Back to Barcelona

Here we are. Back to Barcelona. After getting to our hotel in a death cab ride, we found that our room was not ready. So we took several walks around Barcelona. The city has beautiful avenues, it reminded me of Savannah. We found ourselves close enough to see the towers of la familia Sagrada. We hiked a few more blocks until there it was stretching out into the sky in front of us. I was amazed. Bill said, "take your pictures." We did not walk around it to see the original side. This is the new side, that a new architect has been designing. (Honestly, I had hoped we go on a tour later on, but that didn't happen).



Gaudi, the first architect, took his designs from nature, but more specifically the water.







The next building we walked to from our hotel was much closer. This is la casa Batllo. You can see the sea forms much better in this building.










This is the room we stayed in. It was very nice except for the incredibly hard bed. Hard, like the Flintstones. A rock of a bed. Not comfortable at all. One night and my hips were aching. Thankfully the bed on the ship was very comfortable. Our room overlooked a courtyard. On Monday morning, after breakfast, after our trip to the Post office (we mastered the Barcelona post office), before the bus came to take us to the ship; we enjoyed the school children playing at recess below our window.




Because of the courtyard we could not hear any traffic from the street. The best way to describe the courtyard is to say it had several layers. Across from us was a Catholic church, obviously there was a school. The futball court and basketball courts were on one level. One level up were the trees, one more up to the left (out of the frame) were balconies off of apartments. There was also one level down, which you can just see at the bottom left of the picture. Perhaps it went down to our hotel? We don't know.

We were able to take the bus with Jenny & John to the ship. There were lines like at ticket counters in the airport, but they had a lot of agents working and we did not have to wait long (at least in my memory). The rest I summed up in the post from the other day. Now I will go forward, starting in Day 2, Villefranche, France.