After the train trip to Montpellier and a quick repack, we left Wed. April 8-10 to Barcelona. We bought the cheapest train tickets possible so we had the longest journey possible of 6 1/2 hours. We talked the whole way and had a great time. We arrived into Barcelona around 6pm. After geting metro tickets and finding our super chill, highly recommended hostel, we hit the town for a little sightseeing and dinner. We walked along Las Ramblas (which is the main thoroughfare in Barcelona). We took lots of pictures of the street performers, little shops and tons of toursits. We wandered into this little piazza and decided on a cool tapas restaurant. Now, it should be noted that I do speak Spanish as well, though it's Mexican Spanish which is pretty close to Spain Spanish with a few exceptions. Unfortunately, I completely forgot that Barcelona was the capital of Catalan so everything was in Catalan and sometimes in Spanish as well. Thankfully, we were in a super toursitic city, so things were even in English and French for us (menus, directions & signs were mostly translated). I was a bit disappointed though because I was really excited to speak Spanish but alas, it was easier to speak in English or French to everyone. The Catalan language, if you don't know, is like if the language French and Spanish had a child...it would be Catalan.
We had super great tapas which I ordered in Spanish and of course, we had sangria. Here's our dinner:
Dinner is served very late in Spain, by the way. You have to plan on eating around 9:30 or 10pm for dinner. After dinner, we went home and tried to prepare for our only full day in Barcelona and sightseeing. Thursday was a very, very full day! We saw La Sagrada Familia which is a cathedral built and designed by Gaudi and is still in progress of being built. This has been in process for over a hundred years. This picture is what the ceiling looks like on the inside. Seeing La Sagrada Familia was almost worth the trip alone. It was so huge and awe-inspiring. The sulptures and angles on the building were just so amazing.
Here is one of the sculptures on the outside of the entrance. Look at how intricate and amazing it is, in stone! I have many more pictures of La Sagrada Familia in the photo album. The link to the album is at the end of this post.
After La Sagrada Familia, thanks for Chris' indispensable travel book for Barcelona, we gave ourselves a walking tour of the Gothic quarter of Barcelona. There we saw the Barcelona cathedral that we did not go in because they were charging 5 euros to get into it. I don't think you should have to pay to go into a church. Even Notre Dame is free to go into. We saw tons of cute little streets, did a little touristy shopping and even saw a man playing Spanish guitar in one of the alleys. There is some video of that in the photo album too. After lunch, we wandered some more and went to the Barcelona port/beach. We were really lucky to have such a beautiful day since the day before and after were pretty rainy. The beach was beautiful and the boardwalk was really full. More pics of the beach can be found in the photo album.
Then we decided to go to the Park Guell which is another Gaudi designed/inspired place. This place was really hard to find. Once you get out of the metro station, you actually have to know where you're going. There were zero signs that pointed us in the right direction. I actually went into the library near the metro stop and asked for directions. Turns out that you basically have to climb this really steep road to get to the park which overlooks all of the city. There are sections of the road that actually have escalators for pedestrians because it's so steep. The climb was worth it though. The park was beautiful and mosaics were everywhere. These buildings are at the actual entrance of the park but you can see the skyline a little in this pic too.
Here is the stereotypical shot of the park and I'm sitting on the curving bench that surrounded the whole park.
After the park, we headed back to Las Ramblas to find dinner. We came across La Bouqueria, which, as you can see below, is a huge outdoor market that is setup and taken down every day. We got there in time to walk around as they started to take it apart. It was really crowded as people were scrambling to buy things before they got put away but really cool to see all the food.
Dinner was paella and huge steins of beer. The paella, unfortunately, wasn't very good either but thankfully the beer was huge and plentiful. Chris is demonstrating the size of our beer here.
After dinner, we felt the need for more sangria. We wandered the streets for awhile trying to find a good sangria bar. After being directed really poorly by some drunk American guy on the street to a non-existent bar, we settled on one not far from Las Ramblas but in a little alleyway. 3 pitchers later, we got a cab home since we missed the last metro by a couple hours (they stop running around midnight on the weekdays).
The next day, Friday, April 10, we had the whole afternoon before our train left at 5:30 so we decided to try both Dunkin' Donuts which is called Dunkin' Coffee in Barcelona and Burger King. I haven't had Burger King since leaving the US so it was a really great tasting whopper!! Below is a sign in Catalan at Burger King so you can kind of see the language. Dunkin' Coffee wasn't that great and way overpriced. It was 1.20 Euro for one donut. I felt that it was extortion!!
After more shopping, last minute souvenirs and wandering, we were finally on our way home. The train ride this time was 6 hours and we should have been home by 11:30pm. Instead, when we changed trains from the Spanish train (whose seats are super hard and uncomfortable, especially after 3 hours), we were in a French border town called Cerebère. I like to call it the French town of nothingness. You literally couldn't leave the station because there was nowhere to go except down a really creepy dark tunnel which neither Chris nor I wanted to brave since it was by then dark out when we got there. Our train was delayed leaving this town of nothingness for about 2 hours so not only could we really not go anywhere, what was supposed to be a quick layover turned into a most boring and uncomfortable stay in Cerebère. We arrived 2 hours late into Montpellier and thankfully, Dawn was kind enough to let both Chris and I stay at her place, about 5 minutes from the train station. Since Dawn and her roommate were still out of town, we got our own place that night instead of travelling the half hour back to my very full house of houseguests.I would HIGHLY recommend Barcelona to everyone. We had such a blast and packed so much into 48 hours!!
Here's a link to all the pictures if you are interested:
http://picasaweb.google.com/jkimpfbeck/Barcelona#
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