Monday 6th December 1999

By sunrise on Monday the remaining four had become a remaining three, as Anton had had to head home. Straight from the nightclubs to the airport and back to Rome for a full day's work: how hardy is that man!

The first part of "The Apartment" floor was an exhibition detailing the rise of Barcelona as an industrial centre in the early years of the 20th Century and how the new technologies of gas, electricity and the telephone were embraced and harnessed to make a better standard of living for the city and for its inhabitants. There was also an eight-minute film running constantly in a separate darkened room which used all original film footage to give a fascinating insight into life in Barcelona in this period..

The apartment itself was nothing particularly special, but our expectations were more than met when we made our way up to the fifth floor. We were now effectively in the attic, under the roof, and Gaudí had not passed up on the opportunity to make the practicality of making the roof stay up into a visual feast for the observer. The attic ran all the way around the perimeter of the building and was criss-crossed with a series of intricate brickwork arches that looked more like the spines of dinosaurs than roof supports. However, if anything, it was the contents of the attic that was the real prize.

The first room housed a series of what looked like orator's tribunes, each of which housed a lightbox running a series of slides about each of Gaudí's works - one on Parc Güell, one on the Casa Batlló, one on the Casa Milà and so on. We just marvelled at the breadth of the man's imagination, and spent a lot of time being wowed by these images. It also served as an excellent way of allowing the visitor to Barcelona to separate the Gaudí works they particularly wanted to see, from those which did not particularly grab them.

In the corner of the building that joined this room to the next was a running film that detailed the major world events happening during each year of Gaudí's life - the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Bismarck becoming Chancellor of Germany, the outbreak of what would later be known as the First World War, and so on. The detail into which the film went meant that it took several minutes to get from one year to the next, but it was nonetheless fascinating.

Moving into the next room we were presented with a computerised film which ran through each of Gaudí's works, explaining the design and construction techniques used in each one. This was really eye-opening stuff, even to the non-architect, as Gaudí pioneered a number of techniques that are now integral to architechtural principles, but had never previously been thought of.

A glass case in the next room held the finest example of Gaudí's redical thinking: the revolutionary upside-down model of the Sagrada Família that allowed him to calculate - far more accurately than had ever been done before - the stresses and strains that would be generated by such a unique construction, and therefore what would need to be done in order to accommodate them.

		This room led to the next, and to the next, and finally, before getting to the stairway to the rooftop, the shop. Dashed cunning . . . The rooftop was a mass of sweeping steps, air vents and macabre-looking chimney stacks that made one feel one was either looking over a lunar landscape or trapped inside an Escher drawing. Martin was snapping away quite happily when a mini-disaster struck: out of batteries!
		The Casa Milà's remarkable chimneys

A spare set purchased that morning proved to be defective, and as the sun was setting rapidly, it was essential to source new batteries as quickly as possible. The shop on the apartment floor didn't sell them, so it was a dash down five flights of stairs and into the streets in search of an electrical shop or newsagent. Running north up the Avenida de Gracia: nothing; running south down the Avenida de Gracia: still nothing. Eventually, a small shopping arcade was spotted in a side street and a tobacconist that sold batteries was found. Back up the Avenida de Gracia, back up the five flights of stairs . . .

By then it was nearly dark, and we suddenly realized that we had all been so engrossed in the Gaudí museum and the various displays that we had all failed to realize that we had not eaten anything since breakfast. However, as soon as we did stop to realize, hunger really set in! Fortunately, the Casa Milà had been set up to provide everything (everything, that is, except batteries!) and we found a small cafe on the ground floor, where we stopped for a coffee (beer in some cases) and a snack. However, we relaxed rather more effectively than we had intended to, and it was suddenly 7pm - an hour before the Casa Milà was to close - and we had not yet made use of the second part of our ticket.
Beeehiiiind yooouuuu!

This second part was an art gallery housed on the first floor of the other part of the Casa Milà, and there we found works by a number of famous artists, such as Gaugin, Monet and Kandinsky.

8pm came and we were thrown out of the art gallery. We headed back to the hostel where we found another message from Eva, saying that she was having a pizza with some friends at the Pizzaria Veronique just up the road from our hostel and would we like to join her? This message had been left about two hours before, so we dropped everything and went straight out again, thinking that we might already have missed her. Fortunately, they were still there, although if we had arrived any more than ten minutes later, we would have missed them.

Despite the snack at the Casa Milà, we were more than ready to sink some pizza, so we ate pizza and drank red wine while Eva and her friends topped up their nicotine levels. Michelle then went back to the hostel for an early night, while Eva and one of her friends - English, but a Spanish language student - took Eryl and Martin out to one of their favourite bars. The beer was good, and trying to make ourselves heard above the music gave us plenty of practice for possible future careers in public speaking.

Around midnight, Eva and her friend said goodnight, but for Eryl and Martin the night was still very, very young. We capitalised on Eryl's recently-acquired knowledge of the city's bars and clubs to trace a similar series of steps to those followed the previous night, although this time without the attempted mugging.

We started off in a bar that boasted a wide range of imported bottled beers - we tried a good many of them! - before heading on to a nightclub and dancing away the next few hours. On leaving the club Eryl realized that we were in the same spot where the previous night the two men had tried to mug him and Anton, and started getting angry all over again. However, he did calm down again after a while.

We then wandered out to the waterfront and each step of the way brought back to Eryl memories of the previous night's escapades. However, by the time we got to the seafront complex everything was shutting down, so after wandering around the various levels for a bit, we headed for "home". Bedtime: 6am.