Today, we had booked a full day tour of Girona and Figueres. First stop: Girona. Girona is a city about one hour from Barcelona, best known for being one of the main shooting sites for HBO's Game of Thrones (not that we knew this fact before we booked the tour!)
Before Game of Thrones, Girona was a quiet city, not that popular with tourists, so the show raise tourism in this quaint place significantly. There's a main river which you can cross via several bridges.
This one was built by Eiffel - that's right, the same guy who designed the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
Cars still travel on this road. In Spain, I find that roads for cars and pavements for pedestrians tend to blend into each other, they're all the same colour. And the cars seem to be able to navigate into the narrowest of spaces!
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| Road to Rome |
Girona was the setting for King's Landing and Bravos in Game of Thrones. One of the locations was this church:
The other was the main cathedral of Girona. Jaime Lannister was filmed riding up these steps on a white horse. But the scene where Cersei had to do the walk of shame naked was not shot here because the church felt it would be disrespectful.
The cathedral faces a wall but in the tv series, they green screened an ocean on it. In real life, the cathedral is pretty interesting. The facade reads 1733 which was when the cathedral was completed. However, construction began some 400 years earlier in the 1300s! Apparently cathedrals were built from the back to front, so the interior was Gothic architecture and by the cathedral was completed, fashion had changed and the facade is in Baroque style.
A cute legend the guide told us about Girona: in 1285, the French besieged Girona and desecrated the tomb of Sant Narcis, the patron saint of Girona. When they stole the rings off his fingers, the corpse sat up and sent an army of magical flies that attacked the French soldiers, who started dropping dead like...err...flies, upon which they retreated. That's why flies feature quite abundantly in Catalan art, including those of Salvador Dali.
For lunch, we stopped at a very inviting cafe with a seemingly endless array of sandwiches and pastries.
We ordered two different jamon sandwiches, one hot, one cold. We can't get enough of these. Shouldn't be that spectacular - a ham sandwich but somehow, Iberian ham is tasty without being overly salty and is always paired with the most delicious cheese.
Andre loved it so much he ordered a second sandwich immediately after. And it's cheap too, just €10 for 3 quality jamon sandwiches and coffee!
And gelato to finish the meal. This ice cream shop was opened by Raco, a 3 Michelin star chef, so if you can't afford to eat at the restaurant, you can at least get a cone.
We've had very good ice cream in Spain. The flavours are unusual and the texture super creamy. Here, we're having baked apple (really tastes like apple crumble!) and a Mandarin, passionfruit and orange blossom mix.
For the second part of the day tour, we went to Figueres, 45 mins from Girona. Figueres is known for one main attraction - the Dali Theatre-Museum. Dali was born in and stayed in Figueres until he was 18. Even though he later went to Madrid, Paris and New York, he remained attached to his homeland and settled here in his later years until his death.
This museum is special because it belonged to him - he bought the land and designed the building himself, which explains why it's so quirky. When he was alive, it served as a theatre and arts venue, and was only turned it into a museum later. He's buried in a crypt in the museum. The facade of the building has two recurring items on the roof: the egg, which symbolised creation to Dali, and the Oscar statuette, except Dali's version is a woman because he was a feminist :D
Most of Dali's famous paintings are in the US, since this one houses mostly his private collection, but there are a few notable ones. Right at the main entrance is a huge art installation of Dali and his wife in the back seat of an actual New York cab, driven by Al Capone (that's why the cab has a shattered window). Inside the cab are sprinklers and if you insert a €1 coin in the slot, it rains in the cab. (It's said Dali once waited 1 hour in the rain for a cab in New York and was drenched, hence the inspiration!)
The museum is full of surprises. There's this painting in the main hall which looks like a women in the nude, but when I looked through my camera to take a picture, I was completely taken aback to see Abe Lincoln looking back at me!
I can't show you what I saw because through the lens, you can only see Abe Lincoln, but when you see the painting in person, it looks completely different. I tried zooming in as much as possible so you might have an idea:
Such was the genius of Dali, that in the day when no one knew about pixelated art, he produced this masterpiece.
In another room, there's an arrangement of what looks like furniture...
But when you go up a flight of stairs and look through a special lens, you see a portrait of Mae West:
There were so many whimsical aspects to the museum - we enjoyed it a lot more than we thought we would. Dali had wanted visitors to feel like they're in a theatrical dream, and he succeeded for sure.
Finally, it was a two-hour bus ride back to Barcelona and for dinner, we decided to go back to Crudo Bar, since Kenneth couldn't join us there the other night and didn't have a chance to try the delectable octopus.
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| Grilled octopus with purple potato |
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| Scallops |
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| Corvina fish cerviche |
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| Corvina fish |
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| Shrimps with basil batter |
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| Mojito |
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