Barcelona, Day 1

Sunday, 1 July 2012

Plainly put, the first day in Barcelona was frustrating. To begin with, there were tons of people in the airport because a lot of Spaniards were flying from Madrid to Kiev where the final of the Euro Cup 2012 was taking place. Because there were so many people, getting through check-in and security took forever. But we finally got through. The flight itself was fine – I slept most of the way.

On a lion at el Mirador de Colón

But when we landed, everything went wrong. I looked up the best way to get to the hotel from the airport, and decided that a taxi was easiest. However, because a cab is kind of on the expensive side, the girl I’m with vetoed that option. When we got to the airport, I asked at the information desk for the best/easiest way to get to the hotel. The lady helping me said that a taxi was probably easiest. But because we had already decided against that option, she showed us how to get there via public transportation. She circled the stops we needed in the bus line and the tramline so we could reach our destination. We got on the bus, but ended up getting off at the wrong stop because the lady had said to get off there first, but changed the directions without making the change clear to us. Because it wasn’t the right stop, we couldn’t find the tram stop for the line we needed. And on top of that, it started raining on us as we wandered around Barcelona, desperately lost. Finally, after nearly an hour of walking, and probably at least a mile, we somehow miraculously found the correct tram stop. When we got off the tram, we had to wander around for several minutes before we found the hotel. I don’t like not knowing where I’m going, so the whole process of getting to the hotel was not a fun experience.

We decided that since it took us so long to get to the hotel and since it was long past lunchtime, we would just eat lunch at the hotel. However, the restaurant and room service are not open on the weekends. So we dropped our things off and turned right back around, heading into the city and the rain.

From our hotel, it took a good twenty to thirty minutes via a combination of tram and metro to get into the center of Barcelona. It took so long to get into the city that by the time we came of the metro, it had stopped raining and the sun was shining, which put us in a bit of a better mood. We found a place for lunch where we once again had chicken paella and sangria.

La Plaça del Rei

El Mirador de Colón

After lunch, we set out to try to get some sightseeing done despite the fact that it was now late afternoon. We began walking to the Plaça del Rei (Plaza of the King), which used to be the medieval centre of the city. That was actually pretty neat because we got to see a portion of the old city walls. From there, we set out to find another monument, but we kept getting distracted by all the cool architecture in Barcelona. We ended up down by a marina that had a bunch of modern art sculptures. We continued down the road because we had see a large column at the end of it. It turned out to be the Mirador de Colón (I’m not sure of this translation, but I think it means viewer of Christopher Columbus), one of the tings that was on my list of things to see. By the time we got down there, it started raining again, so we headed back the way we had come because we had seen several places to take refuge in. We ended up in Starbucks because they had free wifi so we could look up information that we needed. We waited there for nearly an hour, hoping the rain would let up or stop, but it never did. It just kept raining harder and harder.

Once we decided that we couldn’t wait out the rain, we headed back to the hotel. There, we ordered pizza and watched the Euro Cup, which Spain won against Italy, 4-0. In Spain, like the rest of Europe, soccer (or as they call it, football) is a big deal, and the noise outside reflected that fact. After every goal Spain scored, we could hear what sounded like gunshots (though I suppose it was probably fireworks) and cheering. Once the noise died down, we were able to go to bed, exhausted from the frustrating and rainy day.