Our first day in Barcelona was filled with lots of sightseeing! Since we arrived in Barcelona by 12:30pm, we had all day to explore the city! We rented an apartment this time in Barcelona instead of a hotel room and it was perfect! We were situated right in the city center on the famous street in Barcelona, La Rambla, and this gave us access to everything! Also our metro line (L3) connected easily to other main lines for the main sights such as, La Sagrada Familia and La Pedrera.
Before we had lunch we went to Plaça d’Espayna, which is a beautiful plaza situated exactly in the center of Barcelona. Unfortunately, our first try at Spanish tapas and paella was a complete disaster. We should’ve listened to our daughter and not tried the paella or tapas on La Rambla because it’s a main tourist area. Apparently that’s a rule of thumb all throughout Spain, that in the main cities such as, Madrid or Barcelona NEVER eat at the restaurants in the touristy areas because they are the worst and the most expensive.
After lunch we went to Palau Güell, which is a palace built by the genius Spanish/Catalan architect, Antoni Gaudí, for the Güell family. This palace was incredible! The best part of it was that we saw the palace everyday from our balcony window in our apartment! Gaudí’s architecture and design was like nothing that any of us had seen before! My daughter was more familiar with him because of his influence in Spanish architecture throughout the country. Once we left the palace we went to the Mercado de Sant Josep, which is a outdoor market in Barcelona. It reminded us a lot of the markets in Tehran, and the fruit and vegetables were amazingly delicious. We had some freshly made fruit juice and bought some big, fat and juicy strawberries. If we spent any longer in the market, we would’ve lost the whole day walking around fruit, vegetable, meat and fish, so we decided to move on.
Since we bought a significant amount of food from the market we stopped by the apartment and left everything there. This was the beauty of having our own apartment! We took a nice walk to the Mirador de Colom, which is the official statue of Christopher Columbus, or as the Spanish say, Cristobol Colón. Fortunately for us it was right by the port and we continued our walk to the Plaça de Reil, which was Barcelona’s equivalent to Plaza Mayor in Madrid. Gaudí also built the lanterns in this plaza. As we continued to walk around Barcelona we ended up in Plaça de Jaume and saw the Barcelona Cathedral, which was gothic influenced. Luckily we got to see a live service at the cathedral and heard it performed in three languages: Spanish, Catalan and Latin.
The rest of the night we walked around Barcelona and did some shopping. When we got back to the apartment we got ready for a packed day the next day.
Ellie and Bahram Go to Spain 