Barcelona Day 3

Our third day in Barcelona started out with cloudy skies, but it wasn't raining. Given that the weather was the best we'd seen so far, we decided to head out of town on one of two day trips that our friends had recommended. Earlier in the week at a visit to the tourism information center, the lady told us that one of the trips, Montserrat, had been closed due to snow. So we decided to check and see if would be open on this particular day and it was. Montserrat is a monastery built on the top of a mountain, offering very nice views of the surrounding country side as well as an impressive church.

So we bought tickets for the train out there and the cable car to take us to the mountain, and headed right down to the train station to catch our train. The trip is about an hour and a half or so out of Barcelona, and the cable car was right by the train station when you get there. On our way, we met a newly married couple from the states who sat across from us on the train who were quite nice. They were honeymooning in Spain over Christmas. We chatted with them most of the way there.

The weather didn't hold out for us, unfortunately. When we got off the train, the drizzly rain had already started up, and mist was starting to rise up around the mountain. Oops. Oh well, too late to turn back! So we boarded the cable car and were quickly whisked up to the top of the mountain. By the time we made it to the top, it had started to seriously rain, and the growing mist was making it hard to see anything from the top of the mountain. Doh!

We walked around a bit in the rain, before deciding to stop at the cafeteria there for a quick bite to eat hoping that the rain might stop. That was a bit optimistic, and it didn't work, but it was good to get a bit to eat anyways. So from there we headed over to check out the church itself. While the mist was unfortunate for the views, the positive benefit was the area was extremely peaceful. It made experiencing the church and its surrounding area that much more special. Its kind of hard to describe, but because there weren't that many people around, and the mist reduced the visual distractions, it made the experience more intimate (if that's the right word).

So we wandered around the church and the surrounding area and took in the peace and quiet. Some of the pictures turned out great as well, so I'm pretty excited about sharing those when I finally get around to it.

We headed back to the cable car and took that back to the train station and headed back to Barcelona. We might've not gotten the weather we wanted, but we thought we had a good day regardless!

For dinner, we decided to consult wikitravel again, and ended up at an Indonesian restaurant called Betawi. Our waiter was almost overly helpful in helping us get our meal, but it didn't take long before we were enjoying satay chicken skewers and spicy prawns.

Up next, another day trip to Figueres to see the Dali museum.

Morgan

Barcelona Day 2

Our second day was drizzly again, but we weren't going to let that stop us. After having our hotel breakfast, we headed out and caught the metro in the general direction of Park Güell. Remember that Gaudí guy I mentioned in the last post? Yeah, he was at work again, this time on a giant public park with large gingerbread-looking houses at the main gates, big staircases with mosaic tiled sides, a large mosaic lizard, a large terrace with mosaic tile seating, and underneath a large shelter with columns and mosaic tiled ceilings. Seriously, this place was full of wonders. Outside of this specific area, there was several sheltered walkways with built with arched supports that, well, I find really hard to describe. They're just cool!

So Diane and I spent a few hours walking around in the rain, discovering many of the little details of this amazing art and architectural installation. The park is quite extensive, and we wandered a lot taking pictures. Despite the weather, tourists were out in droves, but everyone waited their turn for a picture with the lizard, and it was a pretty nice atmosphere. I wonder what the park was like in good weather! On our way back out, we climbed to the top of a 3-cross monument, which also offered a nice view of the surrounding cityscape.

The next destination we had was back to La Sagrada Família, which we got to by the metro. This time we were going to take the tour, so we got ourselves the audio guide and headed inside. I was very glad we did get the audio guide, because it spent a bunch of time walking us through the various features of the church and some of the symbolism that Gaudí was going for in the incredibly ornate artwork. The church has been under construction for over a hundred years, and the audio guide claimed that they projected it to be done in another two decades. I don't know about that ... despite its already impressive appearance and structure, the final plans still call for something like 7 additional towers to be built. Maybe they know how long it'll take, but I suspect they've got a long ways to go.

