You Know Columbus?...and the rest of Barcelona

Day 7
0800 Local Time May 06, 2010 – 0030 Local Time May 07, 2010

We woke up and had a nice little breakfast of croissants/toast with apricot jam before heading down to Plaza Cataluña. We hiked up the little hill to the metro station and took it all the way to the very end at which point the timing couldn’t have been better that we met up with Marc. He walked up right next to us and we started off on our walking tour of the city!

In downtown Barcelona, there is a fork where you can go into the older, Roman part of the city or you can go into the modern section. We walked into the Roman section amongst the expensive, trendy shops and partially along the very famous, Las Ramblas. As we went along, Marc pointed out key points and places and statues. We walked all the way down to the Mediterranean Sea-beach where there is an extremely tall monument of Columbus pointing towards the Americas at which point Marc asked us oh-so-cleverly, “You know Columbus?” At which we laughed because in our history he is only a little bit important (jaja). No but really, Marc was a very good guide and we just had a little fun at his expense.

Together we wound our way through the city streets and plazas, including the main square of the old Roman section. We walked through a very old Cathedral that had a beautiful garden inside complete with ducks. Inside were rooms filled with Catholic statues of saints—it was all very beautiful. Under the stone floors were monks and priests that had been buried--some of the dates written on the stones dated back to the 1500s.


Then we walked up a ways to the Gaudí buildings, Gaudí being a very famous architect who is known for showing off a little bit (or other people might recognize him as that guy who was killed by a bus). His buildings have a lot of curves to them and one of the houses was sort of shaped like an ‘A’ which Marc told us was because the name of the family started with A so Gaudí fashioned it to be representative of them.

Along our walk the street was lined with motorcycles and mopeds. Occasionally we also saw the much less cool version: the bicycle. As we went along, I pointed out the motorcycle that I’d like to have (and have seen quite a couple of times around): the Ninja. Unfortunately, (or perhaps fortunately as far as humor goes), there was a little black bike with a basket parked right next to it, to which Papo quite wittily replied, “Oh the bicycle—and it even has a little basket for you to take your stuff!” This quickly evolved into a running joke throughout the day. We even went back to try to take a picture of it but it was no where to be found.

After our walk to the Gaudí buildings, Marc showed us a good place to eat just off the main street. The food was really good—we had bread with some sort of tomato spread and then this white stuff that Catalonians (I guess that’s how you’d say that?) eat on a lot of things. It’s garlic and egg whites and olive oil. I would highly recommend this white stuff. We ordered two plates of grilled asparagus to share between the three of us and Papo had a sausage with grilled tomatoes and the local beverage (por favor)…he has that down. Whenever we go somewhere, Papo tries manages to get the servers to give him the specialty glass if it comes in one, with each one being different for his collection. So far he’s three for three.

Following lunch Marc had to go to class so we parted ways after he got us directions to go to a Gaudí architecture park. I later found out that we made him 25 minutes late to class (oops..! but apparently it was okay).

Even though we knew how to get to the park, we decided that’d we’d done a good amount of sight-seeing for the day and that we’d already had a nice taste of the Gaudí buildings so we were going to do something very important: shopping! Because our trip involved so much going-going-going and packing in as much as we possible could we hadn’t really had time to do any shopping (sad face).

So we walked up and down Las Ramblas and saw most of what there was to see there. Surprisingly, there wasn’t much variety in the center section. It’s basically the same “store” which was really a series of versions of the same kiosk. The real place to go would be in the surrounding shops, but those have a tendency to be more expensive.

In spite of walking up and down several times though, we didn’t do much purchasing—just a little bit of browsing. After all, it seemed like each kiosk was basically the same. That’s when we remembered that earlier we had passed by a Salvador Dalí museum. Before I get too side tracked though, another interesting thing about Las Ramblas (besides the shopping) is the people who dress up, some in extremely elaborate costumes, to make money. There are just large strings of people in individual costumes with everything from fairy with complementary marbles for kids to demons who are a riot scaring people; there are mimes and garden folk along with headless bodies and princesses. There are also sections of Las Ramblas where they sell beautiful flowers and animals like hens and duckets and song birds along with tiny bunnies, ferrets, and guinea pigs.

In the museum, we were allowed to take pictures, which was surprising. And I was also somewhat surprised to see that the museum didn’t showcase some of his larger, more popular works. Similarly I wasn’t aware that he did so much sculpture. In one section of the museum we went behind a heavy red velvet curtain into a dark room that was filled with tiny sculpture that were lit up and paintings/sketches were hung and highlighted on the walls. In another part were the same pictures that had come to the SU art gallery so I had seen them just a couple of weeks before. It was neat to be able to recognize many of them as being a part of Dalí’s take on Dante’s Divine Comedy. …And while I thought all of this was particularly interesting (because Dalí really is so eccentric), Papo wasn’t quite as keen on it. For him I’m pretty sure he could’ve taken it or left it without too much grief. But that’s okay, he put up with me while I browsed through the entirety of the museum and was a good sport about looking at all of the pictures.

Then it was time to make the decision on whether we were leaving Barcelona tomorrow or to leave on Saturday (dun dun dunnnnn). Well, I decided we would leave on Saturday and stay the extra day in Barcelona, even if that meant foregoing the monkey experience (I also have decided that these monkeys are probably not the cute monkeys I’m imagining…the experience is probably better in my head).

So we bought our train tickets at the Renfe station for the AVE going clase preferente, our only option for Saturday travel, from Barcelona to Sevilla for Saturday instead of the original plan to go clase turista tomorrow. Papo figured we would save on the cost of a night at the Navy Lodge by extending our stay at the Holiday in on points to make up half the difference in cost. With our tickets in hand (or rather in pocket), we went back to the hotel via the Metro and ferrocarril S 55.

Upon arriving at the hotel, we found out that there is actually a Formula One race in town, which explained the race car driver at the head of Las Ramblas that we saw earlier in the day …and this was going to mean no free points for our hotel. Instead of the Navy Lodge of $75, we were going to have to pay 110 Euros, (1€ equals ~ $1.36). We tried talking with David, the extremely accommodating front desk manager but he couldn’t do anything; we even tried calling the Holiday Inn hotline directly: nothing. So we were out of options. The train tickets weren’t changeable so late in the game so we booked the reservation for the extra night.

Then we had the brilliant idea: there was another holiday inn in downtown: we could just go over there tomorrow for the 15,000 points instead. So we called the Holiday Inn Company to see about booking the new hotel. As it turned out, David had actually just added the night to our standing reservation which was only payable via points—we weren’t going to have to pay the 110 Euro or move. It was something like a miracle.

So with those problems behind us we were able to get a little bit of dinner downstairs being that it was already 10 o’clock. I had soup that I think was something like green pumpkin soup with the white stuff in it, and we had chicken (on account that there was no turkey left).

Finally off our feet, and our dogs were tired, we were able to go to sleep and get some rest without the expectations of the alarm clock the next day.

*~The Traveling Buddies

Current Location: Sant Cugat, just outside of Barcelona (St. Joan Station on the ferrocarril)
Day 6: Over and Out.