Barcelona Ole!

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Barcelona - truely wicked place, we managed to fit a whole lot in during our long weekend there.

We left on Thursday evening - Nicola, Rachel and Me. The computers were down at the airport so we couldn't get checked through. Some how the rest of our plane made it on board and we were left running to catch our plane and managed to just make it before the gates closed. A couple of wines (although warm Chardonnay) was well deserved at that point. Our hotel was located on a gorgeous little side street off La Rambla - the main drag. We were very impressed with our accommodation and even managed to humour the hotel staff with our spanish.

We did a lot of sight-seeing using the tourist hop-on/hop-off bus. We caught it up to the main cathedral there - Segrada Familia. This is Gaudi's work and the building of the cathedral began in 1882 and is still in progress now and is expected to take another 30 years to complete - very impressive and grand and rises high out of the city. We went to the top of one of the towers which gave us a 360 view of Barcelona from the sea to the hills. We also went to Gaudi's park which uses very fun architecture - wavey and somewhat colourful. Also made it to the Picasso museum, was never really that aware of the diversity of his work.

The beach was awesome. We stayed there one afternoon until 8pm just chilling... that was the night we ended up having dinner - tapas anyway (the Tapas are truely brilliant, especially the seafood ones) at 1:30am and found an awesome night club off the beach with a mixture of modern and spanish music. We ended up there until 6am before heading back for a couple of hours sleep before getting up for more sight seeing. It was so much fun and we have the funniest photos that i will have to send through. We were not really on top form the next day.

We also met up with Peter and his mate Terry. We also met up with his friend Nick who was meant to be in Stockholm but there were strikes at the airport so never made it. Peter is so tanned its not funny. He was feeling fairly off though, had a bug but I gave him some of my pills from the travel doctor and I think he is a bit better now. He was leaving Barcelona on Sunday. Meeting up with him again in September in Germany for the OktoberFest. We didn't get to go out with Peter, except for dinner, as he was feeling off. I don't think I had seen him though for 2 1/2 years (??) so it was pretty cool. We managed to find an aussie pub and watched the All Blacks in there.

Off to Brussels, Belgium at 5am tomorrow! Just booked in my accomodation, 400 metres from Grand Place so pretty central. Back on Wednesday evening hopefully with a job decision but may have another job interview on Thursday with a London based company Amgen. And then hopefully up to Scotland for the weekend and next week??

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