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Published: February 2nd 2008
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Another nice early start and we were ready to head out to Montjuic. All the guidebooks say that this is an unmissable part of Barcelona so with very little else to do we decided to go there. We opted out of the cable car option knowing the cost of it and instead bought a metro ticket which enabled us to use the metro and the funicular. We got off the funicular and we appeared to be in the middle of the mountain and we didn't really know what to do or where to go. We looked out over Barcelona and the view was rather fantastic but not too dissimilar to the view from Park Guell. We opted for walking up the mountain to the castle (which sounds more arduous than it actually was).
One of the must see things of Montjuic are the gardens, so we took a detour to see a garden and actually found ourselves in the middle of a construction site. Once up at the castle we were pleased to discover that you didn't have to pay to get onto the walls, so we had a gander and played with some artillary that somone had left laying
around. We stopped and watched a lift up bridge letting a ferry into the harbour which really took an age. We opted out of paying the small fee to go into the main castle under the belief that the view would be no better and that we have seen our fair share of military buildings in our travels.
We consulted the guidebook and found a route back down the mountain that was supposed to take us via the prettiest gardens. However, none of them were open or accessible due to construction work again. We did find one garden that had musical toys to play with which we did with such gusto that we a dog ran up to us in great confusion.
The Olympic village is situated on Montjuic so we went and had a look at the site. On the walk there a man came walking towards us and when Rob said eww ugly naked guy I looked and saw a guy with skimpy bottoms on and no top. When the guy got near enough to us I saw that he was infact completely naked and was just tattooed to look like he had clothes on. Gross.
Rob then informed me that he remembered reading somewhere that Saturdays could be nudist swimming at the pool. Scary thought. The stadium was impressive but the general layout of the place was amazing. They had a weird statue thing which was in a huge square of pillars and fountains. From the olympic village we spotted a building infront of us that looked rather grandiose. It is the MNAC which houses Catalonian art but is situated in a building that is fit for a palace. Funnily enough there were esculaters everywhere so even though there were hundreds of steps, you didn't have to climb any of them.
Back in Bari Gothic it was time to find a pub to watch the Boro game in. There was a street of Irish pubs all of which were showing the game so we looked in a few and picked one. 16.60 Euro for two pints of Fosters and two toasties. 5.5 Euro a pint, we couldn't believe it. We nursed the drinks for a very long time but neither of us wanted to buy another so we left some way into the second half.
We decided to split up, partly because I
wanted to shop and Rob didn't and partly because he was in an arsey mood. He went to the park Citudella and sat and watched some martial arts display and I mooched around the back streets of Bari Gothic and looked in some shops and tried on the most amazing pair of boots. Back at the hostel I saw that they had the Arsenal game on so we watched that in the common room whilst updating the diary and having yet another glass of Sangria.
Everywhere in the centre we kept on seeing signs for all you can eat buffets which we fancied as an easy meal option. We hadn´t had any lunch so decided to go for it. The one next to our hostel looked pretty poor and we decided to give it a miss and headed for one I'd seen earlier. It was a pretty good buffet with so much fresh salad stuff that we both went back a couple of times. The puddings were frozen yoghurt and some weird banana and mango slop. We stayed quite a long time and had our plates removed from infront of us at around eleven.
At the hostel we
popped our heads in the common room but it was too busy so we just went to our room where almost instantly there was a power cut. You would think that this meant that it got really dark in the room but because the emergency generator came on the light was right in my eyes. Instead we decided to watch something on the pda and hope that the power would come back on but it didn´t.
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