Barcelona - Where Beer is Cheaper than Water!

Michael and I spent almost a week in Barcelona; we did so many things and took so many photos, so apologies for the huge blog post that is coming. We arrived fairly late in the afternoon and checked into our airbnb room, the woman whose room we were renting was Russian and spoke barely any English so communication was interesting but she was so nice it didn’t really matter too much! Our apartment was located a little out of town so we had A LOT of walking in store (because we both hate paying out the nose for public transport).

We decided to spend our afternoon walking up to a viewpoint I had read about on Spotted By Locals (a website where locals can log on and offer advice or ideas for different things to do in their city). It actually took us about an hour to walk there but we got some pretty cool views.

 Michael's favourite thing to do for any good view - panorama photo!

The view point called Bunker de la Rovira and is not very well known (there was barely anyone else there), it used to be a flak bunker during the Spanish Civil War but now it’s just used as a park, picnic venue and an awesome view point.

You can see pretty much the entire city of Barcelona, as usual the photos don't really do it justice but this is a pretty decent one I took of the Sagrada Familia (more on that later).

In the below photo on the top right you can kinda see the tree line going up to the look out point, this is where we walked up a long hill with a million stairs to get to the look out. 

After spending some time wandering around we eventually walked the hour or so back towards home and stopped to grab some dinner (this is where the title of this post comes from because Michael ordered a beer that was cheaper than my water!), we decided on somewhere close to the Agbar Tower. This is actually just an office building, which sounds pretty boring but it lights up at night and looking pretty amazing, making it a pretty famous building in Barcelona.

Day two was spent walking… and walking! By the end of the day we had easily covered 10km. First off we checked out the Christopher Columbus monument, which just happened to be on our way and is pretty self-explanatory. We then headed to the Arenas de Barcelona, this is actually an old bull fighting ring – unlike other cities in more southern area of Spain, bull fighting has been banned in Barcelona so all of the old bull fighting rings are no longer in use. They turned this one into a huge shopping centre – although you can’t tell from the outside.

From here we walked towards the Parc de Montjuic and the Magic Fountains of Montjuic (Font Magica de Montjuic)! I was super excited to see these light up at night so we planned to come back later once it had gotten dark. 

For now we explored this really cool area and walked up all the stairs to the top of the Palau Nacional (National Palace) and the Museum Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (in front of which the fountains are located), which offered pretty amazing views of the magic fountains and this particular area of the city!

Michael and I in front of the the Museum Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.

View from in front of the Museum Nacional d’Art de Catalunya - the moment where I really felt like I was in the Barcelona I had seen all the pictures of!

Next stop was the 1992 Olympic Stadium, believe it or not you can just waltz right in there and it doesn’t cost anything – which is really weird because in Europe they love to make money off anything slightly related to tourism. It was pretty hard to imagine this had actually been an Olympic Stadium, even if it was 22 years ago, because the MCG is so much bigger. Still, it was pretty cool popping in to check out a place where the Olympics had once been. 

There were all kinds of athletes foot prints outside the stadium (and a museum), as you can see Michael only has slightly smaller feet than Pau Gasol (Spanish NBA player).

Our next stop for the day was Monjuic Mountain and Castell (castle) you can actually take a funicular all the way to the top but since we were really far away from the location of the funicular station we decided to walk all the way up to the top, I think this also took us about an hour and was all up hill – we were definitely getting some exercise in!

At the top of Monjuic there is an old castle, you have to pay to go inside so we didn’t bother but we did wander around and check out the views. I was surprised to find that the views we saw on our first night at Bunker de la Rovira were actually far better than the ones from here. This was strange to me as Monjiuc is extremely well know especially for tourists, while Bunker de la Rovira seemed to barely register on anyones radar – turned out to be a pretty good find. 

We relaxed at the top of Montjiuc and just watched tourists come and go for a while, it was about 30 degrees so cold beer and icy poles were, of course, essential.

Later that night, after dinner, we headed to the Magic Fountains again, ohhhhh! I was really excited to see them do their thing, especially when it got dark! Below are some pictures of the fountains doing there thing while it was still light (9pm!)

