More mountains, ft. boat passengers.
And of course, Joby was there as well.
But that cruise was AWFUL. As pretty as the views were, the cruise lasted three hours and, unknowingly for us, it's actually not a tourism boat, it's another MODE OF TRANSPORTATION. This was a PASSENGER BOAT, and since we didn't really want to leave on a random stop in the middle of Switzerland, we had to stick around for the whole three hour circuit. Surrounded by the armpit-like odor of very sweaty passengers.
It was pretty bad so we went home and just absolutely passed out.
RFotD: I was not in a very happy mood when I wrote this :(
8/5/15, 11:20 PM CET
Did you know that Lucerne used to be covered by a glacier hundreds of years ago? Well, it was. And the only remnants of the glacier now are the very intricate carvings it left on some of the bedrock in Lucerne, some of which we got to see in the appropriately-named Glacier Museum.
Woo! Geology!
...Yeah, a museum entirely about glaciers rocks sounds really boring. And it kinda was. I mean the science is cool, but when the museum is largely just pictures with a bunch of text, it becomes about as fun as reading a textbook. Which is to say, that it isn't much fun.
Thankfully, it wasn't exclusively about rocks and ice. They also had an AMAZING mirror room, which, although completely unrelated to glaciers, was still my favorite part about the glacier museum. Check out these really trippy photos I got while in there. For added confusion, try to figure out which people are real and which are reflections.
Don't worry if you can't do it, my mom couldn't either, and she was
actually there.
Yeah, I am one of those people that use the viewfinder to take pictures.
Don't judge.
I don't know why, but my sister looks like she's Angelina Jolie on the poster for
Mr. And Mrs. Smith.
Things got especially trippy when we reached the end of the maze, where they had a bunch of really tiny mirrors that show off just how cool of a look you could get with a few mirrors.
I like this one a lot because of the lights in the background.
I think this is my favorite picture though:
I call it "Joby in Space."
At one point, Megan actually ran into a mirror believing that it was a passable hallway and it was pretty funny because she was saying something like "It's this way!" but she got interrupted mid sentence by her reflection, which was pretty funny.
Also, the plot of land that the museum is on includes part of a mountain. They had a little wooden tower built on the top of the mountain as a viewpoint, so we climbed it. And the view was SPECTACULAR.
Seriously, it's AMAZING. It looks like it's straight out of a painting.
Afterwards, we decided to explore our inner Charlies and pay a visit to a real Swiss chocolate factory!
Unfortunately, Johnny Depp was not there to greet us.
Initially, I thought their mascot was really creepy. Look at this brown, almondy bastard:
The "A" on his hat actually stands for "asshole," not "Aeschbach."
...But after the entire tour and seeing him literally EVERYWHERE in the factory, I grew to love the guy. And so did Joby.
Awwwwwwwwww.
"It's almost adorable how ugly he is." -Samantha, when talking about me.
The actual factory was awesome too, except for the fact that I probably got diabetes from all the FREE CHOCOLATE WE GOT DURING THE TOUR. They outlined every step of the chocolate making process, as well as the differences between types of chocolate (largely determined by the ratios of cocoa cake/cocoa butter/sugar used in making them), and after every step they showed, they had stations for FREE CHOCOLATE. I especially liked it when they let us sample their white chocolate, since that's the chocolate I like the most. But my favorite chocolate dispensing method they had wasn't the free chocolate fountain with customizable toppings nor was it the Skinner Box-esque dispenser of small chocolate cubes, it was this hot piece of ass.
Little do you know, the back of this donkey actually has a cutout of Olivia
Wilde's face.
You see, when you press the green button on his face, something magical happens. Doctors would almost call it miraculous. And if you see it yourself, you'd definitely be inclined to agree with them.
That's right, they have a DONKEY THAT VOMITS CHOCOLATE COINS IN THE FACTORY AND IT'S AMAZING. We came at a time where there was literally no one else in the factory, and since the donkey dispensed a coin EVERY TIME, we decided to exploit it and get a BILLION of these things.
Actually, it was more like thirteen gold and silver coins, but nevertheless, it's a lot of free chocolate.
My sister and I also got to make and decorate our own chocolate, which basically involved pouring melted chocolate into a mold and putting toppings on it before it hardened. Here was my sister's chocolate bar:
Colorful, melty goodness.
