Visitamos Barcelona

We are spending the weekend in Barcelona. It was an early rise this morning. By 4.40 am we were already on our way to leave the car at the airport's long-parking area. The flight was just before 7 am. Finding an empty slot at the parking area was quite difficult. Literally there were tens of thousand of cars, left by people who are on holiday.

On GPS, it says it would take 14 hours to drive to Barcelona which is about 1200 km away. A friend of us is current doing just that, driving all the way to Portugal which is even further down. Many of the natives here would do that during the summer, taking the journey easy with a few night stopover in France and so on. We opted the simple way, by flight. The plane was full. Daily there are about 10 flights to Barcelona. With the school holiday it was not surprising that it was full.

Barcelona, located in the Iberian Peninsular facing the Mediterranean sea, is a popular tourist destination for many northern European. In fact the Iberia coasts containing Benidorm, Alicante and so on are the favourite destinations for beach seekers seeking cheap holidays mainly from UK and Germany. My first trip here was back in 1985 for a field course. Later came here several times to go to the Pyrenees mountains just west of the Iberian coast.

Barcelona is quite a big city, with over 5 millions people. Barcelona itself is known as the main centre for the province, the people are known as Catalans. The vast majority of the Catalans reside in Spain, where they number over 7 million, the rest lives in southern France.

We decided to take the train from the airport to the city. Our hotel is right at the centre, next to Plaza de Catalunya, officially the city's centre. Next to it are the famous La Ramblas and Palaeis de Gracia which are the most famous shopping streets here. In fact both places were quite busy today, resembling more like Oxford Street.

Today we walked around the city centre. La Ramblas is quite a colourful street with many street performers doing their own unique tricks here and there. The famous 'Ronaldinho' performer was there. Will try to download the video one of these days to show his trick.

Fizah had her own mind. She wandered around herself for 5 hours before we met her again. She seems to be more at ease exploring the city centre on her own at her own pace. She told us later that she had almost covered most of the cultural areas and seeing many of the prominent locations at the city centre.