skipping ahead a bit

5/02 - Arrive in Barcelona

We left Israel early early early in the morning (had to get to the airport at 4:30am) on little sleep and flew to BCN. Five or so hours and a train+bus ride later, we were at our hostel Mambo Tango. Really cute place, the proprietor we met at the front desk is from Argentina, and she and a guy from Barcelona converted their home into the hostel a couple months ago. I think it must have been more like an apartment building, or they were minor royalty, because they can sleep 42 people here in comfort. We've signed up for their evening tapas, which we are looking forward to later.

So after we dropped our stuff off, instead of doing the sensible thing and and taking a nap, we went out to see what we could see. We started with La Rambla, a big street cutting through the old city from the port inwards. It boasts that it has the largest number of "human statues" in the world, and we saw quite a few. Basically it's kinda a tourist trap, but all along the street are beautiful historical buildings, and sidestreets that lead to places like Placa Reial (reminded us of what St. Mark's Square looks like -- at least, the Las Vegas version) and La Mercat de la Boqueria, a big street market with lots of fruit and meat stands all jumbled together. We saw whole sheep heads (skinned), Limor was grossed out by huge dangling cow tongues, and I'm pretty sure I took a picture of something's brain in a plastic takeaway box. Then we bought a bunch of bananas.

We were desperately hungry, so we basically bought the first thing under 5 euros, which of all things happened to be falafel in pita. It was tasty and filling (and with a name like "Maoz Falafel", probably Israeli) but immediately afterwards we found the same thing for half as much down the street. Oh well. Our impromptu picnic in Placa Reial was still delightful. Especially the sitting down part.

Then we headed toward the harbor area, and along the way saw more statue people (including a really great Alien) and Superman perched atop a building at the end of an alley (ended up being the Wax Museum). We got to the Mirador de Colom, which looked a lot like Trafalgar Square crossed with the statue of Admiral Nelson (from London). We think it was commemorating Columbus finding America, since there was a man atop the pillar pointing presumably towards said continent.

We took a short detour to figure out what these crazy giant hoops were, and continued a ways to see the cable car hub to Montjuic next to the World Trade Center complex, and a really large building which turned out to be the biggest boat I've ever seen.

We went back around to Port Vell and the ultra-modern boardwalk to the mirror-faced Mare Magnum shopping center. We watched people feeding the fish and took a short lie-down to rest our legs (also, because everybody else was doing it too). We wandered around the mall for a couple minutes just to see what Spanish consumerism is like, and continued to amble about the interesting architecture of the Port.

Very tired, we headed back up Para-lel Avenue to the hostel and saw a bunch of interesting graffiti and skateboarders along the way in several of the parks that spring up here and there. At the hostel, we took advantage of the water-conserving (yay) showers (yay too) and I sat down to write this very blog before we forgot what we did.

Side Note: typing this on a spanish keyboard with a missing 'o' key was incredibly difficult. It changed from the 's' key because I switched to Dvorak (as usual), so I think we might try just making a voice recording next time. Oh yeah, and I'll finish Israel later, I guess. I have some notes, now I just need time...