Barcelona

First post after barcelona
The trip was good..sun,sand and lots and lots of people.We didn’t have anything pre-planned since our previous planned ones failed.This time we decided we would plan on the move.We reached barcelona in the afternoon,went to the hotel straight,rested for a while then left to explore the city.
We went down the la’Rambla,reached Port Vell and walked along the coast to the beaches.The y were all great.We reached there in the evening so there was not much crowd but we found our way.We eventually got lost which was a good thing btw.We were able to explore the western part of the city.How would i describe barcelona??A city planned well in advance but there are strikingly less people.
There are 4 modes of transport through the city-Bus,Metro,Trams and Trains(to the exterior parts of the city)For all this you have just one ticket:-OJust one ticket which costs just 5EUR for a single day ticket.
Sunday,dressed in our shorts we hit the beaches and man was it awesome,the water was salty(too salty for me atleast)the sun was bright,people were lying around in the sun,kids were playing;It was just how we imagined it to be!!Since we were just three of us we took turns since one of us had to watch the bags!!There were 5 beaches,we had to cover them by the evening,we spent a couple of hours in each and moved on to the next!Marbella was what we were looking forward to…since it was the (you know what i mean!!)
Akhil and Santhosh had already been to Barcelona over a weekend and he touched upon the places he had visited.We also decided that we’ll hit the important ones only and no museums and palaces since we were already sick of them!
The whole irony was we were in the beach the whole day submerged in water most of the time and none of us know swimming,all we could do was walk into the waves and float with our feet bolted to the sea floor below.Everyone were just waiting for sun to come out while we were trying to runaway from it.We were roaming the la’Rambla till the evening and we sat down for a beer where we saw one of the biggest mugs evah!!
Imagine a…forget it,there’s nothing like that!Its that huge and it wasn’t exactly cheap either,11EUR.We did get disoriented but just a bit,went to the hotel and crashed.
On Monday,vacated the hotel,had our breakfast and headed for the aquarium.The aquarium was good,dunno how exactly it compares with the one on London but for a first visit it was pretty cool.

We went to the sangrada Familia which is like a pretty old church in barcelona and a huge one.It had two different phases,the one in the back i assume is the original church while the fromt phase was renovated with the new look.Decided against going inside as it would be just another church and also Akhil had previously warned us.There were not a lot of tourist places in barcelona excluding the museums and churches.Coming to barcelona and not seeing the Football club was like going to Italy and not eating the pizza.the barca FC was outside the city is like the main attraction.Its supposedly the second richest club in the world.Ronaldinho,Thierry Henry,Messi play for barca and so have Maradona,Ronaldo,Larsson.We had a tour of the stadium right from the groud level to the player’s changing rooms.The ground seemed to be smaller than it looks on TV and was maintained quite good. We bought ourselves some memorabilia and headed towards the next attraction,the Olympic Stadium.Barcelona hosted the 1992 Olympics which according to me had one of the awesome’est way to light the olympic flame,An arrow shot from the ground which lit the flame on the cauldron.We were so exhausted by the time we reached the stadium we downed a whole bottle of water(1 litre bottle).
The stadium was located on the other side of a hill,we had to catch a tube which went uphill and from there on we walked to the olympic stadium.Before that we hitched a ride on the ropecar to the old castle on top of the hill.The view from the top was quite exhilarating.We could the barcelona port/harbour in all its glory;ships leaving the harbour,docking,teh container yard it was all awesome.We walked down from the stadium to the Museu’de Art,chose not to go inside again as there was no admittance
Took some pics,walked down to the central square which kinda looked like St Peter’s square in the Vatican.It was already 1800 hrs in the evening our flight was in 4 hours.We had to be in the airport atleast a couple of hours before the flight leaves.We didn’t want to spend exhorbitant amounts on the taxis,our tube tickets were still valid for the day,they could be used for outbound trains as well.So we took the direct train to the Airport.This was a qrong decision as we were stuck up in a remote place outside the city and the train was delayed.Fortunate for us,a spanish guy pointed us to the right train.Since we arrived quite late for our checkin we were stuck behind a lot of people.Finally we checked in and scrambled for our dinner.There was nothing open in the airport against our beliefs so we had to settle for a Toblerone bar and some water.After all this,our flight was delayed by half and hour and we breathed a sigh of relief.