A morning of culture

This morning, Paige and I took our ArtTickets (get into Barcelona's seven best museums for €22) and went to the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB). The museum — an incredibly cool space — is comprised of a couple rotating exhibitions, rather than any sort of permanent collection.

First up were the winners of the 2009 World Press Photo contests. The photos were captioned in Spanish and Catalan, but the museum offered huge binders filled with English explanations. Paige and I accidentally started at the end of the exhibit (it went in a circle), so we read our books from left to right.

The other exhibit we had been excited about seeing for a while: Cerdà and the Barcelona of the Future. This year, Barcelona is celebrating the "Any Cerdà" — the 150th anniversary of Ildefons Cerdà's master plan to build L'Eixample, the part of the city we live in.

Once upon a time, Barcelona was a tiny egg-shaped city encased by walls (murallas). The city reached a point where it simply could not fit within its boundaries anymore (1859) and held a contest to design the expansion (which is what L'Eixample literally means). Cerdà came up with a plan to turn the agricultural plots surrounding Barcelona into perfectly gridded city streets.

150 years later, L'Eixample, with its square blocks and bevelled corners (vocabulary word of the day), is every bit as Cerdà intended.

The city government (el Ayuntamiento) is sponsoring exhibits all over Barcelona this year, so hopefully I'll get to see some more.

Now we're off to the Costa Brava to follow La Ruta de Dali. We're going to see Dali's museum and house and learn all about exactly how insane he was. (So far we've discovered he had a sexual fascination with lobsters, or something along those lines.) It's the first time in a while the whole Consortium is doing something together, so it should be really fun.