Barcelona

We have been in Barcelona for 8 days now and most of that time has been spent lazing around drinking lots of sangria and people watching at the beach, taking in some rays of sun and finding lots of cheap tapas bars around us.

Our first day we decided to take the tourist bus around town to get to know what sights lay before us in Barcelona.  We decided to sit on the top half of the bus, which is exposed to the weather elements, in our case lots of sun (it was close to 36 degrees) - a bad choice for me without a hat, sunglasses or sun cream as I got quite burnt.

We got off bus and headed towards the teleferic de montjuic cable car. When we got out up the top of the mountain we explored the park and castle; we also had some terrible hotdogs and sangria for lunch.

From here we headed back down and continued on bus journey to see World Trade Center, Columbus Monument, Port Vell, Port Olimpic, Ciutadella, Pla de Palau, Barri Gotic, Casa Batllo and then got off at Passig de Gracia - La Pedrera.

We walked from this stop back to our apartment in Sant Marti. We stopped into a cute little bar to have beer on our way home that served us popcorn with our beers.

Onto the next day, another scorcher of a day - we ventured to Tibidabo.  Tibidaboo is one of the 3 oldest parks in the world. The park is the highest point on the Collserola massif which boasts fantastic views of the city and port.  Inside the park is also The Automata museum which is housed in an old modernist theatre dating back to 1909.  It contained a collection of automations from the end of the 19th Century.  We saw coin operated dolls, mechanical games and toys and some very strange things.

The trip up to Tibidabo was quite annoying - first you take the Tramvia Blau where they squash you in, and then you take the Funicular (cable car), which takes you on the last climb up the mountain. We spent about an hour on the mountain top before heading back down to catch the train to Barceloneta, where we headed towards the beach for some tunes and sangria at Sotavento Beach Club.

Another lovely day ended, but then we headed straight back into another by getting up reasonably early, which seems hard for us to do with ease these days.

Day 4: This led us to the Aquarium and Zoo in Barcelona.  The Aquarium was very crappy and to add to this there were several annoying families - we could not wait to escape! From here, we went to the awesome zoo, where we saw dolphins, lions and tigers and bears. Oh my!

Day 5: Spent most of our day at Barcelona Sants Railway Station, by that I mean we spent 2.5 hours in a queue waiting for our ticket number to be called in order to reserve our seats to Madrid. We then had a siesta, a quick stop at the internet cafe to read some news and find out the location of McDonalds for the free whiffy, then McDonalds for free whiffy (wi-fi is pronounced "whiffy" here in Europe) and hit a few bars afterwards. One beer at some random bar, another two at Frankfurt Rodert (with some awesome tapas), then a last cerveza (beer) at Cuando Pueras Cafe to finish it off.

The other days we have spent eating at various tapas bars, walking around Barri Gotic and seeing yet another church; more sangria by the beach, a day trip to Sitges where we swam in the Mediterranean with several hundred others; more cocktails and lots of walking around.

Not a very exciting blog post as it is a race against the "whiffy" connection dropping out.  Tomorrow, we head to Madrid where there looks to be strikes on the metro lines.  So we will have fun figuring out how to get to our accommodation. At least there won't be any arguments about trains.