Barcelona, April 2011

Just some impressions from Barcelona. For larger image, click the image.

Soccer

When Barcelona plays, every bar on every corner shows it, and everybody watches. I was surprised how calmly it all went, though

La Rambla

Famous street (pedestrian zone). Always crowded.

Mercat La Boqueria

This marked close to La Rambla is impressive. It's huge! But impossible to catch on camera

Guell park

I spilled some orange juice on my shirt, and it formed a new sign for mankind: the exclamation heart! (udråbshjerte!) - I hereby release it under the GNU licence  :)

Oh, and then this happened - Out of nowhere, unpretentious and so beautiful:

Strolling around...

Random pictures

Tibidabo - an amusement park in the mountains.

One of the points of going to TIBIDABO was to see the Automaton museum. We were promised robots, but that would be to stretch the concept. The museum contained around 30-40 slot machines like the one below. You press the button (originally, you'd insert a coin), and the figure makes some movements. Charming, but hardly worth a day trip.

This machine was fun, though:

Luckily, there were more to Tibidabo than the automaton museum. The trip up there were nice and there were an excellent view from the top.

Sant Jordi

On 23th April, the streets of Barcelona was filled with guys selling roses and most of Las Ramblas was dedicated to selling books. The event celebrated is Sant Jordi day (St. George's day). Men gives roses to woman and women gives books to men. Sofia had a hard time finding a book for me, though. Hundreds of booths with hundreds of books, yet none in english.

Vegetarian?

Barcelona is not designed for vegetarians... Tapas quickly gets pretty boring when you are limited to omelet. In Barcelona I had the worst meal ever. After looking at maybe 20 restaurents, we got desperate and settled for a "noodle paella". We figured there would be something other than noodles and sauce in the dish. Not the case. Just noodles cooked into a sticky leather-like substance. After this, we learned to look up vegetarian restaurants on the net. There are a few. And we learned to make sandwiches...

Montserrat

Sagrada familia - An impressive work af architecture in form of a church

Sagrada Familia is a popular tourist place. And incredible long lines are not uncommon in Barcelona. We twice went to the aquarium, but gave up because of the insanely long line. Here we decided to join the line and take it as an experience. Actually it was moving pretty fast. A line this lenght (half way round the church), I figured could take half a day, but it only took 55 minutes. 

Beach time

After a week of cloudy weather, we finally got some sun, the day of departure.