The Top Floor Flat

Alright, so there are good trips and there are the trips that just manage to fulfill all expectations.  I’ve got to say, Barcelona was an amazingly beautiful city that I had a wonderful time exploring, but overall my trip was not the best I’ve had so far.  To be fair, I was well overdue for my turn at a stressful/hassle-filled/generally difficult trip and at least it happened in a stunning city.

Things got off on the wrong foot with a horredous airport experience from Heathrow to Barcelona.  I was flying Ibera airlines and I highly recommend avoiding them at all costs.  The unprofessionalism of the boarding proceedure (which took about an hour and a half and involved me standing outside for 20 minutes and then about 100 people jammed into a bus waiting outside the plane for another 15), the fact that they didn’t serve any free beverages (including water which you had to pay for!) and the complete lack of communication through the four hours of delay before we finally took off made the beginning of my trip a little shaky.  Finally arrived in Barcelona, however, where I discovered they have the simplest, most intuitive public transport system I’ve ever discovered.  Score one for Barcelona.

I arrived at the hostel which was supposedly “on the outskirts of the city” out of town but was happily only 40 min from the airport and checked in, ready to go to bed as it was already nearly midnight.  Unfortunately the room was so cold I couldn’t get to sleep at all that night! I had on all my layers of clothes but still couldn’t warm up – I was quite annoyed when I finally got up, unrested and freezing, in the morning to discover there was a heater I had missed the night before.

Not ready to let that completely ruin my day, I headed out for a self-guided tour of the city that took me through all of the most important parts of the Old City (also known as the Gothic Quarters) including the Picasso Museum, one of the few places open on a Sunday.  The museum was absolutely amazing and more than worth the 6 euros I paid to get in.  It was housed in a fantastic old Spanish building and arranged over Picasso’s lifetime so there were works from him as a child through his increasingly insane art styles (I’m sorry, is insane the wrong word? I meant “progressive”).  I also attended a church service in the beautiful Santa Maria del Mar cathedral.

Unfortunately by the end of the day I was so cold, tired and achey that I had to call it a night relatively early.  The next day, which was even colder, I did my bike tour of the city with an awesome group called Fat Tire Bike Tours (they operate in a number of European cities).  The tour was fantastic, and it was just me and another Aussie girl with the guide so we had a great time but the freezing weather really put a damper on the whole thing.

From there, I went back to the airport where I had hoped to get on standby for an earlier flight but was told quite emphatically that was impossible (despite there being two flights before mine with empty seats run by the same airlines) and so ended up waiting in the Barcelona airport for 5 hours to get back home just before midnight.

Whew, it was a wonderful city but I am definitely not doing the two-day trip again for a while, unless it’s somewhere that doesn’t require an airplane flight.  Barcelona, I’ll certainly be back.  But I’m waiting for everything to thaw first so don’t expect me until summer.