Barcelona Day 1 – 22/03/2013

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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.

Barcelona Day 1 Image Gallery

Madrid Day 2 – 21/03/2013

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The second day in Madrid quite a few events happened. First we saw first hand the infamous Spanish protests that our daughter would constantly tell us about. This time it was about their health care. Unfortunately here in Spain, since the economy is not improving the government is starting to privatize their healthcare and the Spanish citizens are being required to pay for some benefits that have always been free. Living in Canada for 11 years, I understand why they would be protesting for this right. Healthcare is important, actually its a human right and when the state takes it away its taking away a vital and important right.

Since this isn’t a political blog, and I don’t intend on making it political either, after we saw the protest in Puerta de Sol, which is the city center of Madrid, we went and had some doner kebob, which is a Turkish dish. Apparently in Madrid, having Turkish food is equivalent to the late nights taco and burrito runs my daughter and her friends make when they get hungry in California. Nevertheless, the food was delicious and we enjoyed it a lot.

Later on that night we went back to the hotel and started getting ready for the week ahead of us in the different parts of Spain. We went back to my daughter’s apartment and left our extra luggage, which we figured out later that night that we should’ve taken a small carry on with us.

See you in Barcelona!

Madrid Day 2 Photo Album

First Night – 20/03/2013

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It’s the first night that we are here in Madrid visiting our daughter who is studying abroad here for a year, and it has already been quite an interesting and fun first day. Our daughter didn’t find us for about 30 minutes because she went to the wrong terminal, which is hilarious but we thought she forgot we were coming today. When we finally saw her it was like she never left California.

We took the taxi to our hotel, because we had one suitcase just full of all the food she wanted us to bring to Madrid and we had to take the taxi because we had way too much to take on the metro. When we finally got to the hotel, we relaxed in our comfortable family suite room and had some left over chelo-kabob, which was like Christmas for our daughter. After we had dinner, we took a stroll outside and saw Madrid at night.

It was much different than any other city I’ve been to before in Europe. The architecture was beautiful and everything that I expected Spain to look like, actually more than I expected. We took a mini trip to my daughter’s apartment, which is currently under construction due to a water leakage, did some grocery shopping and came back to our hotel to call it a night.

Well, tomorrow we are buying our train tickets to Barcelona, Granada, Sevilla, and Cordoba, which is a great Spain tour.