Hola Barcelona!

Hola Barcelona!

Our jouney with Flixbus from Milan to Barcelona Nord lasted around 13 hours. I think this was my 6th journey of above 10 hours in a bus. So I was quite comfortable with the idea of sleeping in the bus at night by then.

Everyone makes mistakes and so did we! We booked a place in Barcelona and it turned out that it was not actually in Barcelona, but in some village outside of Barcelona. Now the problem was not that we were running out of time or something, but instead the adventure was becoming even more interesting. Now in many tram and metro stations in Europe, the ticket needs to be presented or inserted into the machines at both entry and exit points. Wait, what did you think we were travelling without tickets? No, not at all, we are law-abiding citizens and the first thing we did in Barcelona was buying a two day Barcelona ticket which costs around 15 euros per person.

So what actually happened? The two day pass was meant to be for Barcelona and it worked perfectly fine when we entered the subway using it, but by the time we reached that village, we were actually out of Barcelona and that ticket was not working there at the exit. So we were kind of stuck there, in fact not kind of, we were actually stuck there. There was not even a single person at the station there so we could show our tickets and explain the situation. It just had some telephones through which a computer operator could be connected. Looking out around a bit further revealed that in order to exit, we should buy a ticket which now would cost 50 Euros as a punishment. Like come on! That was a very big amount for us students and especially when you start your trip from a country like Switzerland, its normal that your budget had already got upset.

We again read the message of the flat owner and realized that there was another easier and faster way for reaching that place “Esparreguera” from Barcelona via a direct bus which cost around 4 Euros. So instead of paying the fine, we came back to Barcelona, my friend had a friend there with whom we dropped our baggage. He then took us for lunch in a Pakistani restaurant called Himalaya Restaurant. We had our traditional lunch there.

The number of Pakistanis in Barcelona surprisingly shocked me. There were entire streets full of just Pakistani shops which sell really everything, from spices to sweets and even clothes. I couldn’t even feel that I was in Spain. I felt like being in one of the neighbourhoods back in Pakistan.

Anyhow we then roamed around in some streets.

And then we finally visited Sagrada Familia. Sagrada Famila is a large Roman Catholic Church; the construction which started in 1882 is not yet completed though. However it is almost 75 percent completed and is open to tourists and visitors. My words fell short to describe what I was looking at, therefore I would like to borrow few lines from the architectural critics Rainer Zerbst who said that "it is probably impossible to find a church building anything like it in the entire history of art" and Paul Goldberger described it as "the most extraordinary personal interpretation of Gothic architecture since the Middle Ages"

A basic ticket for this masterpiece costs 15 Euros however it doesn’t grant access to the towers. The one with audio guide and access to one of the towers will cost around 30 Euros. A complete description of the various tickets along with their prices can be found via this website

We were quite tired afterwards and decided to go back before it got dark. We collected our bags and this took a bus. We were quite satisfied with the bus as at least we knew that we will not get locked out in some place. With the direct bus it took some 30 minutes to reach Esparreguera from Barcelona. In the morning I would have never remembered this difficult name of that village. Our landlords were however so sweet, hospitable and amicable that we forgot all the bad part. They came to get us from the bus stop even though the house was just a five minutes’ walk from there.

We had some misunderstanding and realized that mistakenly we booked one room instead of two; however, the couple was so nice that they made very nice sleeping arrangements in their lounge. It was perhaps more comfortable than the room.

We relaxed for a while and got fresh. There were a lot of small cafes and restaurants nearby. Our initial plan was to go for this place of pizzas, and as we reached closer, we found a Kebab shop and decided to go there. Guess what, the man working there was also from Pakistan. We chatted while he was preparing our wraps. We talked about numerous things where we study, how long he had been there and etc. The man had been living there since last 20 years just to mention.

We got our wraps along with some French fries and drinks packed, came back to our apartment and enjoyed our dinner. The wraps also known as doners were very good, he surely had made them with more care and love than usual considering that we were from the same country.

I remember I slept really late that night as I had to submit some assignments and I needed to work on them.

Photo gallery