If you’ve ever wondered where The Cheesecake Factory got the idea for the design of their restaurants, this is where you go. This entire building was designed and built in the early 1900s by the local architect Antoni Gaudí. (Read on …)

They’ve got a nice aquarium in the harbor. You can make a reservation to swim with the sharks.
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It was settled, then conquered, then rose up, then conquered and rose up again. Barcelona is the perpetual second city to Rome or Paris or Madrid. The historical folks are just now establishing the digs around the city. There were many cultures here over the course of their 2000 year history. It’s like a snapshot of southern Europe and North Africa.

If you’ve ever been to this set of steps in Barcelona then you’ve probably taken the exact same picture I’ve got here.  It’s tough to be original with a thousand year old building.

Eggs crown the Dali Museum in Figueres, as do gold figures and the occasional diver. The inside is as strange as the outside. Our bus tour ended at this museum housing a collection of works owned by and created by the artist.

While Leslie was working on her thesis I was tasked with booking a bus tour. I trapsed up and down C. de Gracia looking for the right [(i)]nformation center. I came across the apartments and snapped this pic from across the intersection. (Read on …)

RCD Espanyol plays in the Olympic Stadium when they are at home. And while they lost this match, 5-1, the crowd cheered, sang and occasionally exclaimed a scathing comment about a player’s intelligence level. (Read on …)

As part of our apartment rental agreement we’re required to water the plants. Here we have some nice succulents, a couple of seedlings and, oh yeah, a couple of pot plants. (Read on …)

We’ve arrived in Barcelona for nine days of fun on the Mediterranean coast. Our apartment is located in the Born area which seems to be near the center of a new cultural surge. Our flight plan to get here was surprisingly problem free, for the first time in a long time. We didn’t even have to lug our luggage through customs, apparently they check those bags behind the scenes now. (Read on …)

On the last Friday of every month a loose group of bicyclers and other folks using non-car transportation gather en-mass and commute through San Francisco. With the volume they have most traffic comes to a halt around their route. This causes some grief to folks trying to get home. I happened to be in San Francisco this day and was surprised to see miles of riders moving like a giant snake down the streets. (Read on …)

Our latest trip to Chicago found us below street level in a restaurant called The Melting Pot.