Fun and Trains...

At the end of our lovely day in Barcelona, we began to make our way home. The workers dropped Anna and I at the nearest train station, with easy to follow instructions. We paid our €1.40 each and were soon on our way to Barcelona Sants (the central station). As it was still relatively early when we arrived (about 6pm), we decided to have a bit a wander about. After making a sliding down a dragon's tail and few small purchases, we made our way back to Sants.

At this point we should point out that Sants is a VERY LARGE station (at least 14 platforms), and many of the train (or Metro in our case) information bulletins are moderately useless to plebeians such as ourselves with limited Spanish (we did eventually figure SOME of it out). All in all, this had some interesting effects on our journey home. See below for further details:

PLANNED JOURNEY HOME (Estimated travel time: ~10 minutes)


ACTUAL JOURNEY HOME (Estimated travel time: ~2 hours and 20 minutes)

Seeing the sights in Barcelona

After visiting La Boqueria yesterday (Friday), we headed along a main street to Plaza Catalunya. The street had a wide tree-lined pedestrian area in the centre of it, with a few market stalls (flowers, magazines, caged pets for sale etc) and quite a lot of "living statue" buskers. See the video of a pile of iguanas below!





Plaza Catalunya is a square filled with hundreds of pigeons and surrounded by shops. It was here that we met up with local workers Kathy and Adelina in the early afternoon.



We had lunch with Kathy and Adelina, and then they took us on a whirlwind tour of Barcelona! They had a car, so we drove up to a few lookouts where we had wonderful views over the port (where our cruise will depart from) and the enormous city of Barcelona. One lookout was at a palace and another was at a castle. We also saw the stadium where the Olympic Games were held in 1992.



After this we went back down into the city and stopped at La Sagrada Familia, an abolutely enormous church originally designed by Antoni Gaudi, an architect who designed many of the famous buildings and places in Barcelona. Construction began on Sagrada Familia in 1882 and still continues to this day, funded by donations!!

Evidence of the ongoing constuction work - huge cranes, scaffolding etc - was very visible as we walked around the block with Adelina. It's impossible to describe the church so I will have to rely on photos. It's Barcelona's most identifiable landmark and towers above the rest of the city, clearly visible when we were up at the lookouts many kilometres away. The photos probably don't really convey the sheer size of it, but the big photo below is actually a panorama of about 8 or 9 photos that Ben took from across the road, because it wouldn't all fit into the one frame. You can tell the difference between the old and new parts. Unbelievable isn't it!!



Around 4pm, Kathy and Adelina took us 30 kilometres north east of Barcelona to visit the lovely family at the convention grounds. We had a wonderful visit with Antonio, Guillerma and Juana, and also briefly met Antonio and Guillerma's daughter Antonita and her husband Miguel. The workers had to translate everything for us and them, but it was a very special visit! We also had a very interesting tour of the grounds by Antonia and Kathy.



Afterwards, Kathy and Adelina put us on a train back to Barcelona, and I'll let Ben's next post tell the story from then on. :) What a great day!!!

La Boqueria (food market), Barcelona

Hi all! Well, this time tomorrow we'll have set sail on our 15-day transatlantic cruise from Barcelona to Texas, and will be enroute to our first port of call: Cartagena, Spain! We are getting very excited now!!!

We flew into Barcelona, Spain, at around 10am yesterday morning to a chilly 2°C. We had a fairly lazy day from then on, only venturing out of our hotel for an hour or so and not really finding too many interesting things in the immediate vicinity. I was holding the map upside down so lead us in the complete opposite direction to where we were meant to be going to find the nearest metro station. Funny how everything still matched up (well, except that there was no train station at the end...)!! :)

Our hotel is in the El Prat de Llobregat area of Barcelona. Ben got a great deal through EasyJet when booking our flight, and we are very impressed with it - it's probably the nicest hotel we've ever stayed in!

Today we headed first to a food market I'd read about online as one of the top things to do in Barcelona: La Boqueria. It was AMAZING!!!! It was under a large roof near the centre of the city, in an area called La Rambla. It was totally fascinating - beautifully colourful, with foods ranging in appearance (to us) from delicious to exotic to disgusting!

We saw whole pig heads, some other animal heads (sheep?) that were skinned but with eyeballs still in, huge crabs and lobsters on ice and still slowly kicking, enormous octopodes (Google says this is the most accurate plural form of "octopus"!), colourful hanging bunches of chillis, mountains of mushrooms, lots of mouthwatering truffles and chocolates including some shaped like hedgehogs and pianos, brightly coloured lollies in various shapes including fried eggs, all sorts of dried fruit from mango to kiwifruit, lots and lots of beautiful fresh fruit including lychees, dates, pomegranate and dragonfruit (bright pink fruit in third last photo below), a Chinese food stall, a Greek food stall, fresh pasta, pizza, oodles of olives, and much more!

For breakfast/brunch we ate some chocolates and truffles from a mixed box a friendly stallholder assembled for us, two big slices of freshly made pizza, and a fruit salad that included coconut, dragonfruit, kiwifruit, watermelon, rockmelon, grapes, strawberries and pineapple. Yummy!!!

La Boqueria was also a wonderful photo opportunity, and hopefully the photos below will help convey how incredible this place was - although some make it look a bit more yellow than it did in real life! Enjoy...



Anyway, so that was La Boqueria! The rest of the day was excellent too, but I'll put that in a separate blog entry. This one's all about the FOOD!!!!! :D Goodnight!

Last days with our friends in England

Here are some photos from the last few days of catching up with our friends before we leave England! I've forgotten to take photos a few times, but here are some from the following occasions:

Staying a night with Malcolm and Esther... lunch with Steve, Anne, Cameron and Josh... staying a night with Mike, Jo, Charley and Gordon... shopping in Chichester with Jo... staying a night with Ian, (Irish) Sharon, Jake and Grace... lunch with some old workmates... (Aussie) Sharon's card party... and Mexican with Matt and Kat...



We also had dinner with Trev and Sharon at Matt and Kat's place (where we've been staying apart from the abovementioned nights), and I went to a very fun girls' sleepover at Mel's place in London to farewell Shireen. No photos from these occasions unfortunately!

It has been so wonderful to see everyone again, but very sad to have to say goodbye properly this time. We have made so many amazing friends, and no matter how many more people we meet in our future adventures, we will never ever forget you!!! So please write often, visit if at all possible, and click here to find out why you should move to Australia!!! :D