day 2

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Thunderstorms through the night. Woke up to very grey skies but hey that's ok. Today our plans are Park Guell and sagrada familial...........good plans you may say........... here's how it went....... started at Barcelona Sant's stacion trying to book train for next day for our trip to madrid. Which incidentally is forecast to have storms the 2 days we are there! Cannot book trains on a Saturday cos nobody works.......ok we can use the machines tomorrow to buy our tickets on the day...... let's read metro map and find our way to Gaudis park.........4 hours later after having seen some lovely commercial areas all over barcelona and big housing estates and eventually realising that ticket is only single use not return and not an all day ticket BUT if you don't leave the stacions then you can travel all day on local metro lol. Well we wanted our monies worth and think we got it...........after buying at least 6 tickets each we agreed taxis would be cheaper lol. Trouble is we are triers! !!!! When we eventually came out of the subway it felt like we had been in underground bunkers due to nuclear war or summit........and we eventually slowly opened the door to see derelict hight rise flats obviously abandoned years before the bomb........dust and dirt covered everything.....there were only one or two other people to be seen (obviously searching for nearest bar too)........anyhow back on track ....... we eventually found this Parc and pretty as it was.........4 hour journey and ............ mmmmmmm yeah lovely but that's it. We left to take a bus back down to see Gaudis cathedral........that was the real place of interest for me anyway. Yep bus driver says I ll let you know when u need to get off........yep u guessed it....we ended up at end of line in the port........ he says we can catch another bus back up.....went in search. .....by now it was 18.10 so bloody place will be closed........and we were feeling bit fed up...... tried to get bus back to stacions but prat of a bus driver didn't want to help us.........but there was this lovely older gentleman on bus stop that was quite obviously embarrassed by his fellow countryman ignorance so he tried to help us........wow don't the Spanish talk fast......trying to pick out the basic words we can understand when he looks at younger lady besides him who speaks lovely English and Spanish and between them they see us settled safely on the right bus with clear directions when to get off.....felt like kissing them both they had been so sweet. Both of us decided that the one brain cell we had clearly shared the day before had now totally disintegrated.

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