A Look At Barcelona

The family is gone and we slept until 10:30 this morning. We have docked at Marseilles and since we were just here a couple of days ago, we decided to take it easy today. This gave me plenty of time to get some pictures ready for you.

As I am finishing this blog, we get a knock on the door and when I open it we get a plate of chocolate covered strawberries as a gift from John Heald, the official spokesperson, Senior Cruise Director of Carnival and blogger extraordinaire. If you don’t know who he is, look at the right side of the blog and you will see a link to his blog.  The reason for receiving these is that he promised Rexie a plate of chocolate covered strawberries if she could get me to agree to go on the transatlantic cruise. If I can stop eating these, maybe I can finish this before dinner.

Now, a few words and pictures about Barcelona, our first stop in Europe. Barcelona is located on the Mediterranean Sea in the Southern part of Spain. It is a beautiful city with new sections and old sections, like most large towns in Europe.

As we started to explore the town, we found it to be quite different from what we expected. Figuring that few people would talk English, we purchased a GPS with a language translator. As we walked out of the Hotel Berna Catalonia, we were ready to walk the streets armed with our GPS containing our Barcelona Street Map and Spanish translator. We discovered that the streets were too narrow and the GPS could not sync to enough satellites to use. So, we pulled out the trusty paper map and away we went. 

We were heading to a restaurant that someone at the hotel had recommended as being authentic Spanish and very reasonably priced. We didn’t want to eat at McDonald’s or Burger King. We wanted to experience the city and its people. After a few blocks walking we found the Divinus Restaurant sitting on a beautiful boulevard called Paseo de Gracia, which is the road to the village of Gracia. I am sure that my translation is causing Spanish teachers everywhere to cringe. Good thing they don’t hear me trying to pronounce these things in Spanish.

As it turns out, we are given menus that are in Spanish. I pull out my trusty GPS/Language Translator and begin trying to figure out what to eat. Well, it doesn’t work as I had hoped. It could have been operator error as far as I know. OK, time to try plan two which is to hope we can figure out something that we can order that will not kill us. For the record, the waitress did not speak English. I guess we were lucky to get a table. I had no idea how to get something to eat. So I start looking through the menu. Nothing is making sense. I am going to starve and fall down on the streets of Barcelona and not be able to tell anyone what I need.

After fifteen minutes it is hopeless. And then, I found gold, sort of. Eureka! On page four was an English version of the menu. I think Rexie and I need a keeper if I am going to try to survive for two more days in Barcelona.

We end up having Tapas, which cannot be found in my Language Translator (I wasted money on that). The best we have figured out is that Tapas are different small dishes that you select and then everyone shares in the dishes. This was an excellent way to savor the tastes of Barcelona.  We ordered prawns in garlic (Rexie had a problem with the heads still being on them), pizza with olive oil, and couple of other dishes, and a pineapple, apple, chicken salad that was absolutely delicious.

This was just the beginning of several fantastic meals we had in Barcelona.

We went on several tours while in Barcelona, but I will report on them at another time. What did we find in Barcelona?

Not only did they have several wide boulevards, they also had many, many small, narrow streets. Here are several pictures showing the wide streets. Notice the traffic. Many times it was heavy at peak times, but many times the traffic flowed without any problems.

The narrow streets seemed to always have traffic and in many cases it was backed up because one vehicle would stop in the street without any way to go around.

We found that the city streets were full of beautiful monuments and interesting sites.

We also found some interesting art (if you say so, but I wonder) on the streets of Barcelona. This here is nothing but steel cables. Don’t know what it is supposed to represent, but I think they had a roll of cable that got unwound and tangled and they decided to call it art instead of rolling it back up.

On the Paseo de Gracia, we discovered several street laps that were definitely not modern. The ornamental art work of these lights is amazing.

While they have a subway system, they also have a tram system in several locations.

One of the things that was remarkable, was the number of scooters in the city. I heard that they had over 300,000 scooters. You can find these parked not only on the streets when there was room, but they parked them on the sidewalks all over the city. It was interesting to walk down the sidewalk and find motor scooter after motor scooter next to you. They were ridden by young and old, male and female, and people wearing casual dress and suits. It was interesting to see a well-dressed female or a man in a suit going to work on a scooter. Another thing about the scooters is that they made their own lanes or non-lanes when they wanted. It was nothing to see these scooters going between cars at traffic lights or even moving over two or three lanes in front of cars when the traffic was stopped.

The buildings were beautiful works of art and in some cases were art themselves. 

Barcelona is also known as the home of Gaudi who was a very interesting artist. Here are some of his buildings he built. Notice how the second picture has the second floor corner room on a stilt.

The next blog will feature more on Gaudi.