Barcelona

We left from the hostel pretty early in order to get to Gatwick Airport on Tuesday morning, which meant we ended up waiting around for an hour or two before flying out. The flight was a no frills one with Easyjet, so it was a small and basic plane, but the flight was only just over an hour, so we didn´t need much to entertain ourselves anyway.

After arriving at the Airport, we had pretty good directions on how to get to the hostel, so probably not much more than an hour later, we were checking into our hostel. It´s a small hostel run by an Argentinian family, who actually live on the hostel as well. They´re awesomely nice and helpful, and have provided free dinner meals and internet for everyone that stays here.

We explored a fair bit of Barcelona on the first night we arrived, and walked down the main shopping street, La Rambla. We previously headed up to Parc Guell, which is this huge hill that overlooks the whole city. Hill is probably an understatement, but I´m not quite sure it could be called a mountain.



View from Parc Guell










La Rambla & surrounding streets


We checked out Gaudi´s La Sagrada Familia, which is this huuuuuuge church, and pictures don´t really do it justice. It´s covered in impressive sculpture all over. The beach was the next port of call, so to speak, as we headed to La Barceloneta and Port Vell. It was getting pretty late in the day, so it was pretty deserted. All the touristy places have been pretty quiet thus far, as the high season has finished. This has been pretty good, with a distinct lack of queues everywhere, and not having to push past hundreds of people to see whatever it is you want to see.



La Sagrada Familia






La Barceloneta

The next day we got up pretty early, and headed to Montjuic, which is the mountainous region that overlooks the city, and the location for most of the Olympic sites. The Olympic Stadium was free to get into to look at, which was cool, and the Olympic Museum was only a few euros, so we took advantage of that also.







Estadi Olympic & surroundings


After looking at both of those, we headed back down the mountain, and through Barra Gotic and La Ribera, which is full of older gothic style buildings, as well as a heap of museums and restaurants. Included in this was the impressive plaza, Placa Reial.



Placa Reial


The metro system here is really sweet, and you only have to wait 2 minutes between trains. It´s also really cheap (compared to London, at least). We caught the train to Camp Nou, the home of FC Barcelona, the most heavily supported soccer club in the world. The stadium holds over 100,000 people, and was something I really wanted to get a look at, so I went on a stadium tour, which went through the changerooms for the players, media centre and so on.



Camp Nou/FC Barcelona

Tired after a full day, we headed back to the hostel, and took advantage of one of the free meals on offer, before organising our travels for the coming couple of weeks. To cut a long story short.. it would take more money and time than we were willing to commit to go both Portugal and Morocco after Spain. It basically concerned the length of time to train everywhere, the fact that no frills airlines only fly from limited cities, and so on.... So essentially, we had to choose between Portugal and Morocco, and having heard from so many people how good Morocco is, we decided to pass on going to Portugal.

We´re going to San Sebastian for 3 nights from tomorrow, which is a seven hour train ride away. The guy who runs the hostel said it was his favourite place in all of Europe, and after reading about it, and looking at some photos, it should be a good weekend.

After booking the train tickets today, we headed back into the main shopping & tourist district, before going to Parc e la Cituadella, one of the main parks in Barcelona. We then sussed out Barcelona´s Arc de Triomf, and headed back to the hostel.



Parc e la Cituadella


Hopefully going to go get some Tapas or something now. Adios.