And here's mine:
Uhhh...?
I think it's quite obvious who the more artistic one is here.
We ended the tour with a picture on this massive stack of chocolate coins:
And by "we" I mean Joby.
And we FINALLY wrapped up the day by exploring the sights that nighttime Lucerne had in store for us. Take a look at my pics:
Every day, we ate at the lakeside of Lucerne, and every day, we loved it.
Switzerland is amazing.
RFotD: Switzerland would be even more amazing if the stuff there wasn't so expensive.
When this is the first thing you see in the morning:
If you squint, you can see the Toblerone bear in the mountains.
You know that today'll be a good day.
The first thing we did was look around Lucerne, see what sort of things we could see in the city.
Their lake, of course, was beautiful.
I think the flag really makes this photo.
And we saw this bridge over here, called Chapel Bridge, which is one of Lucerne's biggest landmarks.
Pretty pretty.
Joby about to enter the bridge!
Inside the bridge was really cool too...
As indicated by this guy holding a cheetah print plastic bag walking towards me.
But along the way, we saw this poor guy:
I don't know how this bird manifested his thoughts into a real-world
speech bubble.
He's a small bird that we found still alive, but barely breathing.
Maybe he's praying to a god that he doesn't believe in?
From the look of him (and the fact that he didn't react when we got literally inches from him), we could guess that he was dying, probably from a disease since we didn't see any wounds on him.
And we couldn't really do anything about it.
Sorry, poor bird. We wish we could help.
Megan cried and told me she wanted to be a vet now to make sure animals don't die anymore. I thought that was really touching, so I decided not to tell her that bacon was made out of dead pigs.
It's for her own good.
We also saw this beautiful monument.
"It's just a flesh wound."
This is the famous Lion of Lucerne. The story behind this monument is that some time ago, there were Swiss mercenaries in charge of defending a palace. One day, they were invaded, and in order to protect everyone else in the palace, the mercenaries refused to surrender to the invaders even though they knew they would die because of it. And they did.
So later, they made this statue to commemorate that event. The lion symbolizes the brave mercenaries who died. It's beautiful, or at least I think so. Here's some more pictures of it.
Look at how quiet of a place it's in too, a rock face in the middle of nowhere.
Two animals, one pic.
We finished today by visiting the most popular museum in all of Switzerland: The Swiss Museum of Transport.
Sounds boring, right? I mean who wants to look at trains and stuff all day? That's what I initially thought when I looked the place up online, and then I saw it in person.
And it looked AMAZING.
I don't know why, but I'm getting signs that this museum is gonna be fun.
HHEHEHHEH.
And yeah, I got the monkey in there too.
The museum was geared towards making kids excited about anything involved in transport, from planes, trains, and boats, to the more unorthodox things like ski lifts and construction vehicles. And they had SO MANY THINGS TO SEE. They had a giant high definition scale map of Switzerland:
Those aren't visitors on the map, they actually have giant statues of
kids in random places of Switzerland, it's kinda scary.
I only really liked it because of the little slippers they made us wear to prevent scratching the map.
I tried stealing them afterwards but I found that it was implusible. Pbbbbbth.
They also had some cool stuff like a free airplane simulator (that did FLIPS AND SPINS) and a WORKING INDOOR SKI JUMP, but the highlight was the large, open area in the center of the museum.
Here, kids had the chance to do a LOT of hands-on stuff. They could pretend they were construction workers in a rock quarry, which I thought was adorable.
It's like my own little army of cute, tiny little child slaves!
Or they could take to the GIANT INDOOR LAKE THEY HAD and go kayaking, pedal boating, or canoeing, the latter of which my sister and my dad did.
They also had a zorb, which you can see in the background. Veteran readers
might remember my experience with that thing a few years ago.
Just slap on a "Willkommen in der Schweiz" graphic in the left third and
you got yourself a damn good postcard.
Yeah, my sister looks smug right now, but they've actually been spinning
in place for 45 minutes at that point.
They also had a ton of kick scooters lying around the center area, free for anyone to take for faster transportation around the area. God, I love that museum so much.
Panorama! Click me!
I'll end today's entry with a bunch of funny, bad English translations of German phrases on postcards that I found in here. I won't caption them, because honestly, they speak for themselves.
RFotD: Those postcards are intentionally badly translated. At least, I hope they are.
