Friday, July 3, 2009

Belated Barcelona pics

My this vacation has been flying by! I expected that it would, but it's kind of sad when it actually does. Trevor and I were in Spain about 2 weeks ago, and now I'm finally getting around the posting the pictures from that part of our trip. Since then, Trevor left to go back home and go back to work, and I've been hanging out with my parents in Paris/visiting friends with my parents in Marseille. More on that later.

Barcelona was a very interesting city, and full of life! Our plane arrived at 9:30pm. By the time we took the train into Barcelona and transferred to the metro, it about 11pm. Taking the metro in Paris at such a late hour generally means it will be close to empty...this was SO far from the case in Barcelona. When our metro arrived, it was full of people, dressed up in their best clubbing clothes, just getting ready to hit the clubs. We could hardly fit with our suitcases. By the time we got off the subway and found our hotel, it was 11:30pm, and we hadn't had dinner yet. So we headed back out to find a place to eat. Just around the corner we found a long strip of restaurants, all with terrace seating in the island in the middle of the street. All of them still had plenty of people having dinner, many who were just beginning. *Whew* we weren't going to go hungry. We sat down and ordered an assortment of tapas and some beers. The people watching at that time of the night in Barcelona is great. You have a full array of people- from the adolescents/young adults who are getting a bite to eat before going dancing, to the parents with their young children, to the old couples walking hand in hand on their way to dinner, everyone is out and about. It's quite the culture shock, even for us, who are used to starting dinner at 9pm regularly when we're in Paris. We jumped right into the fun, though, and acclimated to "Barcelona time," usually not starting dinner until at least 10pm. When in Rome, right?

We got to see a large array of Barcelona highlights, which I'll post pictures of below.


This is about as close to the club scene as we got during our time in Barcelona- I call it,
the morning after:


A beautiful port, near Barceloneta:


A giant fish sculpture, near the port:


View of the W Hotel Barcelona from the beach (not where we stayed)


Yellow tree flower petals in the Parc de la Ciutadella


More yellow flower petals


Trevor in the Parc de la Ciutadella


Love in the Parc de la Ciutadella


Fountain in the Parc de la Ciutadella


Sagrada Familia




Columbus monument


Lichtenstein street art


Outside the Picasso museum...didn't want to take pictures inside the museum, so we don't have many from here.


At the Picasso museum


Trevor enjoying some freshly pressed orange juice (made to order!) in the cafe where we had breakfast every morning


Some tapas...these were the best we tried while we were there


That's it for now! I might most some more Barcelona pictures when I get home and can upload all the vacation pictures onto our new computer. Currently, it takes about a minute to look at each of my pictures because my poor little laptop can't handle 5 meg pics. So once I'm home, I'll go through all of them and if there are any nice ones I missed, I'll post 'em.

More about Paris and the south of France later!