Our honeymoon got off to a great start when I managed to tear my toenail off while carrying my bag from the house to the car. I picked the bag up while I was twisted out of the door and hit my foot at exactly the wrong angle. This in no way set the tone for the rest of the trip, but it did mean I had to wear a bandage for a few days and be extra careful while walking around.
The honeymoon really started when we got on the red eye plane that was taking us to Europe. I hadn't traveled across the Atlantic Ocean for six years, so getting free food on the plane - both dinner and breakfast - was a nice surprise. It was less nice, and really should have been a sign of things to come, when they weighed our carry on luggage in addition to our checked luggage. Thankfully everything was under the weight limit and there were no problems getting on the plane. We didn't even have to go through customs, which was surprising. We'd even allowed for extra time for that, which meant we ended up with a bunch of time to kill in the airport.
After a seven hour flight, during which I watched The Book Thief and largely failed to get any sleep, we landed in Brussels, where we got our passports stamped and awaited the second leg of our journey to Barcelona. The Brussels airport was under construction, which meant that we had to take a surprisingly long bus ride from our gate to the plane, which we hadn't expected. But that was made up for by the fact that we somehow got bumped into Economy Plus on the second flight. Not only did we get extra legroom, we got free hot pockets and free soft drinks on the second flight. (nothing is free on planes in Europe, including water. This became a theme.)
We finally landed in Barcelona around 3 in the afternoon, got some currency (pro-tip - try not to do this at airports) and took a taxi to the hotel. The hotel room had a number of surprises that we didn't expect. A room key was required to turn on the lights in the room, which appears to be part of a Green initiative in the EU. It took us a while to figure out why the lights weren't turning on. We were also surprised by the lack of shower curtain (how do Europeans manage to not get water ALL OVER the bathroom?) and Kevin was endlessly confused by the bidet.
Once we'd settled into the hotel, there was plenty of daylight left, so we went out to explore the city. Our hotel was just north of downtown, which made it really easy to walk everywhere we wanted to go. We headed over to the Plaza Catalunya and wandered down La Rambla towards the ocean.
We'd been really excited about La Rambla, hearing that it was one of the must-sees in Barcelona with lots of shops. And while we'd been expecting local artisan crafts, something like a street fair, what we got was stores like H&M and Gucci. On top of that, the street was as crowded as Times Square, so the entire thing was a bit of a let down. Luckily, Kevin had remembered that there was a local meat market near La Rambla and we managed to spot it. Wandering through that was a lot of fun, especially seeing all the pig and goat legs and whole rabbits and fish. It would be nice if there was such an extensive meat market closer to home, and it was a shame that we couldn't buy anything there, not having any way to cook it.
Eventually we reached the ocean, which we sat by and admired for a while. Then we decided to head back to the hotel through the winding alleys of the Gothic Quarter. I could spend forever in the Gothic Quarter. The buildings are all stone and incredibly old. The streets are largely too narrow for cars. And there are random cafes and shops everywhere you turn. We eventually picked a restaurant that was nothing more than a few tables (well, barrels with stools) in an alley and got some tapas and half a liter of wine. Then we wandered back to the hotel, stopping for some sangria on the way, and finally made it up to the rooftop, pool side bar of the hotel, where the cheapest thing on the menu was a bottle of champagne. We drank it and played cribbage, trying to stay awake as long as possible.
Unfortunately, we still woke up around 6 the next morning, which was rough, since nothing even opened, let alone served breakfast, until 8. It didn't help that it was Sunday.
For our only full day in Barcelona, the plan was to wander around the Cituadella Park, get some lunch, hang out at the beach in the afternoon, and finish with a seafood dinner at the park. But we greatly overestimated how long all of this would take. After finding breakfast, we wandered through the park, got lost on a random, smelly street next to the train tracks, and still made it to the beach by 9:30. Once there we spread out a towel and Kevin read while I took a nap - I still hadn't had any caffeine by this point.
When I woke up we wandered over to the pier to get pizza, then Kevin rented a bike for a few hours and I found a cafe to sit in with my book and a pot of tea. After that we got a liter of sangria, which is practically cheaper than water in Barcelona, and by the way I hated having to pay for water everywhere we went. It's interesting the things you take for granted, like freely available drinking water everywhere. Also I'm used to sangria being super sweet in the states, so I tend not to like it. But in Barcelona it had a sharpness that made it much more palatable. Then we decided to go to the zoo, couldn't find it, and ended up finding a patch of grass to play cribbage and nap in until dinner.
Dinner was mostly fantastic. We got a bunch of seafood appetizers: mussels, prawns, salmon, and calamari. Kevin ordered a fantastic lobster dish, which made up for my less-than-stellar tuna. It was probably fine, but I usually eat my tuna rare, if not barely seared, and this steak came out well done. On the way home we stopped for cheap mojitos, then we stopped for cheaper mojitos, and finally got back to our hotel room.
On Monday we packed up and stored our suitcases at the front desk. Breakfast was a lot easier to find that morning - I had a ham sandwich. Ham sandwiches are infinitely more delicious in Spain than they are in America. Both the bread and the pigs are superior. Then we headed north to check out the fancy shopping district and La Sagrada Familia. Sadly the line to get into La Sagrada Familia wrapped around the block. We should have been expecting that, but we didn't, and we decided that we didn't want to stand in it. It was still cool to see the cathedral from the outside, though.
We decided to get paella for lunch, because I was convinced Kevin would love it (he did), but it was weirdly hard to find. All morning long there was a paella shop on every street corner, but as soon as we decided to get some all we could find were sandwich shops. I guess we were walking in the wrong direction. We did eventually find a place with paella and sangria, and it was all delicious.
We'd scheduled massages at a spa around the corner from our hotel for the early afternoon, but when we arrived it became apparent that the place was not what we'd had in mind. There was a bit of a communication barrier, but after the words "erotic" and "happy ending" we pretty much hightailed it out of there. Instead we went back to the Gothic Quarter to wander a bit. This time I was more properly dressed (a dress instead of shorts) and they let me into the cathedral. After that it was time to say good bye to Barcelona and head to the train station.
All in all Barcelona was a wonderful city. I fell in love with it a little bit. It was nice to be so close to both the ocean and the mountains. It was an incredibly clean city, the way DC is clean, with people out sweeping and picking up litter all over the place. There were also these grand avenues every few blocks that intersected at these great plazas. Each avenue had three lanes of traffic surrounded by walking and biking paths, with bus and taxi lanes outside those and then the sidewalks. Once you'd figured those out, getting around the city was a breeze. I wish we'd had more time in Barcelona, and we'll definitely have to go back some day. We didn't come close to seeing everything I wanted to see.
The massage place! Ahh! Really made me laugh. We also ran into the same problem with the lights. And even once we figured out that the key card worked the electricity, we still often forgot during the daylight and couldn't figure out why our computers weren't holding a charge. Whoops!
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