geriandlennyblog: Saturday May 14th

5-14-11

We have ended our cruise – all fourteen wonderful days.

Today was a day of hurry up to wait. We disenbarked at 8:50; well that is we got on line to disenbark. It took one hour, there was a shortage of cabs so we had to get in line and wait about 20 minutes for one to show up. We arrived at our hotel, the Hotel Arts (aka The Ritz Carlton) in Barcelona right down at the marina/beach. We have 5 nights here purchased with the Marriott points that we used to get it. It is a gorgeous hotel and we probably have the best view we have ever had at a hotel – right on the harbor! We have a beautiful view of the marina, the sea, and the beach from one perspective and of the beautiful city of Barcelona from the other perspective. We are on the 21^st floor. Since we exchanged Marriott points for our room at The Ritz, breakfast is not included with our room; therefore, we are on our own. The Ritz breakfast is a mere 30Eu per person which works out to about $45.00 per person. We are definitely going to find another option for sure. In the meantime, of course, at 10:00 a.m., our room was not ready, so we checked our bags and headed out for the day.

We purchased a five day Metro pass and found our way quite easily to the famous Gaudi cathedral, Bascillica da Sagrada Familia. We saw it just from the outside last year. We arrived here about 12:00 p.m. and found a line to buy tickets that was totally wrapped around a block and a half, but we were there already so we took our place and waited with the rest of the people dutifully there to do the tourist thing. It is an amazing structure. It took about an hour to purchase our tickets and then , of course, we missed the English docent tour by about five minutes, so, yes, we had to wait another 50 minutes for another to begin. Did the gift shop in about five minutes and then found a bench to sit on – no coffee or snacks of any kind available. We were starving.

The tour was very good and gave us a great background about this most amazing architect. He worked on building this cathedral for almost forty years and now, it is still not completed, almost a hundred years later. We checked off the number one spot to see in Barcelona and decided to find some lunch at the famous food and flower market. It was really crowded and we were really hungry. After searching for about 45 minutes without finding a table at any of the outside cafes, we finally figured out that we simply had to wait at one place. No one seemed to care that we were salivating and ready to pounce at the first empty table we saw. Our tour book suggested a small outdoor café just across from the market, literally in a little cement space with wobbly tables, empty vegetable crates piles everywhere and hoards of people also laying in wait for a table. We discovered that there is some organization to this and you have to wait your turn for a table which we finally were happy to get. Wow, were we ready for a beer and some tapas. We were not disappointed. We had some fried fish croquettes, slices of crusty bread with tomatoes and garlic and olive oil and some fried artichokes. Yum!

On the way back to the hotel, we also stopped in a local market and bought a fresh bread, a can of Spanish sardines in tomato sauce (which we thought we would have for breakfast) and a bottle of local wine for our room. We both simply fell into bed once we got to our room and both of us slept for several hours. When we woke, we decided that there was no way to go out again for dinner so we opened the wine, which was very good and ate the bread and sardines for dinner. I worked for a few hours to catch up on my work and that was it for day one! We did continue to log our 10,000 steps for the day. The attached pictures show some of our better moments.

One interesting thing about the hotel is the automatic window shade. By pushing a button the shade goes up and down. A full picture window. The fancy hotel also has the most confusing light switches in the world. There are about ten maybe 14 all in the wrong place. It is even hard to turn the TV off.