Early in the morning we got up and decided to head down town, which we were told was just a short train ride. Finding the train station however was the hard part. We were given very simple directions which we followed but found no station. We wanted to walk back to the hotel when we say this old man half way to the journey. I used the little Spanish I remembered from University and managed to ask him ,”Donde Esta la Train station?”, while pointing to the station on a Map of the rail network. This started a long conversation in Spanish where Sara and I tried our best to understand. He brought us to the Train station which was exactly where we were before, only nobody would realize it was a train station. I was surprised how hard it was to remember my spanish and we bought 2 tickets to the centre of Barcelona costing us EURO1.30 each.

We arrived and saw a magnificent building designed by Antony Gaudi called Casa Balto just in front of the Metro station. After taking a few photos we decided we were hungry and entered McDonalds to eat a heavy breakfast. The menu there was very different from the ones we had in Malaysia and also England. I had the El Mac, which was a premier version of the Big Mac served on awesome bread, great tasing chedar cheese and a thick beef patty, it was very fresh and tasty but Sara’s burger was much better. Called the CBO, which stood for Chicken Bacon Onion, it was this amazing tasting burger on a special bread which had peices of Onion and Bacon baked into its chrust, a peice of chicken breast and bacon. The vegetables used was very fresh and the chips tasty We saw and old lady enter McDonalds as we ate and she was served by the staff a beer and some bread. She sat down her corner and then had a espresso. Beer for breakfast, we thought, wow.

As we left McDonalds we saw the Bus Touristic, which was a open top double Decker bus which went to all the major sites of Barcelona. It had 3 lines, the Red, Blue and Green, but the green line only ran during summer. Tickets cost EURO 20 for 1 day and 26 for 2 days, so we bought the one day ticket, but later upgraded to a two day one. Included in the ticket price was a coupon booklet which gave us discounts to many many things, including meals and attractions.

We took the Red line first, which brought us to North Barcelona seeing many Gaudi buildings including the famous Famalia Church, which is still under construction! It also passed monuments, a small village called Garcia which rumour has it served the best desserts in town and Barcelona Stadium the home of FC Barcelona. We then changed to the Blue line which took us along the hills and down to the beach front. After we had a chance to see what Barcelona had to offer we walked along the famed La Rambla where we ate the best Paella we ever had, which also cost us EURO 15 including one drink.

At the end of La Rambla, there was this tall monument to Christopher Columbus and apparently people could go up the monument. As our coupons gave us a discount, we decided to go for it. At first we tought it would be stairs we would have to climb up like we did in Vong Tau, Vietnam, but to our joy it was a very small elavator inside! It could fit a maximum of 5 people in one journey, one of them the lift conductor. The lift conductors job is to travel up and down, ensuring that there is always just the right amount of people up there. Once you reach the top of the monument, you realize there is space only for like 8 people at a time, and you have to walk around the circle. We were enjoying the view at first, and then we felt alittle disorientated like we were about to fall off the monument, like it was tilting. We asked the elevator conductor and he told us that back when the monument was designed, it was not covered with glass windows and so the rain would manage to enter the monument. They hence made it tilt alittle so the rain water would naturally flow out. Hehe. Mystery resolved.

After coming down the monument, we were already tired and decided  to head back to our hotel, skipping dinner and planned what we wanted to see the next day.

On this day in History..

• This little light of mine - 2003
• Interbank Volleyball Competition... - 2005
• Getting Ready for the Big Day... - 2005
• Not so hot chick... - 2005
• The weekend's over, back to work... - 2006
• 20 Questions... - 2006
• My team is here... - 2006
• Saigon Secrets : Street Seafood - 2007
• Saigon Secrets : Vietnamese Teachers Day - 2007
• Saigon Secrets : Saigon Wedding Shots (Traditional) - 2007
• Saigon Secrets : Trung Nguyen Coffee - 2007

Tags: barcelona, spain, Travel

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 9:00 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.