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Published: February 2nd 2008
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We were both up nice and early again, there really must be something wrong with us. We pocketed a Couple of the chocolate croissants from breakfast for our lunch. We had planned to visit Montjuic via a cable car over the harbour but we discovered the price and changed our minds. The cable car station was situated next to a fairly nice beach, so we stopped there for a while instead.
Once the sea had come in enough to be in danger of wetting us we picked up our stuff and continued walking down the beach towards Port Olympic. The walk there was interesting because we got to watch people chilling around the area. Lots of old guys were sitting by the boulevard playing dominos and grilling seafood. We walked from the beach up between to towers which dominate the sky line and from there we were face to face with a big metal construction that looks like a whale from a distance but up close is just a sheet of metal.
Once we had finished with Port Olympic we navigated our way through the backstreets to an area we recognised and consulted our list of things to do.
We had read in a guidebook that Currer de Montcada is the most picturesque street in Barcelona so we found it and had a look. It was nice but we didn't think it was special enough to be listed in the guidebook.
We stopped off at a supermarket to buy food for tea and a little something to take back to the hostel to eat then. We spent ages trying to find two different meals but struggled massively with the lack of facilities available for us to use at the hostel. We opted for soup and a sandwich again for tea and picked up a drink and a snack for dinner.
Back at the hostel the internet was actually working so we updated travelblog and I even managed to write a couple of the blogs for Budapest that we had neglected. We re-emailed a hostel in Marrakech to see if there was space available as at the moment we only have one hostel and thats quite a way out of the centre. When we were aware of a decent queue of people waiting for the internet we packed up and headed for our night time sightseeing.
First
we hopped on the metro to the Hospital De La Santa Creu I De Sant Pau which Rob really wanted to see before dark. It was designed by Domenech Montaner and built in 1901-1930 and really is a modernist construction. We expected it to be lavish but it was completely over the top and what made it more amazing is that it is a working hospital. We walked through the grounds and popped our heads into buildings here and there but didn´t want to get in anyones way. The hospital is situated on the top of Avenue de Gaudi and directly faces the Sagrada Familia. This is an awesome sight and well worth the walk between the two. The lights came on and both the hospital and the Sagrada Familia were illuminated so we stopped and sat and looked at them for a while.
The Sagrada Familia was a little disappointing at night. We expected a well illuminated landmark that would stand out from a mile away, but it wasn't really anything special by night. We didn't stay long and decided instead to head towards the Torre Agbar which is the headquarters of a water company but has become
a landmark of the city. We had seen postcards of it illuminated at night by lots of multicoloured lights which we really wanted to see. We walked for ages and because the streets are built so tall we couldn´t see it until we were practically on top of it. When we got there it was only lit by the lights inside the building which looked pretty dull and we thought we had missed it. However when we were readying to head back to the hostel the lights were turned on and we got to see it lit up properly.
Being the scrooges that we are we decided to walk back to the hostel rather than get a metro and began the walk home. We were knackered when we arrived at the hostel and so sat straight down to eat. The "soup" we bought was very thin and not very soup like, after close examination of the packet we concluded that it must have been a carton of vegetable stock. Oh well! we were hungry so we ate a bowl of it with plenty of bread and then we finished of our cheese and sausage in a sandwich. Not the
best of meals. We are now off to bed in the hope that no one else is in there and we can relax and watch an episode of Prison Break before bed.
Night night. Stob
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