Travelling Toys: mini-Andy goes sightseeing in Barcelona

mini-Andy goes sightseeing in Barcelona

3:34 AM mini-Andy

After a night on the town with the skateboarding boys, our mini-Adventurer thought he'd have a look around the great city of Barcelona in Northern Spain.

Realising that a bit of the local lingo might come in handy, our mini-Linguist picked up a book on Spanish grammar and headed straight to an open terraza to get a glass of zumo de naranja and study the preterito imperfecto.

After a few hours reading, and after mastering three different past tenses he came to the startling realisation that the people of Barcelona speak a different language called Catalan so, throwing his book in his bag he set off to see the sights instead armed with his Canon EOS 20D.

(At this point I would like to point out that product placement is a bad and evil thing that is not looked on kindly in the mini-Andy offices, but in the case of Canon photographic products the mini-Editorial team are willing to make an exception.)

Among the many interests that mini-Andy has in that little body of his is an interest in architecture and Barcelona was the home to one of the greatest Modernist architects that ever lived, the Catalan Antoni Gaudi

In the flesh, mini-Andy was incredibly impressed with Gaudi's architecture, which fused elements of Gothic and Classical Spanish architectural styles with an organic quality.

Our mini-Hero then took a trip up Las Ramblas to see the Columbus monument at the center of the Plaça de la Porta de Pau. This was erected 1888 to commemorate the visit of Christopher Columbus in 1493 after the discovery of the Americas.

The statue is 7m high, but the great man was made to look rather small when stood next to our mini-hero!

From here, mini-Andy briefly visited the Naval Museum

Then he went down to Barceloneta, the lovely beach which is usually totally packed in the summer months. Because it was the middle of winter, out mini-Sunseeker had the beach all to himself. Yay!