Due to the flight and time changes we lost most of Sunday, arriving in Barcelona at 5:30pm. We were rolling high class w/ a driver waiting for us holding a sign for the head of the household “Carla O’Brien”. Shows who planned this trip J We met another older couple, Fred and Joanne, from San Francisco on our journey to the hotel who are also buying a Volvo, their second.
Hotel St. Moritz was just a block north of Placa de Catalunya and the Old City so a perfect location to explore Barcelona. This part of Spain has a strong regional identity similar to the Basque region with similar separatist aspirations but without the terrorism. Thus they consider themselves Catalans first, and Spanish citizens second (with EU members a far third). This first night we explored the Ramblas (a tree lined pedestrian street with many shops and street performers), stumbled upon the Barcelona Cathedral (which we didn’t recognize for reasons we will explain later) and finally settled our hungry stomachs in a small tapas restaurant. This restaurant will remain unnamed since it wasn’t very good and was pretty expensive for tapas. We struggled to read the menu until they realized our Spanish was horrible and supplied us with the English menu (though the English menu wasn’t very descriptive with delights such as “shrimp with garlic”). We must have timed our departure from the restaurant perfectly because as we left we felt a few drops which soon turned into a sudden downpour. We raced to the nearest gelato café however and topped the night off w/ some delicious gelato. We were exhausted and settled into our room with two single beds J
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