Barcelona!

Barcelona was a really neat city.

Our evening flight didn't put us in Barcelona until after 9pm, so when we arrived we weren't able to check out a lot of different places to stay. The first night there we stayed in this hostel that felt more like a hotel than anything else. It was nice and everything, but it didn't really have a very 'Spanish' feel to it. It could easily have been in any country. The next day we used our handy 'Let's Go Europe' book to find a much better hostel; one that was definitely more authentic. It was quite an old building (that's hard not to be though, in Spain) on top of a shopping arcade and it had all these little hallways snaking off in every direction. It even had a tower room and a roof top garden balcony! (There was also a very cute cat - Missy - who liked to sleep on our bed.)

After we checked into this new hostel, we went out exploring for the day. We started at La Rambla, which is the main downtown street for shopping and tourists, conveniently a two minute stroll for our hostel. There were a lot of street performers, and I mean A LOT! Also on La Rambla we went to this erotic museum that Andrew and Lisa had heard about. It was... interesting. Some of the art work was really cool looking, and it was neat to see stuff from other cultures that dated back a long time.

After that we found a huge market - mostly fish and meat stands with some fruit and veggie stands; It was packed! Kind of like the Granville Island Market (inVancouver) or even Pike Place Market (in Seattle) but much bigger. We did find a candy stand in it that Lisa especially liked.

That afternoon we walked along the pier (and Troë dipped a finger into the Mediteranian). The pier had a few attractions: a large shopping center, an aquarium, and an IMAX cimena. We decided to find the Barcelona Zoo instead, though. Troë had never really been to a proper zoo before, and the rest of us had been only once or twice each. Plus, this one claimed to have the only albino gorilla in the world, and with Andrew's monkey obsession we had to go in. The zoo was actually really big, but since it was only two days before Christmas and the middle of the afternoon, there were only a few other people there. We saw tons of different animals, and took in a dolphin show and Lisa got to be a volunteer demonstrator. She got to interact with and pet a dolphin. All in all, everyone was impressed with the zoo, even though we found out that the albino gorilla had died a few years ago.

The next day we walked across the city to find Park Guell. It's a miniture city shaped like a park that was designed by a famous architect named Antoni Gaudi about a hundred years ago. All of his architecture incorporates mosaics and is quite distinctive in appearance. Barcelona is home to many Gaudi designed buildings and we stumbled upon several in our way to Park Guell. We spent several hours exploring the whole of Park Guell and found some quite amazing structures. On the way back to the hostel, we made a detour to see Gaudi's most famous building, the Sagrada Familia. It is a giant Cathedral that was never completed.

Barcelona completely wakes up in the evening. After the day trip across the city we made it back to La Rambla to find it totally packed. It seemed like the population trippled from what it was at noon to what it was 5 o'clock. Places didn't open for dinner until at least 8pm, so we rested at the hostel for a while before finding food.

On our final day we went up to Montjuïc. It's a large mountain park right on the edge of the harbour. Our trip had already invovled a lot of walking and hiking on this mountain completely wore us out. The views were quite spectacular from the top though, and we all treated ourselves to some ice cream from a hill top cafè.

In all of our exploring throughout the three days, we discovered Barcelona was full of tiny streets and alley ways littered with cute little shops and cafès. Adam managed to find three different comic book stores along the way and Troë managed to find a cute store specializing in Venitian masks! So both of us brought back a cool souvenir of Barcelona.