Growing up in Barcelona

So for those wondering where I'd got to, I'd been rather busy involved in a couple of launches at work - the blogger.com redesign and dynamic views visualisations; I'd recommend checking them out if you haven't already, e.g. my blog can alternatively look like this! This is actually my first time writing a proper post in the redesign, so it'll be interesting to see how it goes.


But enough of the product placement - this post is mostly to summarise something I noticed in Barcelona - mostly, how much it looked like an awesome place to be a kid. 
So, not only does it guarantee you'll be good at soccer, flamenco guitar, and tanned, but there were a few photos I took of evidence:
[For some context, see this early post about my visit there.]

This first one is a school - it looked more like an old cathedral that had maybe been converted into a museum, and overlooked a large park and more fancy looking buildings, but yes, it's a school. It might be a top-range school, or look terrible inside, but hey, I think I'd be more willing to go to school if it looked that fancy. 

Next up, this shot might look oddly shrunk - that's a normal sized fence, but just tiny roads and signs - because it appears to be a traffic school, i.e. a place children go to learn road rules. Traffic schools are pretty standard, but what surprised me about this one was its location: the wall you see is one of the outer walls of Castell de Monjuic. This means that to get to your training lesson, you drive for about 20 minutes through botanic gardens, then head inside an ancient fort that used to protect Barcelona and has a magnificent view over the city and into the Mediterranean. So you can imagine my surprise at seeing one of these inside the walls... however, that wasn't the most suprising location - losing out to:

You may have noticed the small red soccer goals in the middle - I believe this was another school, as a large group of children were playing there a few minutes earlier. What makes it one of the best soccer pitches in the world was that it was located inside Park Guell. This results in being surrounded by Gaudi architecture and mosaics while you play, meanwhile the view to the side of the pitch is this:

So in summary, it doesn't seem to be a bad place to grow up (providing you learn to avoid pick-pockets...). I've found out recently that I get to travel to Tokyo this month for a week for work, so hopefully can continue this series of travel posts :) And until then, more work, music jamming, trivia and now an 'indoor'* soccer team to play with. 

(*matches played outside on a roof - shall have a photo at some point. Not like the view of Barcelona/Guell above, but not a bad Sydney skyline at night).