Still, it is a fascinating place. Inside the church, giant columns push vaulted ceilings extremely high, and then branch out resembling trees. The ceiling itself looks like large leaves to these trees, which gives you the unsettling feeling of being in some sort of stone forest. The columns themselves start as 8 pointed stars at the bottom and gradually double the number of points until they become almost circles at the top. It is going to be one crazy awesome place to go see when it is all done. I think we'll have to make a point of going back when it is all done just to see it all. Hopefully it doesn't take another hundred years!

After finishing the tour, the cold damp was starting to get to us, so we headed back to our hotel where we warmed up and washed up and once again took up the hunt for a place for dinner. We ended up choosing a place called Carmelitas, which we found on wikitravel. For anyone interested in checking out a city and who need some advice, wikitravel is a really good default place to look. It really hasn't let us down so far, and we used it a lot on this trip.

At any rate, we waited around until 8:00 which was when the restaurant opened (the restaurants open late in Barcelona, and the clubs stay open real late, from what I understand). The restaurant was quiet, but the waiters were friendly so we sat down and enjoyed quite an enjoyable meal. At this dinner, I learned that Entrecôte is a particular cut of beef ... which in this case was quite delicious. Diane's duck confit was also entirely too delicious. As was our wine, and dessert! Let's just say we ate well.

Up next, our first day trip out of Barcelona ... which was perhaps not the greatest idea, but cool nonetheless.

Morgan

Barcelona: Day 1

As some of you may already know, Diane and I were headed to Barcelona over Christmas this year. Why Barcelona? Well, we're trying to get a little more Europe traveling in - something that has been a bit tough this year with a bunch of the time off I took for two trips home. We've certainly done a lot of sightseeing, but a lot of that has been in Ireland. So we basically want to see a lot of Europe over the next year, and didn't really care where we started. Our hunt for a place to go over Christmas, then, was basically looking at Aer Lingus' site to see what was cheap. Barcelona was on that list.

We headed out on the 20th of December, with our flight leaving in the early evening. The trip started out a bit slowly, as we arrived at the airport on time only to find our flight had been delayed an hour. Oh well.

The Barcelona airport is located conveniently pretty close to the city, and its well connected to city center by train. So we hopped on the train and soon found ourselves on La Rambla (a large pedestrian walkway in the heart of the city) by Liceu metro station looking for our hotel. But like I often do, I probably looked confused as I got out of the metro station trying to get my bearings. A random passerby saw my confusion and asked if I needed help ... in Chinese?! Umm, were we really in Spain?

My Mandarin is awfully rusty, despite several years in grade school. Nevertheless, I was able to stumble through a response, and the lady helped point out our way. So, there ya go - my little bit of Mandarin was useful in a place I did not expect. Crazy!

Unfortunately for our plan to go to a warmer destination, Barcelona was on the tail-end of a cold snap, so it was pretty cold the night we arrived. Not only that, the forecast for the week was rain, rain and more rain. Ewww! Oh well, we're hardy Canadians - we can handle it!

Our first day plan was to wander a little bit to get our bearings in Barcelona. It was a bit cold and rainy, but we hiked out on to La Rambla and took in the scene. The area is quite wide, with several retail stands and newstands along it. As we wandered along, we saw a bunch of stands that were selling ... pets! That's right, rabbits, hamsters, birds, fish, turtles ... there was an amazing selection of pets for sale! I dunno why, but even in the rain, they were out there selling pets!

Along the way we found our way to La Bocqueria market. What a place! The area is crowded with stalls selling anything from fresh fruits and vegetables to candy to fresh meat and fish. What's particularly amazing about the market though is the display of the various items for purchase! Fruits were neatly stacked in piles a couple feet high, candy and nuts were displayed in boxes stretching vertically deep into the stall. Nearly every stall had an artful and space conscious way of displaying whatever goods it was that they were selling. It was a wonderful place ... and it was open basically every day (well, it was closed Christmas day and the day after). Simply awesome.

We wandered up and down La Rambla getting an idea what was in the area. One of our friends who has hung out in Barcelona a few times suggested a few places for us to go relax and find some food. So we found a little square that he suggested and decided to get out of the rain for a little while to have a bit of lunch, tapas style.

