Barcelona

Mike and I returned home Monday night from our wonderful trip away to Barcelona. We spent the first few days on the beach as the weather was perfect. The beaches in Barcelona were very impressive, clean, beautiful warm sea and beach bars dotted all along them playing really great tunes. So we just layed back, applied the sunscreen, soaked up the sun and chilled out. It really was the most relaxed we have felt since Ruby left us, definitely the right time to go away.

I also loved these quirky speech bubbles that were planted along the beaches encouraging people to keep the beaches clean.

We managed to eat our way at a variety different eateries, sampling lots of fish and paella with Mike stealing a glance at the football scores on our walks through the restaurants and bars. Barcelona has a very young vibe and is thankfully not full of gangs of the English abroad. However, we did sit in a restaurant one night where there were 2 stag nights in full flow with both grooms dressed in womens clothing but surprisingly it was quite amusing watching their mates plotting various games and tricks to get them absolutely plastered.

We spent one evening walking round the gothic quarter which was quite stunning, tiny little winding streets, beautiful balconies on the buildings and little churches dotted here and there. We ate in a fabulous restaurant there where we listened to the resident pianist and violinist play a medley of well known classical numbers, just great. We also spent the day visiting La Salgrada Familia which is Gaudi's most famous piece of architecture. It is an amazing temple that is covered in so many carvings on the outside that it really is impossible to take them all in. Rising up the centre of the building in between the 4 huge spires was an intricate sculpture of the tree of life. Each spire is covered with various mosiacs and carvings that really were quite random in their themes. We walked round the inside and then took the 350 stepped walked up one of the spires stopping at various places for photos and view takings. At the top we crossed a small bridge linking the spires and had an great view across the whole city. In the 85 degrees heat though we felt slightly jaded on reaching the bottom. Well worth the sweat.

So we have returned with fabulous tans, heads full of Gaudi inspired ideas for our garden and very very rested.