A sightseeing bus tour and the Picasso Museum

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.

It appears that there's a production of 'The Producers' on in Barcelona.

The view across Plaça de Catalunya.

The bus goes past La Sagrada Familia, so we got to see it while dry - unlike yesterday.

Our lunch. We also learned that getting your food in Spain can take a very long time - though, in their defence, they were understaffed.

The Picasso museum.

Dinner at Dr. Beer and Mr. Fried - chicken and waffles, a pulled chicken burger, and fries. With glasses of cava, which we found out is a quite nice sweet sparkling white wine.

La Sagrada Familia

We did go to La Sagrada Familia - Barcelona's famous cathedral - but before we got there we did a walking tour and wandered around the La Boqueria market.

The walking tour was excellent, hosted by a really experienced guy named Andy - like so many tour guides, he's originally from the UK. But unlike any I'd met before, he also had a degree in Art History. As a result, we got a very interesting and detailed account of a lot of relevant Barcelona history, as well as his insight into a whole lot of other relevant (and frequently amusing) stuff.

After that was done, we made away towards the La Boqueria market - and somewhere along the way it started raining. Only a little bit at first, but then it got very heavy. So, it was a good thing we had a market to wander around in for a few hours. We drank juice, ate empañadas and had a very good time.

Then it was time to get ourselves to La Sagrada Familia, which was far enough away that we had to take our first trip on the Barcelona metro system to get there.

Getting to Barcelona

Part 1: from a bench in Doha

I am beginning this post while sitting on a bench in the Doha airport, since we’ve got a few hours layover here, and there’s not a lot else to do other than browse the shops for things I’m neither interested in buying nor prepared to pay the prices for.

That I’ve been mostly awake for well over 24 hours hasn’t helped my sense of wellbeing. Our flight left Adelaide at 9.20pm, and I’d gotten up at a reasonable time in the morning; add on a thirteen and a half hour flight to that - I might have at best slept maybe two to three hours on the plane - and it means I’m feeling a little flat. And I’m looking down the barrel of another couple of hours here while we wait for our flight to Barcelona, which I think is about seven hours. I’m very much looking forward to getting to our first hotel and having a good lie down for a while before we do a bit of exploring.

But such is the way of travel to Europe if you’re coming from Australia, and I am required (if somewhat resentful) to acknowledge that, to get there I am obliged to spend a great deal of time on aeroplanes.

This trip, though, there is the novelty of an entirely new airport in a different country, since on all my previous trips I’d flown Emirates, which meant a stopover in Dubai. But considering that most airports are quite alike, this novelty did not last long.

It’s been four years since my last trip, so I can’t remember that much about the specifics of those Emirates flights - but it seems like Qatar are quite similar in most ways. But this plane was newer, which meant that all the bits and pieces (entertainment systems etc.) were as well. But I’m sure I remember getting more food services on Emirates; that might, of course, just be my faulty memory. Still, given how much eating we’re likely to be doing on this trip - it’s one of the reasons we chose Spain & Portugal - maybe less food is a good thing.

To pass the many, many hours on the plane I tend to watch movies, mostly animated - I definitely don’t watch anything I haven’t seen before, since I don’t feel that a tiny screen on the back of a chair and audio delivered through not especially high quality earbuds (I bring my own; I shudder to think what the complimentary ones are like) is the way to watch anything I’m properly interested in watching.

I’d made watching ‘Frozen’ a tradition, so I was a bit disappointed to find that it wasn’t in the Qatar library. So I had to find something else and, after a bit of scrolling, hit upon ‘The Lego Batman Movie’, which I’d seen in the cinema and enjoyed enough to think it’d be a good choice under the circumstances. I followed this with one that I did watch on my last trip - ‘Arsenic & Old Lace’, which I have a particular fondness for after having played Jonathan Brewster in a stage production (the play predates the movie) a few years back.

After that (and more scrolling) I found ‘Clue’, which didn’t actually impress me as much as the last time I’d watched it. It was after that that I shut off the screen and attempted (with uncertain success) to get some sleep.

With a few hours left I started watching ‘The Bourne Identity’ but with a few stops for food and conversation and announcements and so forth, I ran out of time to finish it. I was expecting to be on another Qatar flight to Barcelona, and with that came the assumption that they’d have the exact same library - but it looks like we’re on a partner airline that I’m yet to learn the details of. So, it might not be until the return journey that I get to spend more time watching Matt Damon beat people up and/or shoot them.

Part 2: Barcelona

So it's turned out that we were not on a partner airline after all, so it was easy enough to pick up where I left off. After finishing that I watched 'The Mummy' - the 1999 one with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz, not the appalling 2017 one with Tom Cruise, though that was also in the library), followed by 'Super 8'. The last 15 minutes or so of this were ruined slightly by the fact that we were coming in for landing and the plane we were on had electronically controlled tinting on the windows which had been rudely set to full brightness at the time.

There's not much else to say about the flight from Doha to Barcelona, other than it being mercifully short, at least compared to the first leg of our trip. And it was even shorter than I think we'd been told; I had it down for seven hours when it only took six and a half. I consider any less time spent on a plan to be a win...

Getting through the terminal was pretty easy, though there was a checkpoint (for want of a better word) of Spanish national police that didn't seem terribly formal; they just wanted to check our passports. But, like is the case so many times when I've travelled (apart from my first trip to the UK), once they saw it was an Australian passport and we looked like our photos, we got waved through without a second glance.

A couple of bus rides later - one more than we probably needed because I bought the wrong kind of ticket for the bus from the airport to the city; we had to get the shuttle from Terminal 1 to Terminal 2 - and a short walk later, we'd found our hotel and checked in. We did some stuffing about to get our phones properly connected to a network, since the company I'd bought SIM cards from hadn't given us all the details we needed. But that was quickly sorted out, and we (now that we had the means to find our way back) could go for a bit of a wander.

We were a bit surprised at just how residential the part of Barcelona (a suburb called El Raval) we're in was. The streets, apart from the big main roads, are narrow and pretty much entirely multi-level apartment buildings with shop fronts on the ground floor. And the shops themselves are everything you can think of, with convenience stores and tapas bars being the most common. It has an amazing lived-in feel, and there are people of all ages everywhere.

It wasn't long before we decided we needed to eat, so we wandered back to a tapas bar just around the corner from our hotel and sat down for a meal. And then it was definitely time for bed.

Of course we took some pictures.

This is our hotel:

Tapas and sangria:

Jaime is the Spanish version of my name. Rochelle thought it was funny; me, not so much.

Me, looking at an apartment building.

The bins in Spain are freaking huge.

I suspect these people who own this place are Australian.

The creepy giant bear is not in Spain, it's in the Doha airport.

Us on the plane. I would not look as chipper when we landed in Spain somewhere around 24 hours later.