Barcelona Day 3 – Disembarkation and our last day of vacation
Since all we needed was a taxi (no transfer to the airport or excursion), we were able to request a later disembarkation time (8:45 a.m.).
We had plenty of time to have breakfast on the Lido deck and hang out for a few minutes in our cabin (Andy used up the last 7 minutes of internet time allotted to us), before our group was called. After being pampered for a week, we were dumped unceremoniously onto the street and onto the taxi line. At least the exit process was more efficient than boarding.
Were it not for the morning traffic (they do seem to have lovely traffic jams in Barcelona), we would have been at the hotel (Barcelona Universal on Ave Paral.lel - not kidding, that's how it's spelled) in about 5 minutes, but with traffic, it was about 20.
It was too early to check in, so we stowed our luggage in the hotel’s storage room. We bought tickets for the “hop on/hop off” tour bus, and off we went. This hotel was a good bit closer to La Rambla than the hotel we stayed at a week ago, and we were soon at stop #4 of the Green Line.
The tour price included ear buds to listen to the audio guide as we drove along. Except the quality of the recording wasn’t so great. We were given the opportunity to sit up on the upper deck of the bus, but the sun was too strong and hot.
We took the bus to the Sagrada Familia church, which is where we left off the week before. This time there was an incredible line – not quite 50 minutes to get our tickets, then another 10 minutes to get our audio guide. The line to take an elevator to the top of the towers was formidable, and we decided to forgo that – we felt no urge to stand in yet another hour long line.
The audio guide for the Sagrada Familia was excellent – there were 11 stops along the way, and some of the individual stops had additional information about what we were looking at. This is one amazing church – looking at the diagrams of the future planned work, it was obvious that the jagunda building we were standing in was only about half the size it will be on completion. The original architect, Antoni Gaudi, was a devout Catholic, and this was his monument to his faith – you could feel it emanating from every square inch of this building.
The two main facades – the Nativity and the Passion – were starkly different in styles, reflecting the mood Gaudi was trying to convey. The Nativity façade was all about round, soft features, angels, peace, happiness and love. The Passion façade was all about suffering, agony and grief. Every inch of the facades had symbols carved into the surface; Gaudi’s love of nature included everywhere – animals/tree/leaf motives covered every inch of the facades.
This was continued inside the church – instead of standard cylindrical columns with flying buttresses, each column was in the shape of a tree, each one unique, with the flying buttresses in the shape of branches from the trunk reaching up to the sky. Leaves covered the ceiling.
The construction is continuously ongoing, and will be for at least another 20 years, so there was tons of scaffolding everywhere, and we saw masons laying the ceramic tile floor.
The tour took us through the museum that holds the models that were made as Gaudi designed his church. He was hit by a tram and killed in 1926, but he had left behind these models and some sketches. However, most of his documentation was destroyed during the Spanish civil war in 1936, and construction wasn’t renewed until sometime in the 1950’s by a different architect.
After the museum, we went into a schoolhouse that Gaudi had constructed, so that the children of the church construction workers could go to school. The school-house itself is yet another marvelous work of architecture.
We were finally done 2 ½ hours after we first added ourselves to the end of the queue.
We had lunch at a restaurant along the same street where we had dinner the week before, then continued up that street to the next stop on the bus tour . It took a few tries to find the actual bus stop.
We got off the bus at the stop for “Park Guel”, which was another Gaudi creation. Problem was, the bus left us only the vague general vicinity of the park. We had no idea where it was, and our maps were not helpful. We followed a street sign and started hiking uphill (why is it ALWAYS UPHILL!!!!), but stopped after a couple of blocks when we realized we really had no idea where we were. Not wanting to wander up and down hill mindlessly and endlessly, Andy went up to the top of the hill and found the park. The good news – it’s spectacularly beautiful. The bad news – it’s several more blocks straight up a San Francisco quality hill. Oy.
We grabbed a taxi that was already headed up the hill to take us the last few blocks. It was well worth it – the park was indeed spectacularly beautiful – with more steps! I was able to get up to the level that had a large covered area, but I called a moratorium on climbing more steps at that point. Instead, Andy went all the way up to the top to take photos, while I sat in the shade and listened to a random string quartet that was playing for the crowd. No idea if the quartet was sponsored by the city or what, but one of the strings was a real, full sized bass fiddle (as in, not a lightweight electric version) – not something one would normally just tote around town and set up somewhere random. There were also vendors displaying their wares on blankets on the floor.
We went back down the stairs to the souvenir shop, but it was too crowded and too hot to stay in there for long.
We then toddled back down the (amazingly steep) hill to catch the next bus that came along. At this point, it was close to 5:30 and the last bus runs at 8:00, so we needed to decide what to do for the rest of our day. We decided to get off at the stop for the Catedrál Gótic (Gothic Cathedral) of Barcelona, visit the cathedral, then continue to the Correro Princessa (“Princess Street”), where we had seen some nice ceramic stuff the week before – last ditch shopping!
The Catedrál Gótic had “modesty police” stopping people (mostly women) who were not dressed modestly enough to go into the church. There was one lady who was making out like a bandit renting/selling scarves for women to wrap around their shoulders.
This cathedral is your classic gothic church – tall, pointed arches, extravagantly ornamented and dark-dark-dark-dark. Take me back to the Sagrada Familia!
We didn’t stay long in the church; we then found our way to Correro Princessa and walked towards La Rambla. Amazingly enough, we didn’t see anything more that caught our eye – I think after the Berber rug thing, we were kinda shopped out.
On La Rambla, we picked a random restaurant to have our last dinner in Barcelona. It was kind of interesting that it was a stereotypic Spanish café, but all the wait staff was Chinese! Just seemed a little incongruous. We decided to try tapas, but we really don’t know what we were doing. We got basically French fries, sautéed mushrooms, chicken wings and a thing called a “Spanish potato omelette” (I called it the “Spanish knish”). We then split an order of chicken paella.
After dinner, we continued down La Rambla for the last time, taking a couple of photos of the street performers. I seriously wondered if La Rambla ever stops. We suddenly noticed interesting street signs: “We welcome everybody, but not everything is welcome. 350 public toilets”. Ew, really? As we walked along, we saw more signs advertising the public toilets – not that I saw one anywhere. All my bathroom breaks were in McDonald’s, Burger Kind or KFC. Anyway, it was a little gross to think about the target audience of these signs – most of them in English, not Spanish!
As we approached the end of La Rambla, we felt rain drops. And by the time we passed the statue of Christopher Columbus, it was definitely raining.
We thought we knew were Ave Parel.lel was (yes, it’s spelled just like that with the “.” In the middle of the word), but in the dark it was harder to locate than we thought. We knew we needed to find the big “hoops” sculpture and the Maritime Museum, but it took a couple of tries to find the right street to turn onto. Once we did, it was a 10-minute walk to the hotel. We were a little wet, but it was a warm rain and nothing we were wearing would be damaged by a little rain, including ourselves.
Of course, we were now able to check in and retrieve our luggage from storage. This hotel had totally free and unlimited Internet! Yey! And the bathroom had yet another strange contraption (not a bidet, we know what that is) that looked like a metal rack, with various knobs that looked like faucets.
Our last night in Barcelona was over – tomorrow, reality smacks us right in the face.
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