We landed in Barcelona on our dirt cheap flight on New Years Eve. As you would expect, a small piece of our luggage got lost in transit. We knew that as soon as we gave it to them in oversized baggage that it would not turn up in barcelona. After reporting it and on our way out of the airport the man walked in with our item of luggage, Ed said "I´ll take that!" he said "Muchias Gracious". The first thing we noticed when we exited the airport was the clear blue sky. Not only that we had a sunset. And..it was still light at 5pm. We got on the bus and finally made it to our prebooked hotel (after missing our stop and having to walk a km with our packs) to find that they had stuffed up our booking and therefore did not have a room for us. We showed them our email from themselves confirming it and soon as they saw this they pulled all stops and shuffled a few people round and we got our room. The hotel is very basic, but in a very good location close to everything and it is clean. Us two sad gits hit the sack at 8:30pm that night while the rest of Barcelona partied right outside our windows till morning.
We have spent the last few days walking and catching the metro train around the city. We have seen many different corners and have enjoyed all of it. First day, Ed was crook with a cold so we decided to take it easy. We wandered down through the main tourist strip called La Rambla and this took us down to the port area. We were hoping to get a cablecar up to the Olympic site but found the queue was about 2 hours long so we flagged this and just mosied back through the streets. The following day we visited the famous Sagrada Familia Cathdredal which was started by Gaudi and was his lifes project until he died but the council are still building to this day. The funds to build have come from visitors entrance fees and tourist souveniers. It is a hugely impressive cathedral with many different spiers and gothic statues all over it. Ed worked out that on the old Gaudi side the statues tell the story of Christs birth and the other side was his cruicificition. Everywhere you looked there was different architecture even down to Noahs animals, a tree with doves in it etc. Again the queue was huge and we didn´t have hours to spare standing in it so we moved on. We went over to the Olympic Village and spent a few hours there wandering around. The stadium was much smaller than we expected. We saw various buildings and arenas. The Olympic stadium was built high up on a hilll so the views of the city were fantastic. The most impressive thing that we discovered by accident was that every available piece of quaried rock these Spaniards have turned into rockclimbing gyms. Even tunnels where passengers used to walk between venues have now been turned into climbing walls. The parts of the rock at the bottom was natural and bolted but where they had concreted the top section to prevent erosion has been adapted by putting on plastic gym holds so you end up with a climb that is part natural-part gym. After this we went to Gaudi park. This is where Gaudi turned his hand to landscaping. His rich friend commisioned him to turn this park into a village where rich people could live and he asked Gaudi to design all the streets and buildings, however the project was a flop and was turned into a council park. Unfortunately for us, the bus companies are all on strike for the duruation of our visit so none of the normal tourist buses are running however there is one private tour bus that is still going so we jumped on that today. It drives you round Barcelona stopping at all the main sights and you can hop on and off as you please. We decided to just sit on the bus and go round the whole way as we had seen most of the sights already and we thought it would be interesting to hear the commentary instead. It ended up being abit of a waste of money as it didn´t really go into much history at all and on top of that it choose today to start piddling with rain - this wasn´t terribly good for us as the seats we were in were on the top level of the bus which had no roof. Anyway we sat through it and saw a few things we hadn´t noticed the first time around. After the bus trip we spent the next few hours walking through all the old narrow medieval Roman streets which were fascinating. Had a look at the Picassa museum and old cathedrals, monestrys. In fact we spent most of our time looking up as the architecture is quite interesting to see. There is a big food market as well which we wandered through. It was full of fruit stands, chocolate stands, nuts, meats etc and looked and smelt 1000 times more appetising than the ones we saw in Asia but then again it is 1000 times more the price too! We picked up some fruit for lunch tomorrow, and sampled a few chocolate truffles and went Yum at all the other stands.
We have eaten mainly in restaurants and cafes as there doesn´t seem to be very many supermarkets around this area. We have not been too adventurous yet with Spanish food and are mainly sticking to basic Tappas menus because we can´t speak the lingo yet to know what the other items are! Tappas is great though, for those who don´t know, they are tiny portions like small entres and you are supposed to choose 2-3 plates and then share. For instance today we had a spicy potatoes dish, a meat croquette dish and an stuffed tuna egg dish. Some people do bar runs, where they will have a drink and a tappas at one bar and then move to the next and do the same. Apparently tappas originated as they used to use the plates as lids for beer and then started putting small morsels on top.
Tomorrow we have booked our bus to Benidorm which will take us about 6 hrs and from there a taxi to our campsite which we will probably stay at for quite some time as the climbing is meant to be excellent there.
