touring – just meesh

Day 3 started out with a morning bus tour of the city. The difference between this tour and the hop on hop off was that we got a live tour guide and we got to do some fun activities…

What we also didn’t know about the tour was that it included a ride on the Teleferic of Montjuic (so we got to go again) and a visit to the Spanish Village, which I’ll get to in a bit.
The tour started on the busy Barcelona streets, weaving in and out of different neighborhoods. Our first stop was at the Olympic Village where my mom and I had our first chance to go down to the beach and dip our toes in the water. We also got to see a lot of older folks enjoying the beach.

From there we headed up to Montjuic where we got a history lesson about the Montjuic castle that we had visited our first day and then got a chance to ride the Teleferic again and enjoy the views.

Then we headed to one of our favorite spots in Barcelona, the Spanish Village. The Spanish Village is basically all of Spain just condensed down into a “mini village.” The buildings inside feature architecture from each of the regions in Spain and house shops that feature the food and wine of Spain along with handmade items like fans and blown glass.

It was like this little hidden gem that we didn’t even know existed before the tour and my mom and I picked up some really cool handmade items like fans (which are super popular there). I think if we had time we would have spent the whole day there just going in and out of the little shops.

Our tour then finished with a walking portion through the gothic quarter of the city. We’d been there before but it was nice to get some context and learn about the area’s history. Plus I’m a big fan of walking tours because I think the best way to see a city is on foot.

Once our tour finished we headed back to the Sagrada Familia….which I will go into detail in the next post.

^^tbt to when my shoes where this white

cheers.

~meesh

The next morning we headed out to conquer Park Güell…the thing is, no one tells you that you have to get your tickets in advance and that you then have a specific entrance time…same goes for the Sagrada Familia. Also, no one told us that you can purchase tickets online ahead of time…Sooooo after we walked all the way to Park Güell and bought our tickets to go inside that afternoon. We then somehow walked from there all the way to the Sagrada Familia only to find out that couldn’t get tickets for the next day in line, you have to get them online…

At that point I was exhausted from walking and so pissed off that we couldn’t just go and see things as we pleased. It took a lot of the fun out of traveling and just became a pain in the ass because we wasted a half a day just figuring out how to “sightsee” in Barcelona.

After that debacle we got on our hop-on hop-off and got to relax and see a lot more of the city, that we hadn’t the day before. Woah, is Barcelona huge…the guide on the bus was listing all of the things you could do in different areas of the city and it was like you could easily spend a week there and still not see/do everything.

At that point we were starving so we picked up baguette sandwiches on our way back to Park Güell …I only mention the sandwiches because 1. they were incredibly delicious (pic to come) and 2. it reminded my mom of when she traveled Europe back in the 80s with my dad. …And so we proceeded to spend 20 minutes trying to recreate a photo in which my dad was eating a sandwich, only instead it was of me eating a sandwich. No, the photo did not turn out…

Okay, so we finally got into Park Güell and….don’t get me wrong it was really really cool/unique but it just wasn’t what I expected. Maybe that has something to do with the fact that my only reference point to Park Güell was how it was portrayed in the Cheetah Girls movie…but still. It was just a lot smaller than the vast openness I had expected.

After that we enjoyed the hop-on hop-off bus some more before doing some shopping around the gothic quarter, getting dinner and calling it a night.