Spain, Day Eight: Barcelona

The last day! There was a half-marathon (or maybe a 10k?) past our hotel the last morning. These people were intense. We watched them while we ate our breakfast of meats and pastry.

In the grand tradition of my last five vacations, I was sick and kind of miserable by the end of this trip. We always plan for a low-key last day anyway, usually shopping and wandering in our favorite spots one more time. This square is at the heart of El Born and we walked through many times every day.

The Joan Miro museum is up on a hill overlooking town, with a funicular to the top. We walked a really long way to get over to the funicular station and discovered it's closed. Then we waited for a bus for a while with an increasingly large crowd of people, and then I used the taxi app and we took a private car to the top for 6 Euros instead. Way better!

The Miro museum was great. Like the Picasso museum, it was a progression through his life as an artist and had a lot of interesting stuff I hadn't seen before. The Miro exhibits I've seen elsewhere are all sort of the same, but there's a lot more to his work than I expected.

Ben pointed out that the floor in this place looks just like the St. Joe North Belt McDonald's.

The museum had great views of the city.

After the experience of these two museums in Barcelona, I've decided I like art museums mainly when they're a) modern and/pr contemporary or b) dedicated to a single artist. Wandering around endless halls of medieval Jesuses and Renaissance portraits is just not all that interesting.

After the museum, we walked all the way back down the hill and through town. This walk took us through some seedier parts of Barcelona - maybe the parts people are afraid of? - but it still felt basically fine. We went into a t-shirt shop we'd had our eye on for a while and then went back to the hotel so I could rest.

For dinner we headed straight back to Tapeo, the place from the night before - it was Sunday, so most things were closed, and we'd noticed specifically they'd be open. Tapeo is a gem!

I didn't have much specific interest in going to Barcelona before we bought the tickets, and now I wonder why - it's a great city. Spain is great!

Spain, Day Seven: Tarragona

There are a lot of smaller cities easily accessible from Barcelona. We picked Tarragona for a day trip because it was a direct train ride of a little more than an hour and has extensive Roman ruins near the sea. 

The day was perfect. Except for the one day of rain, we couldn't have asked for better weather on this trip.

The most impressive of the ruins is an amphitheatre, right next to the ocean.

The really interesting thing about this amphitheatre is that in the 800s (and again later in the middle ages), the people living in Tarragona built a Christian church in the middle of it. I love seeing how people throughout history have repurposed structures from earlier times. It's hard sometimes to remember that the United States is a brand new baby of a country, and that what we see as inevitable and enduring probably is not. (And thank god for that, President Trump.)

Here's some ruins of the church.

Here's Ben learning some information.

With a combo ticket you can go look at a bunch of other Roman stuff too. This big square building was originally a palace, but was used as a prison into the 20th century.

Nice views of the sea from the prison. We climbed a million steps to the top.

  

Tarragona is a regular town, too, of about 200,000 people. And of course there is a cathedral, located in an old city center.

The amphitheatre is actually located outside the ancient city's walls. The main street from the city to the theatre still exists.

From the tower you can see what remains of the ancient city walls. We really didn't intend to go down there and look at them in more detail, but we had a hard time determining how to get out of the complex.

It turned out to be pretty cool! In early modern Europe, Tarragonans tossed their trash into these Roman vaults beneath the city for convenience.

I didn't notice siesta in Barcelona, but you really see it in smaller towns. Mid-afternoon Tarragona was very quiet, with most things closed.

There was a big wedding letting out from the cathedral. The guests overall had surprisingly bad fashion sense.

Next to the Cathedral there was this little building with an open door into a beautiful courtyard. We went inside.

We kept expecting someone to come and yell at us, but nobody did. We couldn't really tell what this was even supposed to be! It might have been apartments. Maybe for church people?

Around here we came upon an energetic group of people in a square having some kind of get-together - we walked over to see what was going on but then noticed a bunch of signs saying things about how tourism was a pox on society! So we played it cool and tried to look Spanish.

Deserted!

This square was lined with sidewalk cafes and there were quite a few people having lunch.

We caught a late afternoon train back to Barcelona.

One problem with the unfamiliar eating schedule is that we kept getting into situations wherein we were starving and testy. This resulted in us popping into a touristy restaurant that Ben was extremely displeased with - we had a few bites of some things and then left in search of something better to do. El Xampanyet was closed but we remembered a good tapas bar just across the street, so we headed there and got a seat at the bar. This place (Tapeo) was great. Ben got sweetbreads.

A couple of American girls sitting next to me were eating this, so I asked them what it was - fish & chips with black garlic aioli - and ordered it too. Great decision!

Here's their leg. Per the waiter, they go through about two legs per week.

The night salvaged by good food, we went home and went to sleep.

Spain, Day Six: Barcelona

When we booked this trip, I only had the first few nights in Barcelona and the Monserrat hotel reserved. There are many vociferous negative opinions of Barcelona on the internet, and we decided to leave our options open in case we ended up hating it and wanting to go somewhere else. As it turns out, people on the internet are stupid and Barcelona is awesome. Before we left for Monserrat we re-booked the same hotel for the rest of the trip and went straight back to our old neighborhood. 

We only had one rainy day. We decided to get up and go straight to the Picasso Museum before it got crowded. We had tried to go once before, the day we arrived, but it was a madhouse and we were exhausted. This time it worked out great. The Picasso Museum is in El Born, only a few minutes walk from our hotel, inside several old medieval buildings that are strung together. One of the most important features of the Picasso Museum is that (TIP!) you can access the bathroom, which is in a courtyard next to the gift shop, without having a ticket. Good to note for future days of wandering around in the city.

The museum doesn't allow photography, so no pictures - but it was really fantastic. The concentration is mostly on Picasso's early life (spent in Barcelona) and development as an artist, which I thought would be boring but was actually fascinating. It turns out he was quite a good painter! Who knew!

After the museum I needed coffee so we popped into a little tapas bar just across the way. The guy also talked us into little pastries.

This was a really picturesque place!

When we got back to the hotel, I looked it up and discovered it's one of the most famous tapas bars in the city. Apparently it had opened only seconds before we arrived, because normally it's packed at all hours.

Revitalized with coffee and sugar, we set out to go to the Barcelona City history museum.

I don't mind a rainy day on a city vacation so much - it was nice to have the streets a little quieter.

This city museum was also amazing! It's built over the top of Roman ruins. There was a lot of really interesting stuff in there, and, just as importantly, almost no people.

The Roman ruins underneath Barcelona show clear evidence of what existed thousands of years ago - a winery, a fish sauce processor, shops, churches... These big vats were for wine.

As you leave, there is a beautiful, deserted great hall and chapel from medieval times. Why tourists are outside taking selfies on a park bench rather than seeing these amazing historic things is beyond me.

Still raining.

We found another tapas place to get a late lunch and hopefully wait out the rain. They had the fried eggplant with honey that we ate so much of in Andalucia.

We did a little more wandering in the rain but ultimately decided to go back to the hotel and relax for a little while. This is when we discovered the tapas bar from the morning - El Xampanyet - was wildly popular, so we hatched a plan to go back right when they opened after siesta for an early (you know, 7:30pm) dinner.

When we got there it was already packed. We snagged the last stand-up table and were soon joined by other patrons crowding around, including two Eastern European businessmen and an Austrian couple who split their time between Barcelona and Vienna. We ordered a few things and had a great time chatting with the Austrians. They love Barcelona and gave us several recommendations for various places to try.

The rain had passed and we wandered some more through El Born, stopping for ice cream before retiring for the night.

This was the best Barcelona day! Great from start to finish.