After lunch, we wandered down the harbour, but the rain started to come harder and that dissuaded us from that plan, so we wandered back up to the other end of La Rambla and found the tourist information center looking for some advice on what we should try to see -- preferably something inside.

The first thing they suggested was to check out Casa Batlló just a little ways north from where we were. So we took that suggestion and headed in that direction. The house there was designed by Antoni Gaudí - a man whose work we were going to become quite familiar with over the next couple days.

Anyways, this particular house was quite striking from the front. Its facade curves in interesting ways, and colourful tiles give it a look I've never seen in a house before. So we decided to take the tour inside, and were well rewarded with some awfully hard to describe scenes. The house had several wonderful rooms that meshed form and function in a very pleasing manner. Quite an enjoyable time -- and I'll really have to get to those photos so I can share what we saw.

Upon exiting that tour, we wandered over to La Sagrada Família - a church that is still under construction over a hundred years since they started. Gaudí was brought on to the project, and it became a massive and incredible piece of architecture and art. We were pretty tired though, so we decided to pass on the tour until later on in the week. So instead we headed back to our hotel room to dry off and look for a place to eat.

Another friend who had recently been in Barcelona had recommended a couple of restaurants to eat at. One of them was highly regarded on the internet as well, so we tried to go for that. Well, when we showed up there it was closed and from what we saw on the door, it opened at 9:00, but it was only 7:30! Eeep! Well it wasn't raining so hard, so we walked down to the harbour and walked around that area for awhile. It was quite a nice evening, but we were hungry so we returned to the restaurant and it was still closed. But on closer inspection, a sign higher up said they were actually closed for the whole holidays. Oops!

So instead we walked back up the street and went to a tapas restaurant that looked pretty busy. Turns out it was a pretty good choice! We got ourselves a lovely bottle of wine, and had several nice dishes, including a very nice roasted lamb dish that Diane picked out. Mmmm.

We wandered back to our hotel by way of the metro -- which, by the way, is awesome in Barcelona. I am entirely jealous of cities with awesome metro systems. It was pretty cheap (with a T-10 pass, it was €0.77 a trip anywhere in the city), and the trains ran so frequently that there was rarely more than a couple minute wait for a train. I think the longest we ever waited for a train was 5 minutes, and that was ten o'clock in the evening on boxing day.

So that was our first day in Barcelona. Hopefully I'll get through the other days in the next few days here!

Morgan

It's COLD back home!

Once again this year, we are happy NOT to be going home for the holidays. The last cold snap in Edmonton bottomed out at -46. It doesn't even really matter Celcius or Farenheit at this point. It's only positive in kelvin. So, our condolences to all the folks at home. We've had fun at the epic company Christmas party and good weather for travelling, and it's off to Barcelona for Christmas!

Happy Christmukkah to those in warm places and cold!

Diane

Oslo, Norway!

A couple months ago, Diane and I had started planning our trip to Barcelona, and I had a bunch of travel sites open. While I was doing that, I re-discovered http://www.skyscanner.net/, which has improved a great deal since I last used it. One cool thing it can do is you don't have to search for the from or to dates -- you can ask it to look for cheap flights departing from city X over the next month, or in March or whatever. So when I found this feature, I tried it out, and promptly found a €16 deal for two seats to Oslo and back with Ryanair. Wow! Of course, after all the booking fees, that ballooned up to ... €36 for the two round trip tickets. Oh well, I'll take that! So I took the day off work on Friday and Diane and I wandered over to the airport for our Friday afternoon flight. The flight, in Ryanair style, landed in an out-of-the-way airport called Torp about an hour and a half or so from Oslo. From there, we caught a bus to Oslo.

When we were looking for accommodation, we quickly found out that Oslo is one of the world's most expensive cities in the world. Hotels were easily running into the €175-€200/night range, and we weren't exactly thrilled at the idea of spending that much. Eventually, we found a listing for the MS Innvik, which is a ship that's been converted to a theater and bed and breakfast. The boat is moored right in the city center across from the Oslo Opera House, which turned out to be a great location. So we spent the weekend in Norway on a boat!

