Barcelona

Jenny and Joll went off by train to Paris and David and I also took the train but went to Barcelona, a three hour train ride, south, along the coast for a lot of the way with the last 10/15 minutes all underground to arrive at the Sante Railway Station. Our hotel was good and right near the railway station. The weather was great 24 degrees and sunny, as we have done in all the other big cities, we bought a two day ticket on the on/off bus and sat upstairs in the open air and enjoyed the ride. Barcelona is a beautiful city, very big, right on the Meditteranean sea with high hills on its outskirts. In readiness for the 1992 Olympics the city had a big revamp and lots of its areas beautified and modernised to accommodate all the tourists for the games. We saw the Olympic Stadium, the port (which has become the busiest in the world for cruise ships), lots of examples of Gaudi's architecture (he certainly had a good imagination!), we stopped at the Museum d`art which had beautiful views down over the city and of course we saw Gaudi`s Sagrada Familia. The traffic is mad in Barcelona, there were heaps of people riding motor bikes and scooters, going in and out between the cars and buses. One of the roundabouts had 9 lanes in it, we were glad we were on a bus and not driving!!! We had lunch aboard a boat moored at the port, the sun was shining, it was warm, the food (garlic prawns) was good and we just sat and watched the world go by, enjoying being in such a beautiful city. On the first night we were there we went out to dinner at a restaurant close to our hotel recommended by the Conciege, we sat inside and were surprised to find that the other people were smoking, they didnt ask us if we wanted to sit in a smoking area, anyway the man sitting opposite us, had had 7, yes 7 cigarettes before our main course had arrived! And as the menu was all in Spanish I ordered a dish which sounded ok but when it turned up it was like potato salad absolutely smothered in white creamy aoli, so that wasnt the best meal we had had. But the next night we found a really nice place to eat so that was good!! We actually had an extra night in Barcelona as we went out to the airport to catch our plane to Rome and discovered that the airport had only just closed due to the volcanic ash, we had been lucky up to date and had avoided it. Anyway there was nothing we could do, I lined up to rebook and thought they would say we would have to wait for days, but they got us on an early flight the next morning, so we rang the hotel back, booked in again and went back into Barcelona for another night, so it didnt really matter to us.