Barcelona 10/ 8-11 2005

We arrived in Barcelona on Sunday the 9th. We stayed at a nice but over priced hotel - www.hotelnunezurgell.com. The location was great, there were lots of restaurants in the area and it was easy to catch a cab or get on the Metro. If you can get a room for less than 75 euros per night then I would highly recommend it. We met up with Chameko and her cousin Tracy and took the metro over to the Ramblas that evening. The Ramblas had the usual freaks that perform for tourists - dancers, mimes, living statues, fortune tellers, etc. We had a really good seafood dinner at some random restaurants and a large pitcher of sangria made with champagne. After dinner we continued our walk down the Ramblas past the Christopher Columbus (Cristobel Colon in Spain so why is it different in English?) to the waterfront. This was a very pretty walk and the weather was great - around 75 deg. We went to Cafe Royale after that to hear some jazz by a live group and some funk. Did you know mixed drinks are rare in Spain. You get a glass of liquor and a bottle of a mixer but never a mixed drink. It was a small smoky place that was packed. We called it an early evening at 1AM although the club keeps going until at least 4.

The next day Shon and I took the tourist bus around Barcelona. We got the two day pass but I would recommend that the 1 day is enough to see all of the sites. Barcelona is a very pretty city. It was very clean and laid out in an easy to navigate way. We spent most of the day looking at the architecture by Antoni Gaudi. Here are pictures of Dinky and Shon in front of my favorite sites.


The Sagrada Famila church is the most interesting structure I've ever seen. I would like to go back and see it once it is finished in 20 more years (only 130 years after it was started). Also I loved the mosaics that were everywhere. They were made with found objects like plates and bottles. To think this was all done in the late 1800's since Gaudi died in 1906.

We had dinner again with Chameko and Tracy in the Barri Gotic area off of the Ramblas. Then we went to a great club Jamboree/Los Tarantos for the What the F**k jam session. It was off the hook with live performances by a regagge group, and some rappers and singers all accompanied by most of the jazz band from Cafe Royale the night before. This was followed by a really good hip hop set. We partied until 3 AM but just like the night before the club was still jumping when we left.

Chameko and her group moved on to Southern Spain the next day. We finished touring the city and went to the Picasso museum which I highly recomended. We had dinner that night at a Scottish style tapas bar near the hotel. Talk about fusion cuisine but it was good. We called it a night early so that we could catch our flight to Madrid the next morning. In retrospect Barcelona was my favorite city of the three we visited (Lisbon , Madrid). It felt a lot like San Fransisco. The people were very friendly and it was pretty easy to navigate even if you did not know much Spanish.

Here is the link to all of my Barcelona pictures.
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/shevvi/album?.dir=/e37a&.src=ph&.tok=phTcTzDB__hzuPh8

We used Rick Steve's Spain and Portugal and Time Out Barcelona as guidebooks.