Plaça de Catalunya

Early start on Saturday for bus trip up Costa Brava to Girona and back.  Therefore, just brief highlights of our first full day in Barcelona.  After breakfast at the hotel, we caught the Barcelona City Bus for its hop-on-hop-off tour of the city.  Got off at Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia church still under construction after 90 years+.  Crowds too big to get inside, but got some good pictures of its soaring weirdness.  Then up the hill to Gaudi’s Parc Guëll.  The bus left us off still 150 ft. plus below the entrance.  Luckily, as in Toledo, they’ve installed an escalator to get up the worst parts.  Again the mobs were too thick to get into any of the structures without an hour wait, but we could walk around the grounds and get good shots of his tiled or stoned twists and turns.  We did get into the aquarium and the zoo down closer to the sea.  Enjoyed both and Anne Mei took more great shots.  Since we’d left the bus route, we tried to get a cab but he wouldn’t take us because he said the ride was too short.  Probably not legal but the cops around here just seem to like standing around fingering their machine guns.  It was a long, hot walk back to the hotel.  Supper at the top of Las Ramblas refreshed our strength.  This time Anne Mei sampled a mango mojito.  We walked down to the foot of Las Ramblas and then back up.  On the way back I felt my wallet leaving my pocket and moved my hand in time to stop a theft  The guy behind me looked as innocent as he could when I turned around.  Final problem of the day when the one piece we needed in order to use our multi-piece electric plug converter was missing.  I’ll probably find it in the drawer back in Princeton.  Luckily the front desk had a whole drawer full of all sorts of converters.  The street signs here are in Spanish and Catalan.

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