Today's plan was fairly simple: jump on one of the city sightseeing bus tours - the kind that go on big loops around cities in the general vicinity of significant landmarks and you hop on and off where you choose - and then find somewhere on one of those routes to explore.
Of course it didn't quite work out that way - but when does it ever?
We made our way to Plaça de Catalunya - one of the big squares in Barcelona - and after working out that the buses for each route (Red and Blue) left from different sides of the square, got to the one we wanted and jumped on. It was quite early, so we were able to get prime spots on the top of the bus. And off we went.
We went all the way through the Blue route (the northern end of the city) and ended up back at Plaça de Catalunya where we dashed across the square and jumped onto the Red route bus and started off on our journey around the southern end of the city. Between the two routes we were able to see a lot of city landmarks that we weren't going to have time to get to - one of the reasons I quite like these bus tours; I've been on them in a lot of cities over the years.
Blue was better than Red, which got a bit slow and boring once we hit the harbour district - though I have to admit I might be a bit biased because it was on the Red route that I got crapped on (literally) by a passing seagull. Thankfully it only got on my shirt and arm and not anywhere else.
After we finished the Red it was time for lunch, so we set off in search of food. Well, food and bathrooms; there didn't seem to be many of the latter around, so we had to find one. We ended up at a quite small sandwich place and had some excellent food. Then it was time to jump back on the bus as we'd found what we wanted to do with the rest of our day.
That plan was to go to Park Güell, which is another site full of stuff by Antoni Gaudi, who I talked about in my post about La Sagrada Familia. Unfortunately, this plan was flawed; you need to have bought a ticket to enter (even though it's technically free - not sure how that works) and it had sold out before we got there without having bought tickets ourselves.
Very annoying. So, instead we walked up a lot of stairs (oh, I forgot to mention that to get to the entrance of the park you have to walk up a lot of stairs, so all in all we walked up a lot of stairs that afternoon) to get to a lookout.
After some research, we decided we'd go to the Picasso museum since we were planning to go there at some point anyway. It was also fairly close to where the bus finished up at, and would still be open for long enough for us to get all the way through after we'd gotten there.
The rest of the bus trip back to the city just dragged, but we didn't have much choice but to continue until it was done. Then we legged it to the Picasso museum - we had bought tickets online, but like so many sites it required us to pick an entrance time and we were getting very close to missing it. But we managed it okay - even though there are virtually no signs to indicate its whereabouts or the entrance, at least the way we came - and got in.
I'm not a huge Picasso fan, but this was very interesting and there was a lot of his early work - you can follow his journey from a more representational style to the one he's way more famous for and which I don't have the words to describe. Abstract, I guess.
After that was done we jumped on the metro to get back to our part of town (El Raval) and walked to a place I'd seen on the map and we'd decided to go in order to have something different from the Spanish tapas we'd had the last two nights - Mr Beer and Dr Fried, a (mostly) chicken place. And it was very good.
Another day done.
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