Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Kya Travels
We woke up and pressed the snooze button one too many times, and missed the time for the first walking tour. We weren't too worried though, as there was another one at 2pm. When we got up and got ready, we headed down to the metro and bought our 10 trip ticket and went into the Uni section, where we'd been told we would be able to find some cheap food. We got off and did a few blocks looking at menus. It wasn't as cheap as we were expecting, (we'd been told about a place that did €1 sandwiches!) but we ended up eating at a pub type place where Darren got a burger and I got a sandwich. By the time we'd finished lunch, we looked at the time and realized it was already ten to two!! We had ten minutes until the tour and a fair walk ahead of us, so we quickly paid and power walked down the street, where we made it to the meeting point a few minutes past two! We went up to the New Europe tour guides only to be told that they had no English speaking tour guides today! What?! This is a company renowned in many cities for doing English and Spanish tours EVERY day! We were so annoyed! They apologized, telling us its the first time it's ever happened, and tried to sell us on a paid tour. We weren't doing that, so we left a little annoyed and wandered down the street. We stopped at a tourist info centre to see if there were any other free tours going that day, but they didn't know of any, so we kept walking. We walked up to the famous street, La Ramblas (like Paris' Champs Élysées) and wandered down that keeping our hands firmly on our bags and wallets! Barcelona is the worlds top pickpocketing city, and this street is the worst for it in the city! We walked past lots of street artists and souvenir shops and past a lady who was spray painted gold, with a sign saying Guardian of something-in-Spanish and she would touch the heads of the donators and blow kisses to them. Pretty funny. Cool costume though. We walked to the end of La Ramblas and reached the water. We walked along and around the port, and when we got to the end of the port, kept walking along the other side and headed down to the beach. We stopped by a supermarket and grabbed a cold drink each. I got a lychee juice and Darren got a coconut juice. They were awesome and cold in the crazy hot weather! From there we walked down onto the sand and picked our way between the towels and umbrellas to wade in the shallows. So everything you've heard about European beaches is true. We walked along the coarse sand and played a game of 'spot-the-boobies'. After about 10 sets in 2 minutes we got bored of it and just kept walking. We sat on a bench type bit by the water for a bit, then found ourselves a scrap of sand and I lay in the sun for a while, while Darren had a swim and a lay down on the water. It was super relaxing. After a while there, we left, feeling much better than when we'd got there, and headed back up the street and to the metro. We got the metro to Sagrada Familia, which is a massive church. The construction had started on this building in 1880ish, by Gaudi (who had designed many buildings around the town) and it was still being built! It was quite impressive! Huge spires all over it, and super intricate carvings everywhere. I can't even explain the magnificence of this building, even with the scaffolding partially covering it! We got some photos from the front of it, but didn't go inside, then walked around a little lake that was out the front of it for another amazing view of the church. After that we had a snack at KFC, then jumped back on the metro. We got off at another stop and walked up the street then up a couple of blocks of ridiculously steep stairs. They were crazy steep! At the top of the stairs we came to Parc Guell, which is a huge park which was designed right down to the last detail, including what trees were planted, by Gaudi. We walked around there, and made our way up to a lookout that we had seen through the trees, with a big cross at the top. We got there, and climbed up the lookout to where we had these absolutely amazing views over all of Barcelona. It was amazing! At the lookout, there were a few people selling things, and one of them was an artist, who had pictures and postcards that he'd made. They were of places around the park, but filled with symbols and hidden meanings and had different pictures coming out of them depending which way up you were holding the picture. It was very cool. We bought a couple of postcards to send to people, then continued to walk around the park. We walked down this huge winding path and ended up at another great viewpoint (not quite as epic as the last one though!), which was actually the roof of a temple type place underneath. All the walls seemed to be made of mismatched broken pieces of pottery or something, it was pretty cool. There was a section off to the side that was a path that had been cut into the rock, and it looked like it had teeth at the beginning. Pretty cool. We walked down further to the temple type place, which was pretty much just all these huge pillars and some awesome roof artwork. At the front of these were two buildings that looked like gingerbread houses, and a cool mosaic statue of a salamander. Parc Guell is awesome. Apparently they're going to start charging an admission fee to enter the park as of October, too, so we got pretty lucky! After this, it was starting to get dark, so we thought we'd head back to the hostel and see if we could make it in time for dinner! We walked back down the crazy steep road (not quite as steep from this side as we'd already walked downhill a fair way in the park. We got on the metro and headed back to the hostel and walked in right at dinner time, went straight to the kitchen and got pretty much the last of the potato bake that had been cooked up! Yum! We had a chat with the people there and got into the rest of the beers that we'd got yesterday, then after dinner I went into the other room to use the wifi to book us a hostel for the next night, while Darren stayed in the kitchen, drinking and playing guitar with the guys there. I found a couple that sounded good, went in to ask Darren what he'd prefer, then by the time I got back, they were both booked out! Argh! So I quickly did a bit more research and found another one and just booked it! Then I went in to hang out with everyone else. We did a video recording of everyone singing along to "Repeat After Me", then not long after, we were kicked out and told to go hang out in the common room, cos it was too noisy! One of the other guys had a guitar too, which was better than Darren's, so Darren was playing that with a whole group of guys and girls from the hostel, and we all wrote a song together, which turned out to be pretty cool and funny. Some people made up the chords, some made up vocal lines, and one guy played the table drums. That was fun! At the end of the song, Darren had broken a string on the guys guitar, and he was shattered! He was pretty new to playing guitar, so had no idea how to fix it, and he looked as though Darren had cut his arm off or something! Darren was just a little drunk by this stage too, so I told him to go get his spare strings, and I spent a bit of time working out how to restring a guitar. I got there in the end though, and he was so appreciative, it was cool. After that, most of them left to go out, and we stayed in the common room with the guitar guy, from London, a German guy and a Lithuanian girl. We took it in turns passing the guitar around and playing songs together. The German guy had an amazing playing style and an amazing voice. (Pity he was a little obnoxious though!!) There was a girl staying in the dorm next to us, who was from Austria, who came out a bit later and hung out with us too. We stayed up way too late, and at one point when I saw it was almost 4am I went up to our dorm and grabbed all our stuff, so we didn't have to wake up the guy who was sleeping in there too many times! I brought our bags down and we played more guitar for a bit longer, then at 5am, we grabbed our bags, said goodbye to the guys, and headed out to go to the train station on zero sleep.... Fun! So worth it though.
- comments