Barcelona & Madrid

My first day in Barcelona I spent walking around for a few hours. I saw the cathedral, not the Gaudi one but the normal one that has been there for a few hundred years. It was hard to see because it is no longer tourist season so they put up scaffolding everywhere to do restorations and renovations. I walkd down Las Ramblas, which is like the main tourist drag in Barcelona. It has all these performers dressed up in costumes, there are people selling small animals in cages, there are artists doing sketches of people and of course there are the souvenir stands. Just off of Las Ramblas was a market where I had some fresh fruit juice and it was bright pink but it tasted like coconut. The next day I spent on the beach. The weather was quite nice by Vancouver standards but you could see the locals in their heavy winter coats and still looking cold. It was very nice taking the day off to just lounge on the beach.

The following day I went and saw Gaudi's Temple de la Sagrada Familia which is a spectacle, no doubt about it. It has spires sticking out all over the place and the detail is quite ... odd. There are skeletons and all kinds of crazy stuff you don't normally see on a cathedral. It looked like a cross between Dr. Suess and Tim Burton. That is all I really did during the day. But that night I went to see FC Barcelona, the major soccer team in Barcelona, play Almeria. It was pretty exciting being at a game like that. They know how to celebrate a goal in Barcelona let me tell you. Otherwise it was much like any major sporting event, they jeered when the ref made a bad call. I think if they had been playing a better team the intensity if the arena would have been higher but also I probably wouldn't have been able to get a ticket.

There was some strike on in Barcelona and I had to take a bus, for an hour and a half, from the train station to the other train station were the trains were to get to Madrid. It was kinda fun. I am not spending much time in Madrid because there isn't much there. I walked around for a few hours and saw some of the sights. I saw the statue that is the symbol of the city. It is a bear standing on its hind legs leaning against a tree trying to eat the fruit. I walked through a park that had a small lake where people were rowing around. I thought it wouldn't be to much fun to do it by myself so I passed.

I am going to San Sebastian next.