Barcelona (Part 1)

SO. Having three sets of unedited vacation pictures is stressing me out a lot more than it maybe should. I so want to start with our Scotland pictures but I still have an entire cruise to finish. Not to mention the rest (and best part) of our Ireland trip which was almost three MONTHS ago. I just haven't had time to edit what with planning and taking all these trips.

Life is tough.

Anyway, here is a post about the first full day of our cruise: Barcelona!

Barcelona is so much more beautiful than I was expecting. Actually, all of Spain was more beautiful than I was expecting and clean! I honestly did not do one bit of planning for any of the cities we stopped at (except for Rome but we had already been there, so). That was all on Fofo and he did a swell job.

As soon as we stepped off the cruise's charter bus in the middle of the city, we hopped right onto a hop-on hop-off tour bus. We normally stay as far away from those things as we can because they sort of make me cringe. But we only had around 8 hours in the city and Barcelona is big. Plus, we were trying to minimal walking for the sake of Forrest's poor head (he has a really bad headache all the time for those of you who didn't know).

So we took the bus all over and had a grand old time. We hopped off a few times to see the best things and were generally glad that the buses had padded seats and stylish blue earphones. The only complaint I have is that the bus wouldn't stop when I wanted to take a picture. It was very rude. If some of my pictures are blurry, that's why.

 

  

 

 

 

Our first stop was the Barcelona Cathedral. It was free to enter but I did drop a few Euro into the alms box. The inside seemed like it was covered in gold and the outside was gorgeous. This cathedral doesn't really compare to La Sagrada Familia (coming up next post) but it was pretty in a much smaller way. 

The magnificent buildings were designed by Antoni Gaudi. Casa Batlló is the house above. It has skulls for balconies, the roof was designed to look like dragon scales, and most of the house is covered in mosaic tiles. I wish I had been able to take pictures earlier or later in the day because the sun's glare makes it really hard to see all the different colors. They were gorgeous. You'll just have to take my word for it. Or go see it yourself.