Off to Barcelona!

While Siobhan had the whole week off for mid-term break, I had finally managed to get my report at work done in time for the next Panel meeting. This meant that I could have Thursday and Friday off as we headed to Barcelona for a long weekend. 

Thursday started at normal wake-up time, was we needed to get to Gatwick airport. From our place, that takes most of an hour, not accounting for traffic. The traffic wasn’t too bad and we got there in plenty of time. It is worthwhile pre-paying for parking there too, as it cost us about £38 to park for 4 days, where it would have cost more and taken longer getting there by public transport. The pre-paying all takes place online, and we have very little in the way to show for the fact that we had prepaid. But when we turned up to the barrier arm into the carpark, the little machine told us to wait a minute and then printed our ticket! They must have cameras there reading licence plates and matched it all up. So that was a good start.

The Pyrenees as we flew past

The flight was uneventful and the amazingly clear skies made for some great vistas from the plane window. Getting through Customs at Barcelona pretty straight forward. We were in a queue where the guy was checking passports, but then he just waved half a dozen or more of us straight through without even looking at our passports. Siobhan was a bit sad not to get a stamp from Spain in her passport.

We got to our hotel despite me not printing off the address. The taxi driver reckoned that he knew where it was after we told him the name for the third or fourth time. The hotel was very nice too – another great deal from lastminute.com. Only problem was we had two single beds pushed together rather than a double. The floor was polished wood as well, and the beds had castors on them so it made it tricky to cuddle in the middle as the beds had a tendency to go where they pleased. Sometimes in life you need to create your own excitement.

Anyway, as we were between town and La Sagrada Familia, we headed up there to see this amazing building. Siobhan studied this at architecture school and I’ve heard all about this amazing building. As someone who is generally not that amazed by buildings, I struggled to contain my excitement about this one (although it is fair to say that I have been amazed by a number of the churches and cathedrals I have seen in England – in a good way). The highlight of the trip there was having a blackberry gelato on our walk there. This highlight was quickly overawed by the building that is La Sagrada Familia. It is not just a building. It is a statement. It is a monument. While I’m not religious, I can really appreciate what Gaudi really thought he was doing with this.

The form of the building is really organic. He was inspired by nature and it is really interesting seeing how he combined these ideas into something that no one had ever done before. Having the ideas, the vision, the people who would back such originality, and then finding the people who would build it as well seems like an enormous coming together of things. Anyway, once I’d recovered from the wonder at seeing this building, we fired off about 50 photos and thought seriously about joining the queue that was over 100 metres long. Then we read the signs and saw you could book online (including booking a tour to go up one of the towers), so we thought that we would do that and go on either Friday or Saturday.

As the best way to explore a place is on foot (or so we’ve been told and probably agree), we headed back towards the sea. We went through a number of parks and saw a number of cool stone buildings. One thing that we passed was what looked like a bull fighting arena. It had a sign in Spanish that indicated something about a museum so we weren’t really sure if it still did bull fighting, or whether it was a museum. It indicated that you could go in to see where the bulls were kept, which made it sound like they still were. Siobhan didn’t really want to see anything like that as it involves cruelty to animals, and we didn’t get to have a philosophical debate anyway as it was siesta time and it was closed between 2 and 4pm. We carried on walking.

A park we walked through

Eventually we came to the Ciutadella Cascade which is an amazing fountain situated in a park of the same name. It even has a little lake thing that you could go boat rowing on if you wanted. We didn’t. We talked to another couple who were there and did the mutual photo taking thing so we have a nice photo of the two of us with the fountain in the background. And for once it didn’t involve me holding the iphone at arm’s length trying to get us and the background in. You can see the difference.

This was a good arm's length one though!

From here we walked to Barcelona’s Arc de Triomf. It was quite triumphant as arches go, although we weren’t quite sure what it was triumphant about. Nice city sculpture thing though, and set in a nice park. Another major attraction of the arch was that it was only a block or two from our hotel.

We headed back to our hotel and Siobhan set about booking tickets for La Sagrada Familia. Doing this on an iphone is a tricky business. Web pages don’t always load properly, and when it occasionally sends you to a Spanish page despite originally selecting the English version, can make one quite angry. Or so I’ve heard. Also, they didn’t email the tickets which would have made things easy. Instead Siobhan needed to print a page from her iphone. Tricky. But not something that is impossible. Siobhan went down to reception and came back a lot happier and with a bit of paper that would get us in to La Sagrada Familia on Friday morning.

After sorting that, we then looked through Tripadvisor to find somewhere that had good tapas and wasn’t too far away.  And after reading some of the reviews, that opened before 9pm. We were only there for the weekend and it seems it would take a bit longer than that to get used to siestas in the afternoon and then dinner in the late evening. We found this great little place called Elsa y Fred. The tapas were great, and dessert was at least as good. All in all, we really liked Barcelona and we’d only been there for half a day.