After a good nights sleep (modern chemistry is wonderful) we headed out to see the city. We bought tickets for the double decker bus that tours the city. After a nice breakfast on the street, we hopped on the bus and headed off. The city is quite beautiful and full of interesting and unusual architecture as you can see below.
Barcelona is proud of its connections with Christopher Columbus. In the late 1800s (?) they built a huge monument to him near the harbor. To give you and idea of the scale of the monument, the finger he is pointing in the picture is .5 m (1.5 feet) long. it is quite high in the air as well and would be a dominating site from the sea.
After completing most of the red bus loop, we hopped off at the harbor for lunch and found a nice fish place. Well, it was nice for Chuck--Caroline is not a fish fan. I had a very good gazpacho, mussels farmer style (in tomato sauce) and shared Caroline's vegetable paella. Plus, we had a bottle of a nice refreshing white wine. We were joined by a small friend looking for a handout. He eventually got a bit of the bread in the lower right of the picture before we shooed him away.
Our next task was to find the shop that Caroline had purchased lace from when we were in Barcelona for a day after last year's cruise. We knew roughly where it was so we headed to that area and commenced the search. It was around the Cathedral, a beautiful building which we only viewed from the outside. We wandered pretty much every side street and alleyway in the vicinity and never found it.
We did find a couple of interesting things. We were pretty tired and hot so we thought about going into this shop and seeing if it would help.
On the other hand, this billboard did not entice us to run and buy any Schweppes.
By the time we were done with that we were hot, sweaty, and tired. We caught the tour bus and went back to the hotel to cool off and rest.
Continued in next post.