Europe Trip: Day 10

This was our last full day in Barcelona. As usual, we woke up slightly after nine, awoke very leisurely, and went down to the nearby bakery for breakfast. It wasn't raining more than a couple drops when we went to get breakfast, but by noon, when we decided to head out to go sightseeing, it was raining pretty hard. At first we planned on going by Parc Guile and the Gaudi Houses, but because of the heavy rain, we decided to first stop by the Plaza De Catalonia, look around, and decide how far we wanted to go.

The Plaza was neat and we took a few pictures, but there was nothing huge and exciting. Lauren wanted these mosaic salt and pepper shakers she had seen earlier, so we kept an eye our for tourist shops that might have them. Parc Guielle was actually a 20 minute walk uphill from the metro stop, and it was raining quite hard, so we decided that instead of seeing the parc and the gaudi houses, we would instead just take a leisurely walk down the Ramba.

The Ramba is kind of the “Champs-Elysees” (the famous fancy/touristy street of Paris) of Barcelona. It's a big, pretty, touristy street in Barcelona that starts at the Plaza and is lined with lots of shops and such. What turned out to be really interesting was not the shops on the sides of the streets, but all the little vendor stalls lining the streets. It started out with a few generic tourist stalls, but as we walked it turned into pet stalls. Lots of birds – just about any kind you can imagine, from lots of little chirpy pet birds all the way up to chickens, roosters, turkeys, and other traditionally edible fowl. There were also lots of rats, mice, bunnies, snakes, fish (lots of fish), lizards, etc... There were a lot more than I mentioned, but that's all that Lauren and I can precisely remember seeing at the moment. If this was such a touristy street, I'm not sure who they thought they were selling to, since probably most tourists aren't going to be able to get these animals home a on a plane. As we approached our metro stop, finally all the stalls turned into plant stalls – lots of big pretty flowers and huge leafy plants. Who knows what would've been next had we continued walking.

But alas it was still raining really hard, so we decided to forgo the rest of the sightseeing and head back to the flat. As usual, we took Barcelona's wonderful metro system back to the flat. On our way back we grabbed some bake-able prosciutto pizza from the grocery store to make for dinner. Then we spent our usual evening back at the flat, eating dinner and watching 30 Rock with Heather (who, I'm happy to say, we apparently turned into a 30 Rock addict). Lauren also ventured out by herself in the late afternoon to go get the salt and pepper shaker she wanted from where she originally saw it by the Sangrada Familia.

So as usual, we went out and saw some touristy stuff, but the heavy rain and our general inclination to relax in Barcelona kept us from being quite as insanely busy as we were in Italy. Barcelona was a really nice place to just kick back and relax because of the flat, the easy to use metro system, Heather, and the lack of nearly as much good food and touristy stuff (that we really cared about) as Italy. We suspect that Paris will be a little bit crazier.