beautiful Barcelona

It's been nearly a month, and a busy one at that, since I last updated the blog.  From April 3 to April 18, I was travelling on spring break with Ashley and (partially) Anna.  My blog posts about spring break are going to be in the form of a blog post per city.  First up on spring break was Barcelona.

Day 1 (April 3)

Our first day of spring break was a deja vu to Dublin travel day--Ashley and I had to get up at 2:30 a.m. to catch a 4:30 a.m. bus to the airport, though our flight did not leave until 9.  Unfortunately, that was the only way of getting to the airport since buses and trains don't run in Glasgow until after 9 a.m. on Sundays.

We arrived in Girona Airport outside Barcelona in the early afternoon.  While waiting for our bus into Barcelona outside of the airport, we were surprised by a great number of mountains surrounding us.

The views on our bus ride into Barcelona were equally beautiful.  Spain is a really lovely country.

We didn't do much on our first evening in Barcelona, since we were tired from our travels.

Day 2 (April 4)

Our priority for our second day in Barcelona was to visit La Sagrada Familia, the infamous and incomplete cathedral, in progress since the 1800s.

When we arrived, we found the fairly huge line to get into the cathedral.  We ended up making friends with the lady behind us, who was from Cincinnati, and visiting Spain with her husband and elderly parents.  Our wait in line also made it clear why the cathedral is still in progress--we saw about four guys actually working on it.

La Sagrada Familia was a very beautiful cathedral.  The main hall was massive!  The details around the cathedral were very intricately done.  After we viewed all of the cathedral, we took a lift to one of the towers and crossed the bridge to walk down another tower.

We had very beautiful views of Barcelona from the bridge.  The spiral staircase down the tower was also a favorite of ours.  It was a kind of confusing tower staircase--it would  have hallways where you could choose two directions to go in, presumably both going down.  There were also a number of photo points along the way down, allowing us to take even more pictures with the backdrop of Barcelona.

Once we made our way down, we paused to take a picture with the statue of la sagrada familia, before grabbing a metro to our next destination:  el Estadi Olimpic (Olympic Stadium).

We had a somewhat desolate, rather woodsy walk from the metro to the Olympic Stadium.  When we reached the Olympic Stadium, we pleasantly discovered that it was free!  We took some pictures with the football (soccer) field and grabbed lunch at the Olympic Stadium Sports Cafe.

Outside of the stadium, there was a cool courtyard area.  There were two small and one massive fountains, stretches of grass, and an interesting tower.  We meandered around the courtyard for a bit before beginning the walk to Montjuic Castle.

Montjuic Castle was on top of a hill, so we decided to take the Teleferico (cable car) to the top of the hill.  The Teleferico was a little shaky, but it got us to the top of the hill safely.

Montjuic Castle, though not on par with Scottish castles, is in a pretty awesome location.  It is right by the Mediterranean Sea and has beautiful views of the city of Barcelona.  There wasn't really much to the interior of the castle--just an inner courtyard.  It had some massive cannons around the outer courtyard area, but that was about it.

After walking down the hill and back to our hostel, we decided to stay in for the night.  While hanging out at the hostel, we met two workers:  Chad the bartender from Australia who has been living in Barcelona for three years, and Peter from New York who just moved to Barcelona.

Day 3 (April 5)

We began our last day in Barcelona by souvenir shopping in the Placa Catalunya, a square filled with fountains and statues.  After finding our souvenirs and sitting in the Placa for a while, we headed to (initially) El Born, a medieval jousting place.

However, we missed our turn and decided to do Barceloneta Beach first, after grabbing lunch at a restaurant near the beach.  Barceloneta Beach was beautiful, but the Mediterranean Sea was freezing!  So, we sat on the beach (it was about 75 F and 25 C) for quite a while.

Once we tired of the beach, we decided to try to find El Born.  Either it was an unexciting square, or we didn't find it.  We did, however, find the Picasso Museum.  Maybe it's just us, but neither Ashley nor I found Picasso's art particularly "wow, this is amazing."  I think we just aren't big fans of modern art.

We were pretty exhausted by the end of the day, so returned to the hostel to pack up our stuff for our flight to Madrid the next day.