Morning came and our new day (December 30th, 2006) started with “breakfast” at our hotel. We quickly found out that our idea of breakfast and the Spanish idea of breakfast were definitely not the same. Apparently the Spanish enjoy pastries, sweets and espressos as their breakfast, where we prefer a good cup of “normal” coffee and perhaps some bacon and eggs. So after a quick nibble on a few pastries we were off to explore the city.

We starting by walking up La Rambla, looking at the shops / vendors and staring in amazement at a sea of people out enjoying the shopping and the sunshine, and by sea of people, I mean wow! I had never seen so many people in one place. The phrase “walking up La Rambla” should actually be replaced by the phrase “shuffling around La Rambla” because that is about the speed foot-traffic was flowing.

We did some pondering and decided that jumping onto one of the city tourist busses was the way to go, as we would be able to see all the main attractions the city had to offer and could hop on / off as we saw fit. For anyone heading to Barcelona, I would recommend doing this as well despite the seemingly high price of the bus tour at €19. I was overjoyed by the fact that I got to visit the Template of the Sagrada Familia, one of Antoni Gaudi’s most famous architectural mater pieces and a building I studied in my Art History classes in college. This building is magnificent like most of his works and despite the fact that construction began in 1880, it is not yet complete even today. We actually ended up stopping for lunch at a cafe under the shadow of this temple just so we could stare at it’s beauty. Gaudi did a lot for Barcelona, and we enjoyed seeing a lot of his work such as the Casa Batllo, Park Guell and Casa Mila. We never did actually go inside any of these as most lines to get in were well over a one and a half our wait, but we enjoyed them from the outside none-the-less. The other place we stopped was to visit one of my favourite painters galleries, Joan Miro. Seeing his paintings and sculpture in real life after also studying him in college was something I won’t soon forget.

After we were done our bus tour we headed back to the hotel to see about that room switch. The hotel front desk clerk seemed surprised by the fact that we wished to change rooms, but she instructed one of the cleaning staff to show us room 201 on the front side of the hotel. We investigated this new room and decided that we enjoyed it a bit better than our current room, so off we went to switch our stuff over. Funny thing, when we were leaving our first room we happened to notice that the cleaning staff overlooked someone’s old crusty panty-hoe type sock hanging from the ceiling fan. Yuck. Glad we were out of there.

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