Barcelona and Gaudi is about mine and Karen's adventures in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. No not necessarily for its pristine wilderness, but for the artistic beauty of a vast, bi-cultured metropolis with enough history to keep someone busy for weeks. Sorry for not posting sooner, I took a Holiday vacation up to San Francisco with my good friend Taylor and ended up seeing two other friends Joe and Nash. I have plenty of San Francisco stories, but for a quick note I will drop
one tip. San Francisco is definitely not known for their Mexican cuisine, but if you are out late and craving an amazing burrito, grab a cab to Taqueria El Farolito and he will know where to go. Be prepared for a line because this is one of the only legitimate burritos you can get in town. On to Barcelona!
We flew on RyanAir from Venice to Barcelona... not the best idea. We landed in Girona and took a long bus ride into the city. The airport was horrible and I feel lucky we lived through the night. Think of flying into John Wayne (Orange County) when you were trying to get to L.A. or San Diego, not the best way to enter a country. To make the night a little more interesting, once we arrived in the main transportation hub we needed a cab to find our hostel. While waiting for the cab (with about 10 others in line for cabs) three locals attempted to rob Karen and I. Well luckily I had a good grip on my bags by the look on my face; they probably knew they should have robbed the older couple. We weren't up next in line, but the people ahead were locals and let us take their cab to prevent any further problems with the idiots.
We stayed at the Centric Point Hostel (part of a chain in the area) and it turned out to be awesome. Our first experience with Antonio Gaudi was his Casa Batllo... next door to our hostel! The staff was friendly, couldn't complain about the rooms, and location was perfect. We were at the north end of Las Ramblas, the main shopping, dining, dancing, drinking street in al
l Barcelona. The first night, we headed out to see what this Las Ramblas was all about and we decided to grab some authentic Tapas. Unfortunately we struck out with our first Tapas, but not for long. Then onto the center of Las Ramblas we stopped a cafe to have a glass of Sangria. The image does not do it justice; these were unnecessarily large glasses of Sangria which could be a good or bad thing. Needless to say, we struggled to get all that sweet wine down. Another interesting and great aspect of Barcelona was that walking along the streets at night locals would have a six pack of cheap beer and try to sell it to all the tourists by the can. I did not fall for the marketing tactics, but they sure did persist throughout the entire trip.
The second day was very festive. We set out pretty early for some touristy type activities. Word of mouth recommended we take an on/off bus tour so we could see many places in one day. We headed out searching for a good price and good looking bus. We ended up on a bright orange double-decker (Barcelona Tours) who handed out bright orange headphones for the audio tour. This ended up 
being a great deal and we would do it again in a heartbeat.
We saw numerous attractions. From the jaw dropping Church of Sagrada Familia by Gaudi and his Park Güell which if you look at the pictures Karen and I had quite the adventure. We hit up the FC Barcelona stadium, Catalunya National Museum of Art 
in the Palau Nacional which hosted the 1929 World Fair, the 1992 Olympic Stadium, Montjuic Communications Tower designed by Santiago Calatrava for the 92 Olympics used by Telefonica, and last but not least the Christopher Columbus Monument. Our pictures of the Columbus monument are a bit blurry (at night) but still amusing.
Not too tired from our bright orange bus tour, we headed out for an authentic Flamenco show with other travelers in the hostel. A beautiful little venue in the gothic district housed a very talented Flamenco dancer and musical group. They also had Guinness on draft so I had to indulge just a bit. We attempted to go out to a club to dance that night but our legs gave out at about 10:00pm and we started feeling the effects of all this travelling. Off to bed.
Day three was just as great. We managed to find a laundry mat to clean the limited number of clothes we brought and then headed out for some great shopping and people watching along Las Ramblas. This trip was in late October and the weather was a bit chilly, but we toughed it out and headed down to the beach. We just started walking north and eventually hit one aspect of Barcelona we completely forgot about... nude beaches! 
Not everyone was baring it all because of the weather, but quite a few didn't let a small wind chill stop them. Off the clothes and into the water they went. After a brief walk we ended up finding a spot far enough away from the crazy nudes and bundled up in our towels (it was pretty cold). Maybe midsummer I might have said "When in Rome, do as the Romans", but it wasn't summer now was it. We also made sure to tase our Spanish Fanta: Fanta Naranja for Karen and Fanta
Limon for myself. On the walk back we saw Barcelona's version of the twin towers, two buildings about 1/4 the height of our beloved towers we all miss so much.
That night Karen and decided to hit up this nice looking Spanish/Italian looking restaurant one block up from our hostel. I am still looking for the name of the place because it was some of the best food and wine we had our entire trip. Huge plate of Paella, a few appetizers, two bottles of Spanish wine, and 3 hours later we finally walked out completely satisfied. One of the most relaxing evenings ever. We packed our bags and readied ourselves for the early flight to Paris.
