2016-01-15-barcelona

Barcelona

Last stop

So here we are!

This is the last stop before heading back to Perth. We were in Barcelona for a few days (maybe four?).

Travel fatigue?

In the fourth week of travel, we were getting pretty homesick. Either that or just too lazy to go anywhere. You can see this when we were very productive in Switzerland (our first stop), where we would move locations every day or two, do all sorts of stuff, explore the cities.

In Barcelona we were much slower paced and chilled out.

Flamenco

Steph was feeling (extremely) ill so I ended up going to a flamenco performance on my own. It was surprisingly good and definitely worth going to.

There was plenty of food too! Way too much for just me. I think I ended up eating about 10% of the food.

The place is called Tablao de Carmen and is located in the Poble Espanyol. The Poble Espanyol is an architectural museum of sorts. Basically a giant enclosed village/castle... thing.

Antonio Gaudi

So I hear that there was a famous architect here by the name of Gaudi. We didn't really know else to do while in Barcelona so we decided to check it out.

Sagrada Familia

The sagrada familia is a famous church (still under construction for the past hundred or so years). Each side looks entirely different and every part of the church itself has symbolic meaning. It was pretty epic.

I mean holy crap look at that thing!

Casa Batllo

I went to the Casa Batllo on my own with my electric superbike.

It was one of Gaudi's great masterpieces (or so I'm told) and is basically a house with really weird architecture.

It contains no straight lines and is basically what you'd expect to see in sci fi underwater houses. Wobbly walls, round windows, squircular ceilings.

Food

Spanish food is mostly tapas. Bravas was something we ate quite often, which was basically loaded wedges.

This was the first (decent) place we went to, 7 Portes. The paella was great! Monkfish also.

This was a really really good crepe I had near Casa Batllo.

At the end of the trip we splurged on what was apparently traditional Spanish food - suckling pig! And tapas before that.

Cycling

So I went ahead and rented a bike for half a day in Barcelona. I got an electric superbike for 15EUR for a half day. With this bike I was hooning around the city no problem, and with the reasonably heavy traffic was able to keep up with most of the cars!

An Empty City

It was really strange when we got to Barcelona:

• The streets were almost empty
• The souvenir shop owner kept giving us discounts as we were trying to leave

"I'll give you 20% off! No, 30! Wait where are you going, I'll give you 40% off!")

• The bike guy knocked the price of renting the bike from 30EUR down to 15EUR

Maybe people in Barcelona just have a habit of bargaining themselves down? Apparently the reason why all the restaurants were at 10% capacity (websites often tell tourists to book extremely well in advance) was because after New Years celebrations everyone just goes back to their home country. The ebb and flow of tourists is very big here I guess? But now that I think about it Paris was completely empty as well. The line at the Louvre was non existent for instance.

Europe,Spain,Barcelona