Barcelona, part VIII - Barceloneta, La Rambla and Parc Guell

It's been almost a year since I last updated, and I feel ashamed to say it, but at this rate it's almost been two years since the trips themselves - it's May 2016 now and I went on this trip in May 2014, so I can't recall a lot of the details, but it's astonishing what photos can do to jog your memory.

The last Barcelona entry because this is the eighth one of this series and I really want to wrap this up. There isn't a whole lot left to say about Barceloneta that hasn't already been said - I went there with Nadja and the gang, but most of them left before I did since I planned my stay for seven days, because this was my first proper trip after all, and it was a bit of a trial run for me. In any case, that made me realise that I would require about 3 days tops in a city, and probably about a day and a half for smaller towns or cities that only consisted of an Old Town or three.

Barceloneta though. At this point nearly all of the old gang had gone on to other places - Henri and Piia to Nice, Nadja to Morocco, Luis and Jozef-Pedro to Portugal, Alin on to Greece, and Yuta back to Lille. I remember sitting in the communal kitchen sipping my coffee capsules as I always do, feeling really quite desolate and missing my new friends, and then as always stiffening my upper lip and going off to wherever it was I'd decided to go for the day.

Barceloneta and the Mediterranean. The ticket I'd bought for the Royal Shipyard included a tour of a skiff, which of course I had to visit. It wasn't anything too fancy, but was definitely worth a visit.

Went off to the infamous and ultimately overrated La Rambla, which was just a long boulevard. Apparently there are a lot of pickpockets here but no one wanted to pick my pockets. I suppose I look poor and destitute.

Obligatory picture of the street sign

Last day of Barcelona. I had a late afternoon flight to Lisbon, or Lisboa, and I decided to to to the Parc Guell in the morning because the hostel was basically right next to the Parc. Gloomy, overcast sort of day, terrible for photographs. Parc was yet another architectural wonder by Antoni Gaudi. I wasn't overly fond of it again, but it was another of those "must-see" places, plus it was right next to the hostel and I had time to kill before my Lisbon flight, so I spent the better half of the morning there.

Went back to the Espanya where I'd gone with Nadja previously. There was a bus that went straight to the El Prat airport, and I still had my Hola Bon pass. Adios Barcelona for now.

This was the bus I eventually took to the aeroporto

In the El Prat airport. I was peckish and got something to eat at the McDonald's of all places, used the airport wifi for a bit (all 30 minutes of the free access it provided) and waited around for my flight. I feel that a lot of my trips consist of loads of waiting; waiting for buses, waiting for flights, waiting for the planes and the buses to reach their destinations, etc etc.

That concludes it for Barcelona. I'm not sure if I want to come back here again - I feel I've had enough of it - but perhaps some other parts of Spain in the future, like Seville, Madrid or Valencia.

Barcelona, part VI - Basilica of the Sagrada Familia, part ii

I've been revisiting a lot of my old blogs recently. Partly inspiration, a lot of escapism, and an attempt to recapture that which has been all but lost. I noticed that I tended to skim a lot over the pictures and focus on the words - partly because I usually read my blogs in a place with zero privacy, but also because words are the soul of wit. Next time I really, really should type up my stuff when I'm still fresh.

Sagrada. Not much I can remember from that morning. I do remember sleeping slightly fitfully that night though, because the person who slept in the bunk above me, kept on tossing and turning, and everytime he did that the bunk would shake as well and it was rather annoying. He told me that he was going to the Sagrada today as well but we were going at very different times - I wasn't leaving till about 8:30 but he was up at six and planned to go there at like 8. Oh well.

Sagrada was located fairly closely to my hostel, and I chatted with the lovely hostel owners before I left as I always do. They told me to walk there - "it's only a 20 minute walk!" and even gave me a map, but I took one look out at the scorching sun, another look at my ride-all-you-can Hola Bon travelcard, and decided I'd be better off taking the metro, nohow.

Sagrada Familia has a metro station all to itself (unsurprisingly) and is located on both the blue line (L5) and the purple line (L2).

Anyway, picking up from last entry, there was a nice little museum right next to the Basilica which was dedicated to Gaudi and the process of the construction of the Sagrada, so I grandly present another medley of pictures.

A photograph of a photograph of the great man himself, Antoni Gaudi

Included in my preordered tickets were a trip up one of the Facades, the Nativity Facade, which is 50 metres high. I was scheduled (people numbers restrictions again) for a 12:00 entry and went up with a lovely English family who had two adorable little boys. Cute as the kids were and much as I was looking up to going to the facade, something pretty disgusting happened whilst we were going up in the elevator - it lurched and stopped, and the elevator lady was just as freaked out as any of us, saying extremely unhelpfully, "Well THAT'S never happened before!" and looking rather scared. We stayed in limbo for the longest 10 seconds of my life before the lift groaned back into life again and went up. The English family and actually all of the other lift passengers looked just as rattled as I felt, and one of the little boys said to me, "I think I'll be taking the stairs when I go down!"

A nice view of the city from one of the peepholes in the Nativity facade.

And, true to my word, I'm taking the stairs.

More stairs.

Some sort of architecture sticking out from the Facade.

And more pictures of the Sagrada Familia before I say adios.

The Sagrada Familia entries ended up being splitted into two entries after all, not three. Oh well, I still have heaps of pictures left for them, will do a picture recap if I ever get round to it somehow.