Tuesday 22 May 2012 Barcelona - Happy Anniversary to us!

We arrived at 7:45 AM their time (11:45 PM at home) and planned to meet up later with Palmers for a day of touring in the belief that this would help us adjust to the new time. We were in our hotel room by 9:15 AM. We waited for a while for the Palmers to phone, and then tried calling them. They still did not have a room and had gone out for a walk, so we obtained directions to their hotel and set out on a half hour walk. We succeeded in finding them and agreed to buy one day tickets on the hop on, hop off tourist bus. At the departure point we found a huge line-up, but the buses came frequently and the line moved pretty quickly. We rode around from noon until 4 PM. We were all doing pretty well until we got into a traffic jam. As we inched along for what seemed like an hour, our heads all started to droop and we agreed that we were done for the day.

Celeste kept commenting on how clean the streets were and that there was no gum on the sidewalks. Here is why. They stick their gum on trees! Actually, this collection was at one of the tourist bus stops at the second level.

We returned to our room and slept from 5-9 PM. We thought we probably would not go right back to sleep, so we went for a one hour walk and went back to bed at 11 PM. I woke up feeling pretty good at 5 AM, but Celeste had been unable to get to sleep for quite a while and only got up at almost 9.

Barcelona is a very interesting place. The streets are very wide and easily accommodate pedestrians, bicycles, scooters and motorbikes, cars, trucks, and numerous buses in more or less segregated spaces through the use of tree-lined boulevards. It must be very frustrating to drive here, because the emphasis is on pedestrians, and the pedestrian walk lights are very long, leading to long waits and slow progress for drivers. Not that that is a bad thing, just an observation.

The downtown architecture is mainly the old classical European style, with occasional splashes of more modern design. Local architectural hero, Antoni Gaudi, embellished the old forms with curves and other modern twists to create some quite interesting structures. His Basilica de la Sagrada Familia, begun in the late 19^th century, is still under construction. It takes the ideas of the old European cathedrals and gives them a more modern form. Outside the downtown, the buildings are much more plain and ordinary, although there are still some pretty interesting places. There is a lot of large scale public art. Some of it is pretty cool and some looks like they forgot to move a junk pile.

Weather: temperature low 20s, sky mostly thin overcast with some full sun, wind mostly light, but sometimes quite windy riding in the open second level of the bus.