They were pretty amazing; the colours looked awesome in the dark! They pretty much play continuously from 9pm-11:30pm, pretty cool for something that is free! The fountains play along to all kinds of music, it started off as currrent radio music (in English because everyone here listens to American music) and then slowly turned to classical songs. 

Above: fountains with the Palau Nacional and the Museum Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in the background!

Below: I tried to make cool silhouettes in front of the fountains, it kinda worked...

We took SOOO many photos of the fountains - it was hard not too, they looked so amazing!

I took a little video, sorry the quality doesn’t come up very well on this blog site…

We spent one day in Barcelona pretty much being Gaudi lovers. Gaudi was a Spanish architect who lived in Barcelona and practically designed half of the city, well that’s not entirely true but he did design a lot of the famous monuments and sites located in the city. Anything Gaudi is HUGE for tourists, people get right into his buildings – it costs around 18 euro to go inside of one… no thanks!

First we headed to Casa Batllo (above) – this is a pretty cool building. It has so many details and tiny intricate components to its design. It was also kinda gothic-ish enough though it’s colourful. There were huge crowds of people lining up to go inside and up onto the roof! We planned on heading to another Gaudi building, Casa Mila, but it was under construction so we didn’t really see anything, which is a shame cos it looks like a cool building in the pictures I’ve seen and probably more famous. 

Finally we were headed to THE most major tourist attraction in the whole of Barcelona, the Sagrada Familiar (above). This church is also designed by Gaudi and has been in the process of being built for 100+ years (since 1882) and is still not finished – proof that construction workers really do just eat pies and drink coffee all day. We did read somewhere that it is estimated to be finished by 2026 (or thereabouts, here is a link to a video that shows what it will look like, pretty cool: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/spain/10343792/How-Gaudis-finished-Sagrada-Familia-cathedral-in-Barcelona-will-look.html).

We booked our tickets online to avoid the long queues for tickets – they set us back quite a bit, definitely one of the most expensive attractions we had seen while in Europe but according to everyone we have meet who has visisted Barcelona, this is a must see!

The outside itself is pretty impressive, super gothic and insanely intricate (I don't know why these photos are such poor quality...)

The inside was pretty gorgeous, as you can see; there were hundreds of panes of stained glass so the whole church was filled with different colours. This is technically a church but it’s more like a huge tourist attraction then a place for people to pray but the continued building of the Sagrada Familiar relies solely on tourists visiting so I guess there is no other option!

The roof of this place is insane, it’s all three dimensional and there were giant pillars everywhere, on crazy angles, meeting up with the designs on the roof. This is easily the most impressive and out there church I have visited so far in Europe, it’s hard to know what to look at as there is so much happening all around you!

After spending some time trying to look at everything in the church we headed up to one of the towers, they only let a certain amount of visitors up to the towers per hour so we had to book a time slot online. We went up in an elevator full of people and then all tried to crowd in to check out one little view spot and then you basically walk back to the elevator. We thought that we pretty fast and not really worth the money so we decided to walk 20 stories down instead of taking the elevator. I am glad we did because we got better views on the way down and it added to the experience.

Photos of Michael and I at a view point about 3 stories down from the lift - I made the mistake of looking down and it totally freaked me out - you can tell from Michael's photos there are holes in this balcony and I hate heights!

As you can see we walked down crazy narrow and steep stairs, I was not a huge fan as heights are not really my thing!

Our final Gaudi stop was Park Guell – originally this was designed by Gaudi )and commissioned by a count called Guell) to be a fancy and exclusive estate for the richest people in Barcelona. However, although parts of it were designed and built it was never completed as the location was too far away and the transport links were not yet built. This doesn’t surprise me because even today it is pretty far away from everything (about an hour walk for us haha) and there are very limited transport options unless you want to make multiple connections.

Of course, as with all things Gaudi, you have to pay to go in! I really wanted to check it out though so we did! The two buildings in the above photo (bottom left) were originally supposed to be located at the entry for the caretakers of the estate but they are now a museum and gift shop.

