Barcelona

My first impression of Barcelona was taken up by the dilemma of arriving in the city, early evening, without reservations (the ones we thought we had, had been cancelled on us). The train station was crazy busy and it was hard to get accurate information from anyone. After getting on the metro, some running back and forth, and pleading with a lady at the tourism office to make a call for us, we found a room in a great location for a cheap price. The guy at the front desk was kinda creepy (he would fit well in a horror movie) but other that.. it was great.

Our one full day in Barcelona was well spent. We spent some time walking along Las Ramblas (including some time in the food market), walked around Park Guell (that Gaudi architecture is even more impressive than the pretty flowers and trees all around the park), saw the Sagrada Familia church (one very enormous and expensive construction site), the Picasso museum, and then I went to the beach while the girls went to the aquarium. In the evening, we took a funicular and a cable car up to Montjuic for a beautiful view of the sun setting over the city. We were looking for the olympic stadium but never did find it. It was too late to take the cable car down, so we started walking.. eventually we saw a road but there was a fence in the way.. so we climbed over it.. then we needed to jump down from a wall.. so we did, but I didn´t notice the sharp things on the top of the wall and managed to scrape up my hands and rip my skirt. No big deal though. We eventually made it back into a busy area (I was NOT loving the neighbourhood we were walking through) and head down to the port. We went to shopping mall that has a club in it at night (Maremagnum) and though it was dead when we arrived, it had picked up by the time we left.

Got a good night sleep and then set out the next morning for Madrid.