My Shout

Barcelona was a fabulous experience! After the Sagrada familia and the first day, there were many other beautiful things to see. One small damper occurred when we found out that my camera was busted. It had started to play up on the top of the eiffel tower (probably fed up with the wait as well) and after developing the first roll, it wouldn't wind on anymore and so we started a quest for a new camera to capture our experiences. Of course, being on a fairly tight budget, we were looking to get a second hand camera. This is not an easy feat when you don't know where a store could possibly be found! We did manage to find a store that had a few second hand camera's and went for a rather cute looking Kodak Bertinette, which is fully manual, not an slr and without even a lightmeter to help set the exposure - great fun! We shot a quick roll of 12 shots and put it in to develop to check the results and it works fine, so should do nicely. Because I'm not that great at guessing exposures, I've been lugging around the other one, just to get a reading, which makes everything a lot heavier but should provide better shots in the end!

We did actually do more that second day in Barcelona - a lot of walking around mostly, walking past the Sagrada Familia again and down to La Pedrera and a few other Gaudi buildings as well on the way. We also spent some time in the beautiful park to the southeast of the city center. Visited an art museum and browsed around the park and the beautiful old fountain at the top end of the park. The day was finished off with a nice paella and a whole jug of Sangria, which after a couple of wines already had the rather undesirable effect of resurfacing the paella in the middle of the night.

Day 3.
Yet another Gaudi building to start of the day. The Palau Guell is the former palace of Gaudi's main benefactors, the Guell family. The visit there takes place in the form of a tour, so we found out a lot more information about Gaudi and some of the finer details that we may have missed otherwise.

After the Palau Guell, we tried to visit Montjuic, but in the end couldn't be bothered, because it was too hot! We found our way up to the entrance and had a great view of the city from there, but then gave up and returned to our hotel for a siesta.. rather a nice way of life really

We spent the evening wandering down to Barcelonetta, which is where the beach is located and made a rather unfortunate choice of Tapas, choosing two seafood dishes (which Janelle dislikes). Not knowing the language allows such things to easily happen.

Day 4.
We were to leave by train to Seville at 10 PM, so we had another whole day to kill and still had a few things that we wanted to see as well.. We had bought a two day ticket for the metro the day before and used it well. First stop was the Parc Guell (yet another Gaudi creation), and the gruelling climb up the steps thanks to malfunctioning escalators. The views are spectacular though and the park was well worth the visit.
Next stop, we returned to La Pedrera, which we had only walked past on the second day in Barcelona. Now we were committed to visiting it on the inside and climbing to the rather spectacular rooftop. The most impressive part for me though, was the apartment area, which was fitted out in its original style - very interesting. We finally caught the metro back la rambla again and walked through the old town again, visiting the Cathedral's courtyard and the geese in it one more time. For dinner, we now overcompensated for our previous night's mistake and had two dishes of sausage, which proved a little too much.. not much luck with food at that point!

The train ride from Barcelona to Seville proved fairly straightforward, although we had to sleep in separate berths! I felt rather bad, coughing all night and keeping all the other occupants awake. Finally made it though!

Barcelona is a lovely city! Beautiful buildings, great food and really nice people so far As I mentioned in the last diary entry, we were late on our first night here, which meant the hotel was mainly booked out when we arrived there at twenty to midnight. This worked in our favour, as we were upgraded to a beautiful four person room with a huge bathroom and a LOT of space! We went out for some tapas on las ramblas to finish the day off.

Next morning we were told that they had a smaller room which is what we had payed for of course, so we had to move to that one.. a lot smaller and the bathroom was crammed into a room that would normally only fit a toilet, but the view was of the Joan Miro mosaic on las ramblas and there is a lot more action in general to be seen from the balcony. More about that later.

To start our visit of Barcelona, we made our way down to the Sagrada Familia, the amazing Cathedral that Gaudi started work on over a hundred years ago and still is work in progress. It is basically a construction site, so you can only walk around certain restricted areas. Well worthwile though and we spent almost two hours walking around looking at it from different angles and wandering through the museum underneat the cathedral.

