On our first morning in Chiang Mai we stepped outside our hotel in the Old City onto Ratchadamnoen Road with a map in hand but really with the intent to just allow our feet and eyes to lead us. One block later we came to our first wat.
We spent our final day in Barcelona visiting Park Güell, originally conceived as a residential suburban development opened to the public as a park in 1923.
Casa Batlló is a bold, exuberant composition of natural organic forms, symbolism, and brilliant color, with a generous and playful use of mosaic glass and ceramics. The top of the façade is famously known as the dragon's back because the curving shape looks like a spine and the colored masonry tiles are its iridescent scales.
Designed by Gaudi and completed in 1912, Casa Mila (aka La Pedrera) is an apartment building in the Eixample neighborhood. At just over 100 years old, it was not only innovative for its time but is still a model for multi-family housing today.
I've had three architectural experiences that have, literally, brought me to tears: Le Corbusier's Notre Dame du Haut de Ronchamp, Carlo Scarpa's Brion Cemetery and most recently, Antoni Gaudi's Sagrada Familia.
With beautiful architecture that changes from building to building to building, I've never enjoyed exploring a city so much as I did Barcelona, and I can't wait to return and find new places and spaces to lose myself in all over again.
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