Zach and I are sitting in the common room at Yellow Nest Hostel, killing time until we need to leave to catch our night train to Granada.
This morning, Zach and I grabbed some pastries at a cute little shop close to our hostel on the go and hoped to find a free tour of some Gothic architecture and ruins offered by a more obscure company (not New Europe). Unfortunately, the staff at Yellow Nest isn’t very reliable. The man I talked with this morning about directions to this Palacio Reial gave us the wrong metro stop. We missed the tour… Zach was devastated!
Instead, we bummed around the Catalanya area for a little while, then we found our own way out to the Sagrada Familia Cathedral---beautiful! We tried to be creative in wasting 6 hours until the 5:00 tour, which wasn’t as cool as the 11:00 would have been… all about the Gaudi architecture, the gaudy (ha!) and modern-looking stuff.
After snapping several pictures of the Sagrada Familia Cathedral and NOT waiting in the mile-long line to get in, Zach and I found some shade by a homeless man’s nest under some beautiful trees next to a pond. We hopped up after we were refreshed a bit and found some lunch at “Friss,” Zach’s suggestion—but I think he was just being nice. :) Definitely girl food—salads, pastas, small sandwiches, and fruit smoothies!! We are getting our 5-a-day, even in Barcelona!
After our self-guided tour of the Sagrada Familia area, we tubed back to Catalanya to be there EXTRA early for the next tour. We had plenty of time to ask someone who knew what they were talking about where this starting point was. On the way down La Rambla, a really neat street lined with all sorts of small booths and shops, we stopped at a gigantic fruit market! Zach wanted to be brave and try some juice from some kind of hot pink fruit we had never seen before, which we later found out was “cactus flower.” Tasted like bananas… weird!
I got to call my sweet mother, highlight of the day….
We solved the mystery of the location of the square/fountain/Palacio Reial place that was the starting point of this tour that we had missed twice to date, and bummed around there for a bit until time. Got to witness some argument between man selling drinks and man buying drink about dinero (money). Tour wasn’t as good as New Europe… we really only got to look at about 3 places. Zach said he didn’t learn enough.
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