This beautifully tiled balcony features on heaps of postcards and tourism advertisments regarding Barcelona - it was kind of like a scene from Alice in Wonderland, Michael thinks Gaudi was trying to take the piss haha!

This was originally designed as the entrace to the fancy estate (below), Guell Park is the only park in Barcelona spelt with the English spelling of Park instead of the Catalonian version (Parc), which was supposedly intended to make it more 'upmarket' and targeted at fancy English speakers!

Tonight Spain was playing their first game in the world cup (as was Australia), so we headed to an Irish bar in the centre of Barcelona to watch the game on the big screen. The bar was packed with soccer fans; surprisingly a lot of people were supporting the Netherlands!

We had a pretty good night, we got to order food similar to back home and off an English menu, which is always a bonus AND I got to drink 3.5 euro cocktails all night – winning! They actually had Fosters on tap, which we always think is funny!

As we all know Spain got smashed, much to the locals dislike!

Downtown/central Barcelona was our next stop!

We went to the Boqueria market, which is far and away the best market I have visited in Europe! It was amazing, full of fresh fruit, juices, chocolates, nuts and any other fresh food you can imagine!

We spent a fair amount of time just wandering through the market and drolling over all the amazing food and drink that was on offer - we eventually had lunch here (and several different fresh juices, strawberry and cocnut = YUM!)

Side note: Europeans are huge fans of the Smurfs! As you can see in the below photo they even have Smurf characters in their ice cream!

We spent a lot of the day walking around the Gothic Quarter of Barelona (every city seems to have an old town...), below is a photo of Michael at a Plaza in the Gothic Quarter. 

Since I am a HUGE chocolate fan I couldn't resist a visit to the Museum of Chocolate! Our entry tickets were chocolate bars which really excited me! There were a bunch of different chocolate sculptures - apparently this is a big thing in Spain!

We also checked out Ciutadella Park (below on the left), this fountain was (in my opinion) one of the most beautiful things we had seen in Barcelona! I loved it, totally gorgeous! The picture on the right is Barcelona's version of the Arc de Triomf (spent differently)

Another photo of the fountains in Ciutadella Park - gorgeous!

And of course some photos of me in the same locations, sorry again for the poor quality, I don't know what my app is doing...

While we were in Barcelona we discovered what I thought was one of the most amazing brunch spots so I thought it deserved a mention, brunch is not really a thing in Europe so this was a pretty unique spot! Granja Petitbo only served fresh and mainly organic meals and really reminded me of home which is probably why I liked it so much (and why we went there twice in one week!)

"Years ago when I was backpacking across Western Europe, I was just outside Barcelona, hiking in the foothills of Mount Tibidabo..." - Friends lovers will know this quote but for those of you who haven't watched the entire series of Friends ten times over like me, here is a link to this particular scene so you know what I'm talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HguzO9KmHBU.

The point I am getting to is that Michael and I paid a visit to the famout Mount Tibidabo - in part because we knew it from Friends and wanted to visit a place made famous by our favourite sitcom.

We took two trains, a blue tram and a fenicular to get to the top!

It was worth the trip. The views were amazing. 

At the top of Mount Tibidabo there is a huge old church with a giant Jesus statue on the top (having giant Jesus statues seems to be a thing in Europe), an old amusement park and some viewing platforms. 

We didn't actually visit the amusement park but it was so old school (100 years old) and very cool! There were heaps of rides that included amazing views!

Another of Michael's panorama photos!

I loved the old ferris wheel that looks over the whole city! I loved the top of Mount Tibidabo, it was kind of a magical land and felt like we were in another time with the old amusement park and church! We spent a fair amount of time admiring the views and watching people scream on the rides haha!

We even managed to sneak in a drink with a view (bottom photo on the left).

All in all we had an amazing time in Barcelona! I haven't been a huge fan of many of the bigger cities in Europe but this has been one of my favourites! Especially our visits to the amazing market and Mount Tibidabo! Oh and the fountains... and Park Guell! In other words we had so many fun things to see and do it would have been hard not to enjoy this incredible city!