Last Day In Barcelona

Although I’m looking forward to heading to France tomorrow, I am also sad that we are leaving Barcelona.  There is so much to see and do that we could probably spend another few days here!  Fortunately, we managed to zoom around today and see most of the remaining sights we haven’t done yet.

We started our morning by walking towards the Arc de Triomf that was built in 1888 for the Universal Exposition in Barcelona.  Because both of us were sick of the bread/cereal at the hostel, we decided we would grab breakfast on our way out and randomly stopped at a cafe when we got close to the Arc de Triomf.  The Asian lady at the counter tried speaking to me in a dialect of Chinese I wasn’t familiar with and when I spoke to her in English, she called out a nice Filipino waiter to help us.  He tried to explain some of the menu to us, but his English was sort of hard to understand too, so we decided to just order two sandwiches, which we were guessing were made with some kind of sausage, and two cafe con lech (coffee with milk).  We ended up getting two hot dogs on toasted baguettes – kind of interesting but ok!

After checking out the Arc de Triomf, we walked down the the road to the Parc De La Ciutadella, Barcelona’s most central park and home of the Barcelona Zoo.  The park is really well kept and I would say it’s nicer than Retiro Park in Madrid because there’s more to see – lots of fountains and statues and Gaudi even designed a small part of it!  We skipped the zoo because the entrance fee is 16 euros for adults (I don’t want to see animals that bad!), did a circle around the park, and headed off to Gaudi’s Palau Guell, a house that belonged to wealthy industrialist Eusebi Guell and the only building Gaudi ever completed in his lifetime.  The Palau Guell is actually currently under restoration, so we could only see the basement and gift shop, but entrance was free!  Paul didn’t think it was worth the line-up, but I enjoyed it because I’ve become a big fan of Gaudi’s work on this trip.

Because we had bought a 10-ride ticket for the metro, we decided we would use up some of our metro rides after Palau Guell by taking the metro up to Placa Espanya – we had no idea what was there but it was the furthest point Northwest on our map and it looked like a park.  As it turns out, Placa Espanya is where the National Museum of Art of Catalunya is, and it also connects to Montjuic!  We decided to head straight to Montjuic and skip the art museum, and we found a path right behind the museum that connects directly to the Olympic park.  The view up here is truly magnificent, and, best of all, most of it is free!

When we finished checking out the Olympic park and stadium, we headed down the hill in the direction of the funicular/cable car.  We decided we would take whichever one we found first and, after a short walk, we found the funicular, and discovered you can use metro tickets to ride the funicular!

So, we managed to see the rest of the sights on our list as well as Montjuic, which we thought we would miss, and we used up almost all of our metro tickets.  This last day here has really ended things on a high note – hope France pulls through and keeps things going well!