Saturday, July 11, 2009

First Day in Barcelona

Today was an interesting day. First, we had breakfast in our new hotel, after that, we caught a bus to Barcelona's main square, Placa Catalunya. From there, we bought a day pass for the Barcelona City Tour Bus. The bus took two routes aroun Barcelona and had headphones to describe each place you saw, and stopped at many of Barcelona's main attractions. The first bus went around the east part of town. Attractions we saw included the Olympic Port, La Sagrada Familia (An unfinished cathedral designed by Antoni Gaudi (in the 1800s), that is scheduled to be completed in 2026, which probably means it'll be done 2050), and Park Guell. Park Guell is one of Gaudi's other creations, and it is where we stopped for about an hour. There were many great pieces of architectures, ingenious uses of the environment, structures that look like they'll fall apart but are very stable, and just a ton of eye candy. There was one area in the park with a stone tower and a cross on top. When you climb the tower, you have a panoramic view of the entire Barcelona area (This finished our panoramic views of all the cities we visited. We had a panoramic view of Zurich, Montreux, Nice, Cannes, Monaco, and now Barcelona).

After the first bus, we took the second bus around the western part of town. We didn't stop, but we saw monuments including The Olypmic Stadium, The Cristopher Columbus monument, the gardens of Miramar, and the Diagonal Avenue (Barcelona's main avenue which runs diagonally through the city from the top of a mountain to the sea. After that bus, we walked towards one of Barcelona's cable car stations to see if we could ride them. After the half-hour walk, we were told that they closed 15 minutes ago... We'll go back tomorrow. We returned to the hotel by bus, rested for a bit, and then had dinner at a nearby restaurant. We covered a lot of ground today and I'm tired, so hopefully tomorrow will be more relaxed.

The pictures from Nice Day 4, our train ride, and our first day in Barcelona are at:





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