Day 3 – Tuesday 1st July – Barcelona

Still haven’t got the sleeping right – I’m writing this at 5am on Wednesday morning, although, we didn’t have a nap yesterday and were up and about until 11pm.

Breakfast at the market today – we plucked up the courage. We were conspicuously tourists however, because who else would have coffee in the Barcelona heat – at 9:30am. The locals preferred there drinks at room temperature (red wine) or cooler (Rosé, beer, spirits over ice) and what better time than to get the first one under your belt than 9:30 in the morning. For breakfast, we had the Tortillas (potato pancake, with cheese and zucchini) and coffee. It’s a change from the usual weet-bix and peaches.

The walking today was all quite local, as we headed off to visit some Gaudi buildings. Firstly, Casa Battlo and La Pedrera. Everything here is all about Gaudi, but I’m not convinced. There’s some beautiful architecture in Barcelona (I’ve put some pictures up on Flickr, if you follow the link at the right hand side of the blog), but the only thing you hear about is Gaudi. The buildings remind me very much of a Lord of The Rings set and while he was very courageous to build the buildings he did, I can’t say that I find them particularly visually appealing. I think if his ideas had taken off, everybody would have very quickly got tired of it and it would all have just gone away. None the less, everybody here seems to love his work, and we still have several of his famous creations to visit, so I’ll reserve final judgment until I’ve seen all that there is on offer.

The walk for today was really just round one large city block. From the hotel, we went up La Rambla to Placa de Catalunya (Large square at the top of La Rambla) and then over to the opposite corner of the Placa and up Passeig de Gracia. The Passeig is one of the main shopping streets, with lots of designer shops. Being the first of July, all the sales have started, so there were people everywhere. We discovered later in the day that all the shops were staying open for the start of the sales season and the whole area was busier than it had been a couple of nights earlier when the football final was on.

The Casa Battlo and La Pedrera are both on the Passeig. There was a concrete mosaic seat with an elaborate wrought iron lamp holder on the corner opposite La Pedrera, so we sat there for about half an hour admiring the building and people watching.

We came back down a parallel street called La Rambla de Catalunya. There are lots of Ramblas here – this is the third one we’ve mosied up and down. Basically it’s the Kent / Cambridge Terrace thing all over again, but with trees lining either side of the pedestrian precinct and a variety of attractions – usually the outdoor seating areas of restaurants, which is really cool. We had a two hour Tapas lunch, with a bottle of rosé watching the people go by.
In the evening, we went to Placa Reial for a couple of beers outside and more people watching. We then discovered that Anne’s V mobile wasn’t working, so spent some frustrating time trying to sort that out, before discovering that “there’s a know fault that we’re working on – aaaaah”