Day 1 – Sunday 29th June - Barcelona

We’re in Barcelona for 6 days, which is great. It gives us plenty of time to have a good look around and get to know the place a bit. There are a heap of great sites to visit, we can walk our legs off getting between them. For the bits that we don’t want to walk, there is a really good metro and there’s also bikes to rent everywhere, we just need to learn the secret of how you rent them.

Our hotel is the Hotel Royal on La Rambla – Barcelona’s most famous street. The road is only two very narrow lanes each way, divided by a large pedestrian promenade. Think Kent Terrace / Cambridge Terrace, but with trees, zillions of people, living statues, street performers, caricaturists, flower sellers, pet sellers, souvenir sellers, pick pockets, vagrants and vagabonds, tourists, locals, police – ok, it’s nothing like Kent and Cambridge.

The living statues are cool. Some are more living than statue, but there must be a couple of dozen of them and they are all really cool. My favourite ones are:
- the guy dressed all in white, including white face of course, sitting on a “big white throne”, with his trousers round his ankles reading the newspaper.
- The WWII soldier – his outfit is a metallic chocolate brown – including his face, helmet and sun glasses
- There’s some LOTR type characters. There’s a green one that seems to be doing a Gollum impersonation and a big evil eagle with massive wings that he wraps around the people who are having there photos taken
- Atlas, carrying the world on his shoulders.

I said to Anne, “if it all goes really wrong, make sure we still have enough money to make ourselves a costume to earn the airfares back home”. She said “the airfares are already paid”. OOOOOOK! (read that with a long O and a short K)

We walked down La Rambla to the Christopher Columbus statue. Then we walked back up the Rambla to our hotel – it’s 100m from the top of La Rambla. Stopping just briefly for a short rest at 1:30pm, we woke again at about 7:30pm.

Cool. Spain are playing Germany in the Final or Euro 2008. We are in Spain, staying on Barcelona’s most famous pedestrian promenade. Better get out there. Walking past the tourist information centre, there was a big sign saying “there is no large screen to view tonight’s game” – Ya kidding, right. Nope, there was no big screen.

We wandered down La Rambla and into Placa Reial. On our way, we passed small groups of people peering through the windows of restaurants and bars, watching the game on mainly small TV’s. In the Placa, there was a restaurant with a TV. The restaurant had an outdoor courtyard, which was separated from the main Placa by arched pillars. People were sitting on the ground in lines so they could see through the arches to the . Because there were three arches, there were three lines, all directed at one TV, so it looked like the rays of sunshine when they shine through clouds – it was kinda cool.

Even though the game was on, there were still lots of people wandering round not watching the game. Anyway, as everyone knows, Spain won. There were fire works, fire crackers, massive really loud fire crackers, beer was sprayed, car and scooters with their horns tooting charging up and down La Rambla, men climbing lampposts, leading the crowd in chants, songs (ole, ole, ole – better than aussie, aussie, aussie, oi, oi, oi – but only just), people with flags, even a group of Germans with a German flag. They got the now customary ‘L’ shaped fingers on the forehead salute, but all in good fun.

We decided to head for an outdoor bar on La Rambla and get a beer (me) and a Sangria (Anne). Everybody was having pint glasses, so when the waiter asked if we wanted large glasses, I said “yes”. Lets play spot the newbies – it’s David and Anne. Obviously a pint is not a large drink – a litre is a large drink, so my beer duly arrived, almost requiring two hands to drink it for the first bit of it. Anne’s Sangria (also a litre) had two straws – one a normal length one, the other the best part of a metre long. It was only when Anne offered me a taste of her Sangria and I lent all the way across the table to drink from the wee straw that I realized what the big straw was for – it was for ME. Drinking Sangria became very easy after that.

We stayed out celebrating (finishing our drinks) until about 3:00am, then went back to the hotel to sleep.