Saturday was bright and beautiful weather-wise. We took a bit of a walk around the harbour and eventually made our way to the tourist information center. The lady there informed us that we should take advantage of the good weather since it had been cloudy and raining for the last 3 weeks! Guess we lucked out on the weather thing! We picked up Oslo passes at the tourist center which turned out to be a pretty good deal. The pass got us free use of the city's trams, subways, and buses as well as free entry into a couple dozen museums/other attractions.

It being beautiful out though, we decided to not activate our passes (which were good for 24 hours) until later on and instead walked over to the Vigeland Scuplture park. The park is filled with 212 statues originally carved by Gustav Vigeland (although the statues were made by other people based on the sculptures that Vigeland had made). It's a pretty impressive area. Some of the sculpture were pretty amazing, although I do totally remember being impressed by the brick mosaic patio around this fountain (which actually wasn't turned on for the winter).

Next up, we wandered around the Vigeland museum which had a lot of the original sculptures that the statues in the park were made from. Following that, we headed to what is essentially museum central in Oslo. There we first went into the Oslo Folk Museum at the recommendation of the tourist information lady. The museum was a huge area and kind of resembled a Norwegian version of fort edmonton park. They had a bunch of old buildings from various eras, and it was pretty cool wandering around looking at all the buildings on stilts.

It was starting to get a little late so we wandered on to the Viking museum without completely exploring the folk museum. The Viking museum is pretty small, so it was pretty quick to walk through and admire the three big viking boats they had on display.

Next up, we walked over to a small area where there are three separate museums. It was after 3:00 when we got over there and we discovered that the Kon-Tiki museum had already closed, and both the Fram museum and the Norwegian Maritime museum closed at 4:00. So we had some work to do!

The Fram museum was pretty cool -- the museum itself was a giant A-frame building which houses the entire ship that made several polar expeditions -- to both poles. Not only that, you can go up and actually walk through the boat's interior, much of which is still intact. A pretty nice experience!

The Norwegian Maritime museum didn't have a huge amount of interesting things for me, but it was good to walk around it. Definitely good to leave to the end of the day where we could hurry through and then leave. The sun was setting as we left the museum so we stayed by the coast there to take some photos -- some of which I think turned out pretty well. Not too sure when I'll get those photos up, but hopefully not too long.

Having done a lot of walking and a lot of museuming, we returned to the city center to find something to eat. One thing we didn't really find on the trip was any sort of traditional Norwegian food. The places we were at seemed to be populated with Italian and Indian and other food, but we didn't really see anything traditional :/ Oh wells. So we stopped in at an Italian place which wasn't too bad. After having a nice dinner we headed back to our boat to enjoy the evening atmosphere therein.

The boat's common room was the only place where we could get internet, which was a good thing since there was lots of activity in the common room. There was a bar (although the beer they were serving wasn't amazing), and music and just some general fun times. Some dancing even broke out later on in the evening. But we had had a long day so we turned in early.

The next day we were determined to use the remaining time on our Oslo passes, so we first went to visit Akershush fortress, which we didn't realize didn't open until the afternoon on Sundays. Whoops. The day was cloudy and rainy, but we weren't gonna let that stop us. We walked around the outside of the fortress a bit before heading off to the Nobel Institute, which is based in Oslo. They had some exhibits there, but it actually wasn't all that interesting, and was pretty pricey at that! Good thing it was free with our Oslo pass!

From there we caught the underground to the Eastern part of town to check out the natural history museum. That museum is actually several buildings spread across a pretty wide area, and there was a lot to see. So we wandered through the rained on plants for awhile before finding the geological building and then the zoological building. They sure had a lot of stuff to look at! Partway through my feet were sure tired of all the walking!!!

We had a couple hours to spare before our bus back to Torp airport, so we stopped in at another Italian place ... and this turned out to be a really good choice. I had a dish called "Turkish Risotto" which was absolutely delicious. Mmmm.

We picked up our luggage and spent a rather uneventful trip back to Dublin via bus and plane. So it was a pretty good trip! Next up, we're headed to Barcelona over Christmas, which is pretty exciting!

Morgan