Barcelona part 1

Now here comes the good stuff! We got to Barcelona around noon on Wednesday and went straight to the hotel. Our hotel is located on La Rambla, which is a very famous area of Barcelona. This area has tons of shopping and restaraunts, and seems to be open 24/7 - hence the earplugs we wear when we sleep. We have had a really hard time adjusting to the time change so we took a 4 hour nap before we explored the area. We woke up around 5 pm and went to a restaraunt near the hotel for dinner. We had tapas (spanish appetizers), paella (spanish rice dish) and sangrias (spanish drink make with red wine, orange juice and carbonated water/soda). It was delicious. After dinner we wondered around the area, admiring the Christmas decorations and doing some shopping. We went back to the hotel around 10pm and finally fell asleep around 3 am.

This was a cool statue of Christopher Colombus.

This means Happy Holidays in Spanish. The architecture here is simlar to what we saw in Rome and Venice - lots of little alley ways.

We ended up sleeping until about 2:30pm on Thursday so we stayed in the area of the hotel again for the evening. We started off at an area called La Boqueria. This is a market where you can buy all kinds of meats, fish, fruit, nuts, candy, etc. What was interesting, is that they do not waste any part of an animal. So they were selling cow tounge, brains, livers, stomaches, sheep heads, full chickens, pig ears, pig heads, full bunnies, every part of an animal! It was quite a shock, but cool to see!

The entrance to la Boqueria

Some of the full chickens and bunnies :(.

After the market we went to this fountain called Font de Canaleles. Supposedly if you drink from this fountain you will return to Barcelona, so of course I had to take a sip!

We roamed the streets and did some more shopping and exploring. We found this Irish pub that had a happy hour special so we spent some time in there as well! We had a good day and looked forward to more fun to come!

On Thursday night, we had some trouble sleeping again and slept until about 12:30 today. We got up and started moving so we could go to this neat area called Parc Guell. This is a public park with architechture by Gaudi. It was incredible!

At the entrance of the park

The famous lizard by Gaudi

Kevin being goofy!

We are holding up the pillars

This bench was incredible and huge! The view was not so bad either!

Gigantic Cactus

The view from the very top! It was breath taking. The Sagrada Familia is in the back ground. More of that to come tomorrow!

And what better way to top of the day than with a goofy tourist picture!

We are having a great time and I can't wait to see more in the next few days. I will try to post once more before coming home, but if I don't get to it, look for more on Tuesday!