My first time in Barcelona!

Planning the trip...

A few years ago I visited the "ciudad condal" for the first time, the city also known as Barcelona. I'd wanted to visit the city for quite a while, but I had never really encountered the time to go ahead and discover it for good. When I started university, I convinced a friend to join me and we were off!

The trip lasted three days; we arrived on the Friday, we spent the day on Saturday and headed back home on Sunday. Through Couchsurfing I had been speaking with a couple from Extremadura who lived in the centre of the city and were willing to host us, however, at the last minute they had to cancel for personal reasons and so we had to find another place to sleep. In Barcelona there are many people renting rooms and apartments to tourists (something I'm not sure remains legal after what happened with Ada Colau), so it wasn't actually too hard to find a place that met our needs. I don't remember the price, but I remember that it was relatively cheap and it was quite close to the Plaza Cataluña, one of the more central and famous plazas in Barcelona. In terms of how we got to Barcelona in the first place, we simply purchased a flight two weeks ahead of time. Given that we were coming back home on a Sunday, the flights were a bit more expensive, with the round-trip ticket costing about 100 euros, but those are the prices you'll find when you're buying last-minute. (Later I'll explain what couchsurfing is and a few other things).

We arrived... and we're lost!

On the Friday morning, my friend Marina and I were on the plane headed for Barcelona. Once we arrived, we had our usual airport confusion... where do we go?... where are the bathrooms?... we ended up on some runway that we supposed was the cercanias train station that brought us to the centre of the city. I don't remember what line it was, but I remember hearing more English being spoken on the platform than Spanish, a clear indication of the large amount of foreign tourists that flock into Spain's second-most important city, after Madrid naturally. The cercanias train ticket cost us something around five euros. We had to change lines at a certain point at some stop around the Zona universitaria area.

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As in most of my trips, I had a moment of ignorance and got off one stop prior to ours, and so we lost two hours of our short weekend in Barcelona walking down non-central streets searching for any metro station that would bring us to Plaza Cataluña. After finally getting on another metro and getting to Plaza Cataluña, we searched for the street where our apartment would be located. We finally located it and rang the doorbell, only to be greeted by a lady who responded in Catalan, to which I naturally responded "I'm sorry, I don't speak Catalan" in a very apologetic tone. She opened the door for us and we went up to see our temporary humble abode. Our host's name was Beatriz, and she was Catalan to the bone, though she was very nice. She left us the keys for the room where we were going to sleep, she asked us if we'd transferred the money into her bank account and after telling her yes, she took off, leaving us alone in the flat. She told us that normally there'd be other people staying in the other rooms, but this weekend we'd be alone, which didn't really change anything for me seeing as I wasn't planning on spending too much time in the flat anyways.

*Before moving on...

Couchsurfing is a cheap way (free) to find housing in cities in which you are going to visit. The hosts are individuals who don't mind and actually rather enjoy housing travellers for free. It's actually a good way to travel because you save a lot of money and you meet nice people who know the city well and are usually more than willing to show you around the city. In my experience, my couchsurfing hosts have always recommended me good places to visit, such as bars, museums, the best way for moving around the city, etc... And who better to show you around a city than someone who lives there all year round! It's a term I'll be using in several of my blog posts seeing as I've used this service during several of my trips. The availability of housing using couchsurfing depends from country to country, however in Europe, especially in countries like France or Germany, it tends to be pretty easy.

Something else you should about Barcelona, other than its original name, it's also known as “la ciudad condal”, and likewise “Barna”, which is basically taking the word Barcelona and removing the "celo" from it (so weird lol). This last one is actually quite useful to know since in some trains and cercanias they'll write "Barna" on the signs instead of Barcelona, and for a foreigner who doesn't know it might be easy for them to get confused and make a mistake.

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When I typed "Barna" on Google it showed me this photo with all the symbolic buildings of the city. I love it!

With our bags packed with the necessary equipment for the day, Marina and I set off after eating and headed toward the Plaza Cataluña to take a look around. At this point I need to mention that our intention was to visit the city in "express mode", which means quickly and only doing the basics, but we acknowledge the fact that it's not ideal to really seeing the city in such little time.

Plaza Cataluña or Plaça Catalunya in Catalan.

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In Plaza Cataluña what particularly caught my eye was the high number of palm trees and the immense crowds passing through there. From this point on, we did one thing: we walked! From when we left Plaza Cataluña we started walking all afternoon toward the most emblematic spots in the city. Our route consisted of: Plaza Cataluña – Casa Batlló – Casa Graciá (La Pedrera) – The Sagrada Familia – Güell Park. We're gonna pause at each one of those spots.

The Casa Batlló was quite the pleasant surprise for various reasons. The good thing about it is that the facade is really pretty and it's impressive seeing a facade like that on such an important street like the Paseo de Gracia dotted with stores and shops.

The Casa Batlló's Facade

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What negatively surprised us was the high cost of admission to enter and visit the site. I remember it was something 20 euros, and this adding on to the long wait time to get in... After taking a few pictures of the facade we decided to leave the inside for some other time and moved on to our next destination. What I noticed was the high number of tourists in such a small space. In front of the building there's lots of people photographing the facade, though some don't seem to remember how close they are to the street and I'm surprised that I didn't see any of these tourists having a run-in with a car while trying to take the perfect picture. On another note, the Casa Batlló was designed by Antonio Gaudí, one of Spain's most famous architects and the most well-known in Catalonia.

I'll talk more about Barcelona in my next post. Until next time!

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