Besides our visit to the Sagrada Familia, we also visited the Textile Museum, which proved rather fascinating, with some beautiful capes and old spanish clothing. It is situated in the Old Town of Barcelona just opposite the Picasso museum. The narrow winding streets in that area are beautiful and a great pleasure to walk down as there are all manner of lovely quaint little shops.

After dinner, we sat on our balcony for a good hour and a half watching all the action on las ramblas. We were keen to try and spot any pick pocketing, but instead were treated to a lot of street performances and a rather violent episode between a certain man and the police! The events took well over half an hour to unfold and we followed the whole thing like it was a play being acted out in front of us. I won't go into all the details, but it included a lot of arguing, some hassling of restaurant patrons, some urinating on the sidewalk and some fairly serious looking fighting talk! Besides that, there was also a man dressed up as a gorilla hassling people, which we thought would be a perfect setup for a pick-pocket.. who knows

Well, that's pretty much yesterday's story. I'll tell you about our new camera tomorrow..

Well, after the initial blister inspiring day in Paris, we decided to start our second day bright and early with a long walk all the way to the Eiffel Tower. Of course jet lag helped us wake early, because this would not normally be in our character or even a consideration. Not many people are around at 7:30 in Paris - just the street cleaners sweeping the previous day's mess.. and there was plenty of that too! We wandered past the Opera building, then on to the Place de la Concorde and down the boulevard, crossing at the famous bridge that I don´t recall the name of We had skipped breakfast, so were looking for a local boulangerie to get some food from, but in that part of town the shops were scarce.

We finally made it to the Eiffel Tower at just before 9 and considering we still hadn´t had any breakfast were feeling rather peckish. Even though the lifts don´t start till 9:30, he queues were already forming, so we figured we needed to get into one to save a long wait.. As the queues kept growing we thought we were clever to be so early, until at 9:30 our particular lift was declared out-of-service and we were forced to pick another one. As it turned out we made the wrong choice, because at 9:30 the queue we HADN´t picked started moving, but ours didn´t The french customer service officer kindly informed us that there was a technical problem and it would be fixed in about twenty minutes. (side note: always multiply these estimates by at least two). At about 10:20 the queue finally started moving. By then we were about ready to pass out, but of course had to persist now! The trip up the tower was worth it though (I guess I have to say that now don´t I) and the views were spectacular, so all´s well that ends well. The only downside is that we were necessitated into buying a severely overpriced chocolate crepe and some coffees from the cafe on the second level

After that rather long start to the day, we were pretty much wrecked already, so took it easy the rest of the day. We did visit the Arc de Triomph and the Moderne Art Museum of Paris, which were both fantastic of course. To finish the day off, a nice dinner at a restaurant as the heavens spilled open and blew everything down around us. Some french guy on the table next to me cracked a joke about the price sign falling over that I didn´t understand, so I smiled politely.. (he said ´prix chute´ if anyone knows what that´s supposed to mean? - I presumed.. ´the price has plummeted').

Our last full day in Paris was a real test on our feet.. museums and art galleries will do that for you The louvre was everything it was made out to be - way too much to see of course, so I´ll spare you the details now. The Pompidou was even better in our opinion, just because the art was modern. Problem was that we were totally wrecked by then, so were limping our way through the gallery We were very fortunate in our timing though. Turns out the first sunday of every month means free entry to most major galleries including the Pompidou and the Louvre, which probably saved us a good 30 euros! Our timing only got better when we found out that the train staff would be going on strike a few hours after our train left for Barcelona .. phewwww.

The train trip turned out to be rather stressful though. An unfortunate breakdown happened on the way from Paris to Montpellier, meaning we missed the connection to Barcelona. Of course all the instructions on how to deal with this were broadcast in french, so we didn´t understand what was going on and knowing that the strike would start that evening, we were starting to think we would be stuck in the south of France for a few days! There were enough other people headed for Barcelona though and after a train trip to Perpignan and a bus from there we ended up in BCN only an hour and a half later than expected.

That´s all for now.. I´ll tell you more about Barcelona later.

Peter