bar-ce-lo-na!

Barcelona was a bit of a surprise for me - I have only heard good things so I had pretty high expectations! I loved all the things to see and do in Barcelona and the weather reminded me of home which was a nice change to the cold weather we've already started having here in London. I was surprised at how big Barcelona was and that it was rather dirty & smelly in a lot of places (reminded us of Bangkok), but probably the worst thing was that there were SO MANY tourists!! Oh well, I guess we contributed to that too ;) I was surprised at how little Spanish I actually recognised - I'd never even heard the Spanish word for hello before which seemed odd.

Over the 3 days we spent there we visited a lot of Gaudi stuff which I really quite liked - not all of it, but most of it was really cool. We walked to Park Güell which is a big park like 17ha or something which this Guell guy got Gaudi to design. It has heaps of awesome stuff with mosaics which I absolutely love. I just read that he uses the practice of trencadis tiling (using waste tiles to clad buildings), and that he actually worked with another architect, Jujol, whereby Gaudi would do the general design and Jujol would develop this further, sourcing new tiles and creating ceramic tiles etc. Needless to say I bought heaps of postcards and a Gaudi book :) A lot of Gaudi's designs actually mimick those found in nature which was really interesting, including tree tops, tree trunks, shells and ocean waves.

Another highlight was visiting Camp Nou which is the Barcelona football team's home ground. That was pretty cool as although not a premier league team, I have picked this team as my team (morgan's is tottenham), and also I've never done a stadium tour before and it was cool to see they have their own press room and broadcasting room for the Barcelona football TV channel. One thing I did like was the fact that the change rooms have a spa over which there's a whiteboard where they discuss the game plan... talk about preparing for a game in style!

We did see a lot of other things in Barcelona - we walked heaps; in fact, so much that morgan swore he had a broken foot at the end of the second day! After checking in to our "hotel" we went for a walk and the first thing I saw.... was a rat! The only other rat I saw was a dead one and in the most bizzarest of places too - washed up on the beach!?? Very strange.

We wandered around Port Vell on our first night, grabbing some tapas for dinner at 1am. Far out, I have never really been a fan of calamari... that is, until now. Oh my goodness, they really do the best calamari - so fresh and tasty - I shall have to learn to do this myself I think ;) We checked out the beaches and back streets in the Barceloneta area and enjoyed a tapas meal at an authentic local restaurant where morgan had a great time trying to order and pay for things which involved a lot of gesturing, taking waiters outside to point at the menu on the wall, and all 5 of the waiters trying to explain how much money he had to pay. We stumbled upon an extremely busy local fresh produce market which I later read was the infamous Mercat de La Boqueria. It was a bit crowded for my liking, but very interesting and we enjoyed a nice fruit salad for breakfast. Walking up the Las Ramblas was extremely overcrowded, but I did enjoy seeing some rabbits and what we think were small Korean squirrels that I wanted to take home!

Apart from the sites, we also enjoyed sampling all the food delights - lots of tapas, paella (I definitely prefer the Italian risottos), my favourite drink definitely being the Lemon Damm which seems to be a mix of their Estrella Damm beer and Lemon Soda = delish! For some reason I hadn't expected the tapas to be so much seafood, and I was extremely excited to see pictures on the menu of some tasty-looking big prawn-like creatures, and proceeded to try and order these but for some to-this-day-unexplainable reason, I ended up ordering cuttlefish?? So needless to say I was surprised when what should have been my prawns turned out to be a whole cuttlefish complete with disgusting little tentacle things. Morgan then issued the ultimatum saying that I wasn't allowed to order prawns unless I ate the cuttlefish - ugh! We got through it and then got the prawns - they were SO delicious! just as well, as when we got the bill it turned out that the prawns doubled the bill of our whole meal making it our most expensive meal of the trip!... oh well, it WAS our last meal :)

Barcelona is definitely somewhere I could go again as I'd like to go inside the Casa Battlo and apparently they found a whole city underground that would be interesting to see. I think my favourite thing I saw was the Palau de la Musica Catalana which is a concert hall full of Modernista style architecture - lots of flowers decorating the roof, lots of tiling everywhere on the ceiling and on columns, and most importantly - lots of colour! Unfortunately no photography was allowed so we resorted to buying postcards. We actually took the tour in Spanish as there were no more English tours for the day and we were leaving that day, so we didn't actually learn much! The tour wasn't very good either (and not just cos we didn't understand it!) but it involved just sitting in the concert hall and not being able to go walking and exploring :( Apart from this, I would definitely recommend a visit there anyway!

Click here to see some photos. - esther :)