Friday, 10/7 - Lloret de Mar, Spain

Woke up shivering this morning. Apparently, all the rooms at this hotel come with twin beds, which would be tolerable if they had provided adequate blankets. Argh. Memories of the inferno hotel in Glasgow are floating deliciously through my head...

But we had things to do. First on the agenda was breakfast; turns out there was a little boardwalk-style shopping area behind the hotel, where we found a café that served these awesome chocolate croissants. Gotta love a country in which chocolate is practically a national treasure! Also behind the hotel was a small Catalunian chapel, and I had to grab a few pictures before we moved on. That style is like nothing else I've seen in Europe; bright colors, polished tiles... looks a lot like something I'd put on the wall at home.

Next on the agenda was to find the car and head toward Barcelona. That turned out to be a slow process, mostly because the signage in Spain is almost completely useless to the tourist. For example, the signs on roads coming out of a roundabout may not be visible until AFTER you've had to turn on that road. This results-in our case, anyway-in a lot of U-turns, and it took until almost 1pm to find a place to catch a train into the Barcelona city center (driving there is sort of like driving to central Manhattan-not worth the trouble). Once we found it, however, the remainder of the trip was smooth, and it was fun to speed along the coast, often within a stone's throw of the water's edge.

Arriving in Barcelona, we transferred to the Metro (subway), and found the Sagrada Familia cathedral. This is the famous gothic cathedral designed by Gaudi, and it lived up to its billing in a big way; the art that covered it was nothing short of amazing. We walked around the cathedral (it takes up about a city block), shooting pictures along the way. Most intriguing to me was the gargoyles; they came in all shapes, including animals such as frogs, lizards, serpents, and snails. Lunch came next at a café across from the cathedral, and consisted of a very decent paella (seasoned rice and vegetables baked with chicken or shrimp in a metal pan). It was fun to sit there and people-watch-we were very close to the metro station and saw people ranging from the most jaded tourists to Spanish schoolkids.

Hopping back on the metro, our next stop was Las Ramblas Avenue, which is sort of a "Tourist Central" in Barcelona. They say that if you get pickpocketed anywhere in Europe, it will most likely happen here, and I can see how that's true-there are about a gazillion people walking along this road (it's actually more like a very wide median that goes down the center of the avenue), and lots to distract oneself with. It started with bird vendors, then progressed to flower stalls, with street performers in all kinds of costumes along the way. Fortunately we didn't get pickpocketed, and before turning back toward the metro that evening we stopped for dinner... at an Indian restaurant. Leave it to us to eat Indian in whatever country we end up in.

This took us up to our witching hour, and it was time to hit the metro back to the regional train that would take us toward Lloret de Mar. After about a 45-minute wait in the underground station (we found we could doze by sitting back-to-back on a bench), we were on a train speeding back up the starlit coast. Back to the car and back to Hotel de Frigidare for the night. Still, a hot shower makes up for a lot.

More manaña,
Leanne