Day 1: A Pleasant Stroll Through Barcelona

I managed to get some sleep on two of our flight, so I am in considerably better shape than Bill. My job today will be to keep us both up for as long as I can so that we are on local time tomorrow. Unfortunately for both of us, I want to get the lay of the land, and Bill will fall asleep if I do that via tour bus. So we’ll walk a lot – and likely regret it tomorrow. But at least we’ll be awake to regret it when things are open. Also, since I know we’re both kind of out of it, I haven't planned to do anything on either of our short lists.

We start by heading to a recommended restaurant nearby. (Our receptionist/concierge at the H 10 has some very strong opinions on the local food, starting with “don’t eat anywhere on la Rambla,” the main tourist drag through town.) His recommendation is not open yet, being only a little after noon. So we just head west for a while until we hit a decent sized road, and then turn south. Eventually we grab a bite at some random tapas place, which turns out to be pretty good.

Pay no attention to the look on his face. He is having a great time. Or at least enjoying some cured meats and bread with tomato, garlic, and salt.

Our vague destination is Montjuic. It is not, as the name implies, a mountain. Just a hill. Really. We'll just be taking a pleasant stroll up a hill. We've been heading that direction using the compass in my head. Along the way we find an interesting park with some interesting graffiti.

Younger me would have tried to climb this.

This park is just teeming with odd industrial toys.

Interesting graffiti, wide view.

Interesting graffiti, close up.

Bill has some new app for his phone that stores maps off-line and uses GPS for location instead of data. He busts it out every so often to confirm we’re on course. We do wander into the edges of Montjuic. What we fail to find is either the funicular rail or cable car transportation options to get to Castell de Montjuic at the top of the “mountain.” Fortunately, we do find stairs.

Don't worry, we took the ones on the right.

While I would ordinarily rank “fortress with excellent view of the city accessible via cable car” pretty high on my list, the building is now a museum I am not terribly interested in, and we have a better view of the Barcelona lined up tomorrow. I just picked it to give us something to head towards. So we get as high as the cable car station that doesn't go to the top, and enjoy the view from there.

View out towards the harbor.

WTC complex.

The three smoke stacks are right next to the park I photographed earlier.

Next, we headed towards a monument to Christopher Columbus towering over the southern end of la Rambla and just bask in the interesting architecture all around. On my map, this is identified as the Barcelona Monument, but tomorrow I will discover that cab drivers don’t know what that is.

Columbus, pointing not towards the Americas.

See? Not sleepy at all.

There is some more interesting graffiti along the way. There’s actually graffiti pretty much everywhere – I’m just only photographing the interesting stuff.

Hello, one-eyed creature. Will you be my friend?

It’s now late afternoon, and Bill has demanded a return to the hotel. Conveniently a couple blocks off of la Rambla’s far end. As the day goes on, more and more street performers set up along the street. For a few coins, they’ll pose with you – but they pick the pose.

Hello, strange man. Will you be my - ACK!

We also look in a few souvenir stands and stop for the jamon experience. Ok, just the gift shop, we didn’t actually do whatever the “experience” was. I’m really sad that they didn’t have anything that would make a good Christmas ornament as something sculpted to look like cured meat would be my ideal ornament from Spain.

I also convince him, somehow, to forego the hotel in order to find the location of a tour I want to take tomorrow – assuming the place will be open on the May 1^st holiday. We get there just in time to miss the last tour for today, but it was in French, so no big deal. I pick up tickets for a tour tomorrow afternoon, making the day packed with three planned stops.

We do go back to the hotel, but somewhere around kilometer 2,000 of today's march, Bill got his second wind. I suggest Casa Batllo, the closest Gaudi building that is open to the public. It’s also open until 8PM, and it’s not quite 6 now. I’ve seen a lot of pictures of this building, but all in the bright noon-day sun, and I am kind of interested to see how the glass and tiles look in less direct light. Also, this is the least popular Gaudi site and probably even less crowded at this time. Usually, we travel more off-season than this.

When we get there, tickets looks a little steep, but we go ahead in. Admission includes an audio tour which was 100% worth doing. There is so much detail in everything. I’m sure I missed a lot, but less than I would have without the nice recording pointing some things out. Here are a negligible portion of the pictures from our visit.

Casa Batllo exterior from across the street.

Exterior close up.

Entry way, where Bill is obviously serious. He's wearing both cameras.

Nothing but the floor is flat. The walls, doors, and even the leaded panes in the stained glass windows curve.

These panels are made from dichroic glass. While the colors look different on these two images, these are both sides of that same doorway. My camera has done a poor job of capturing just how different they appear in reality.

Seriously, were do you even begin to look?

Stepping into the next room reveals even more interesting details, like this ceiling.

The view from the front of the house.

Another room features both ceiling mounds and a pair of columns right in front of a door.

A tiled courtyard beyond the columns.

Chimney's on the roof.

And an access door into a dragon?

Obviously, a dragon is where you hide a water feature like this.

The view down the stairwell from one of the higher floors. The tile work gradually changes from white to blue as it goes up.

Afterwards, we headed back to find the restaurant we had missed at lunch now barely open. The food was excellent, but we only had room to try a small portion of what was on offer. And, like lunch, it was mostly meat. The bread wasn't as good as our random stop earlier, but the cured meat and salmon carpaccio were divine. Unfortunately, the whiskey tart I ordered never arrived, but it wasn't on the bill either. The bill which took forever to pay because when the waiter said “he’ll run your card” I didn't realize that was code for “you need to go to the register and watch him run your card.” I assume that with chip and pin cards, this is a common occurrence. I will endeavor to be more attentive in the future.

Gelato shops are as common as Starbucks here, so I was not without desert for long. We made our way back to the hotel, having stayed up to 10 PM thanks entirely to my clever, clever plan and Bill promptly blew a circuit in our room (and possibly the entire floor).

Some additional observations about Barcelona from this first day:

1. Sidewalks everywhere are paved in stones, but not the same stones. I started taking pictures of the variations but fairly late into the day. So the images below are spread across multiple days, as should be obvious from my multiple shoes (included for scale).
   
2.  Small dogs are very popular. Not toy small, just cardigan corgi small.
3. Motor bikes are even more popular than dogs. And that popularity is supported by the surprisingly common designated parking areas.
4.   There are several “streets” where cars are technically permitted, but are treated like pedestrian paths. In Iceland, our hotel was on a street that swapped between motor and foot traffic depending on time of day, but these seem to be both at all times. I sort of feel bad for the drivers, though, as they seem to not be making much progress through the indifferent crowds.
5. By my standards, the weather is pretty much perfect. Even now, sitting in the shade in the early evening with a breeze I’m not tempted to pull out the light sweater or scarf in the backpack right next to me. Once the sun is down, the sweater is nice to have, but we've seen loads of people in jackets and layers all over town today that indicate much cooler weather.