Blogs from Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, Europe - page 213

Day 93 Barcelona, Spain. We used the complimentary shuttle bus to go into the main tourist mall leading to a central plaza. Once acclimatized to the surroundings, we chose a hop on, hop off bus to tour all the city efficiently. Barcelona is the town of Gaudi, the wonky architect who is unconventional, he uses lines that imitate nature; his buildings are rounded, curved, honeycombed and spiraled with ceramic added in weird and wonderful places. We saw his apartment buildings, his cathedral, started in the late 1800s and still full of scaffolding with only 7 out of 16 steeples finished- he is dead but work will go on for another few 100 years. Then we climbed to his garden and home, another masterpiece with a park bench 100 feet long- curved! After we completed our bus ... read more

It's been a while since I last wrote an entry, and I'm sorry for keeping you waiting in suspense. We have now crossed the Atlantic ocean and the weather was quite good and the boat didn't rock too much. I finally got off the ship in Gibralter, a British colony on a peninsula attached to Spain and only 8km from the coast of Africa, you can see it just across the channel. It was an amazing day (ok, only 3.5hrs, but it was still amazing). It's known as 'The Rock', since it has this very tall and sharp cliff face which is full of monkeys. I avoided the usual tourist traps as all the passengers from the ship would be visiting the same places...I needed to get away from them for a while. I just strolled ... read more

Well after last night's disaster, the holiday seems generally to have gone tits-up. HL seems to have caught some bug or other as he is much sicker than he usually is with a hangover. He spent the majority of the day in bed, sleeping, emerging only to eat (and even then he couldn't finish his fettucine), leaving me to entertain myself again. So, I took a stroll up La Rambla to Plaçca de Catalunya to have a look round. I intended on texting our friends to let them know what happened - you can send SMS from the public telephones. However, as I was doing so, some man came shuffling up, talking to himself, muttering "hijo de puta" and "coño". Well, I couldn't be entirely sure that this wasn't directed at me, so caution being the ... read more

So, we left London on the 11.15 from Heathrow, which was delayed for some reason which the pilot tried to explain in really bad English. We were unfortunately sat in the middle of a group of terribly middle class people who SO thought they were in an ITV drama - we dubbed them the Cold Feet crowd. Their kid, Lucas ("Lu-Lu") wouldn´t stop skriking the whole journey there which was lovely. The poor kid was about 2 years old and was obviously just bored and hot and tired, and they kept fussing over him and trying to explain things to him which he was clearly too tiny to understand. Anyway, finally got into Barcelona airport and managed to lose them as we dashed off to the baggage carousels. Slight heart-stoppy moment as it took literally a ... read more

In Barcelona I visited: *La Sagrada Familia - the world's most famous building site *Parc Guell - a failed project turned into a beautiful public park - the original idea was that veru rich people would pay to have houses built in Gaudi's landscaped grounds high above the city. ... read more