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!

¿Que hacemos en Barcelona?

Okay, I´ll be honest. I wrote that title just because I really wanted to use the upside down question mark that´s on the hotel keyboard in Barcelona. ¿How fun is that?

This will be a picture-less post, unfortunately, because the WiFi is horrible here, which means I´m stuck using the hotel's computer. Pictures will have to wait until we´re back in Paris. Even so, I wanted to post a quick update about our time in Barcelona so far.

Our plane landed in Barcelona yesterday at 9pm. Trevor researched the best options for getting to our hotel from the airport, and decided that the quickest and most economical option would be to take the train and then transfer to the metro. We were a bit confused at first, but I busted out my Spanish and asked somebody for help. Whew...even though my Spanish is definitely a little rusty, I managed to get my point across, and even incorporated a bit of Spanish lisp on my ¨gracias¨ (only on the ¨c¨ of course). When the train arrived at our stop, we got off and looked for our metro correspondence. Strangely, there were no signs to get to the metro, only signs to exit. So we followed those, figuring that they would somehow lead us to the metro. No such luck! We ended up on the street, at the top of an escalator, with the stairs to go back into the train station closed off by a gate (because it was already 10:40pm at this point, and the last train was at 10:30). We felt a little lost, but eventually found the metro entrance we were looking for. Apparently, the train and metro aren´t connected in the way they are in Paris. But, we found our metro line and barely made it on because of the hoards of people dressed up in their clubbing clothes who were just getting ready to start their night. It was a bit surreal, even though I was expecting Barcelona to be party central.

We ended up finding out hotel around 11:30pm, checked in, got settled, and ventured out to find a place for dinner. Had we been travelling to any other city, we probably would have eaten before leaving, but we had heard that restaurants don´t start serving dinner until 9pm here, so we knew we´d find something when we got in. As soon as we turned the corner from our hotel, we saw a long avenue, with an island in the middle of the road, filled with tables, which were filled with people. The most amazing part was that there were people of all ages, including some very small children, just sitting down to dinner...at 11:45pm. Wow.

We chose a tapas place, ordered some food and enjoyed. The prices were much cheaper than Paris, which was a welcomed break (we´re talking 1,90 € for a beer...not too shabby). The food was okay- nothing fancy, but not bad- and the service was just like in France. They serve you and then leave you alone. Overall, we really enjoyed the first night!

We finally went to sleep at 1:30am, and rolled out of bed at 11am this morning. Quite a different pace of life! We found a cafe near our hotel and had some breakfast at noon (where several locals were also enjoying breakfast!) and walked to a nearby beach to stroll around and people-watch. After a while, we sat down at a beach-side cafe to have a drink (sangria!). Then we walked around the city, took pictures in a big, beautiful park, and pretty much had a very relaxing day. Now (7:15pm), we´re heading up to the pool for a swim and will probably go have dinner in a couple of hours. Ahhh...this definitely feels like vacation!