Barcelona

I spent last weekend in Barcelona, Spain with my cousin Kat and her friends Harsa and Lyril. It was a bank holiday weekend so we got three days away.

We had a really early flight from London Stansted on Saturday morning flying Easyjet and arrived in Barcelona with a full day ahead of us.

We took the train from the airport to our accommodation which was a very eventful trip! We missed our train stop due to our lack of understanding of Spanish and Lyril had her wallet stolen by a pick pocket! We were all warned about pick pockets in Spain but you never think that it will happen to you, luckily we got Lyril's wallet back after some quick thinking by Harsa - that was Harsa's superhero deed for the weekend!

Kat had rented us an apartment for the weekend - fantastic location! We were one block away from one of Barcelona's top tourist atrractions: Sagrada Familia!!

We bought a two day pass for a Barcelona bus tour of the city, it was a great way to see the city as it let us get on and off the bus wherever and whenever we liked to see the sights we wanted to.

Some of the highlights of Barcelona attractions:

Sagrada Familia - (known as Gaudi's dream) this is a work in progress. As it was only partially completed when Gaudi died in 1926 it has had years of added contribution by sculptors and architects with an estimated completion date of 2030!! (not sure when they actually complete work on it though - we didn't see any contruction work been undertaken while we were there during the day and never saw anyone working at night either). This was well worth the visit, it was amazing and is nothing like I've ever seen before. The view from the top was fantastic and the narrow stairs coming down were interesting ...

La Pedrera - an amazing apartment block with its crazy roof, known as one of the most emblematic of Gaudi's work. It also has a museum dedicated to Gaudi's architecture. Recommendation to anyone visiting Barcelona - go here first to learn background info on Gaudi's work. I think this would have been useful for us if we'd been here first before visiting other places.

Park Guell - Gaudi's architecture in garden form. The gingerbread houses and lizard were pretty cool.

Barcelona Cathedral - gothic cathedral which was an interesting experience, even a little freaky ...

La Rambla - of course we had to take a walk down this long street. Had lunch there on Sunday and saw an interesting range of people, not all of them clothed ...

We had set aside a bit of time for 'shopping' seeing as we were a group of girls! Were a bit disappointed with the shops though, I guess Madrid is the place to go for shopping?

We had a full day in Barcelona on Monday before returning to London, we arrived back in London about 11.30pm Monday night and when all we wanted to do was to get home to bed we had to wait in the line at Immigration for AGES! Everyone else in London had gone away for the bank weekend too and it felt like we all arrived back at the same time. Finally got home just after 2am Tuesday and the thought of getting up for work in a few hours wasn't the best (can I remind everyone that I'm NOT a morning person!) Let's just say that I wasn't entirely with it at work on Tuesday but it was a good weekend. Even with the dramas we had with Lyril's wallet, navigating our way around with our very limited knowledge of Spanish, and issues we had with using Spanish locks (there were numerous occasions when we couldn't get back into our apartment because we couldn't get our key to work on the locks, there must be some knack to it that only Spanish people can use?)

I can now say that I've experienced Barcelona, which had good and bad paella, good and bad tapas, good and bad sangria. By the end of the weekend we were even getting used to Spanish eating times (lunch approx 2pm - 4pm and dinner from about 9pm - midnight). The weather was nice other than a few random down pours, temperature was in the 20's and I even got jandal tan lines!

Photos http://picasaweb.google.com/njshew/Barcelona02?authkey=6DpQv_r2DE0