We landed in Barcelona around 8:30am after an overnight stay at Dubai for connecting flights. It was too tiring an experience to repeat- two very early morning flights over two days. As a result, the first day was basically nothing. We basically just took a few pics amongst the crowd at Casa Battlo (see pic above) which was right across the street from our hotel and then found Casa Mila which was further along on a straight road and just called it a day. We had a pretty good dinner at El national Llotja of oysters, Iberian ham and octopus, so much that we booked for dinner again the day after.
Day 2 was mainly Park Guell and surroundings in the morning and Basilica de la Sagrada Familia and misc. in the afternoon. But as is our wont, we basically only visited Park Guell and the Basilica for the whole day. I joined a skip-the-line tour for Park Guell but Mum was not quite happy about it since we were stuck in the crowds for photos so we ended up leaving the group half way. On the other hand, I basically could not get individual tickets from the official website- it was sold out the day it was released in the 16 hour difference between Barcelona and Melbourne so I bought two skip-the-line tour tickets from Viator. This is also the only tour from Viator that I didn’t like because the meeting point information was not well organised- we almost missed the meeting time because the guide did not arrive before hand and we had no idea where to look for the person until we asked one of the park staff and they pointed us to the blue umbrella or something. But multiple groups had this same issue for the exact same time slot. We visited Carrer de Verdi for lunch and also because it was supposedly a good photo spot. We had lunch there as planned but there was nothing to photo. We made our way successfully to the Basilica in the afternoon and were supposed to go onto Gaudi Avenue etc in a straight path. But we ended up just photographing both sides of the Basilica from the metro station exits and really could not find where to go from the Basilica. But we just contented ourselves from that and called it a day. I booked at Vivo Tapas and we had sauteed clams and red shrimp paella for 2. Clams are one of my favourite Western dishes so far and it did not disappoint. The paella was okay which already said a lot for picky eaters like us. I was expecting half-done rice or else soggy but the paella was actually the first time in a non-Chinese country that had rice which I deemed okay to eat for me. The taste wasn’t great by any means but certainly not horrible. Red prawns weren’t anything special compared to Australian banana prawns but they were fresh. We were content with this meal but also content not to try any more paella on this trip.
Day 3 was Sitges day trip and I was yet again conned by the weather forecast to bring two raincoats along with us that ended up baggage to carry on the day in my backpack, not to mention that we wore too much (again due to the weather forecast). Most of the morning was spent trying to find the way to Placa de Belaud and being unsuccessful with the help of Google maps and even after asking locals. At the end, we changed goals and aimed for the church. Then, we got pulled into side streets such as the Greek mimicking Carrer Fonollar (blue doors and stuff) etc. We also took photos at the place with the three door-way looking windows above an arched door that looked similar to the Bishop’s Bridge at Barcelona’s gothic quarters (lucky we did because we never found the Bishop’s bridge at the Gothic quarters when we visited it the day after). The church was actually under maintenance so I only took a faraway shot of it. By this time, we had forgotten about the original goal of Placa de Belaud but at the end we took a faraway shot of it by itself without bothering to take the stairs to go down to it. We didn’t think there was much to see at Sitges but the photos were not bad and it’s a nice beach town if that’s what you are looking for. We also had an ultra expensive lunch at Sitges (I believe the most expensive on this particular trip): 55.4 Euro for sauteed clams and codfish cakes, 2 juices and a coffee but I guess that’s because Sitges is a tourist town. We made our way back to Barcelona early and spent the afternoon trying to find Plaza de Catalunya which was just 5 mins from our hotel and La Rambla beyond. However, due to me being direction blind and walking the wrong way, we had made a big loop and accidentally found the Plaza on the way back to the hotel. We had given up the idea of going on to La Rambla since we are not really wanting to shop. For our second dinner at El Nacional Llotja, we again had excellent oysters, scallops and the angler fish stew which actually contained more seafood including one prawn, one mussel and one clam but it had two pieces of angler fish meat so was called the angler fish stew. Both the scallops and the angler fish stew were pretty good, well worth the 200 Euros we spent (by coincidence, also our most expensive dinner for the trip).
We made a late start on the fourth day because we heard that the Gothic quarter at Barcelona was not quite safe so we decided to travel with the crowd. We basically made the Barcelona Cathedral the main attraction for the day. I had created a map but we decided to just wander randomly and only found a number of the attractions I had planned and we found most of these other places dark and grey and not much photographable (Mum’s all into putting herself and me into the foreground whereas I’m all into scenery capturing but we both found dark buildings to be dull material for either purpose). I did take a picture of Palau del Lloctinent. For dinner, we decided to randomly cruise La Rambla de Catalunya which was the eating street near us. Mum didn’t much like the environments (small stalls, street food type of eating). We ended up ordering chorizo and baby squids, both of which are food I wanted to try. We both found the chorizo too salty for our tastes but the baby squids were fine.
And that concluded the first leg of our Spanish trip.
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