Bonjour,
A couple of weekends ago, I took a trip to Barcelona with my housemate, Natalie and our French friend, Lionel. We drove up there on the motorway (which you have to pay to drive on in France, weird huh?) through Perpignan. So we arrived in Barcelona at about 11:00 a.m. on a Saturday. First thing I noticed was it was crawling with people (mostly tourists). It’s one of the biggest cities I’ve ever been in and it’s amazing to see that amount of people.
Our first attraction was a Church called Familia Sagrada. It’s a Church that was started in 1909 and is still being built to this day. It is estimated to take another 300 years before it is finished so they have a sign outside of it that says 1909 – ??. It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen, with amazing detail and and religious statues. Form there we decided to take the metro into the centre of the town. Natalie had warned me that the pickpocketers were bad in Barcelona and especially on the metro, so I zipped up my pockets and thought that would suffice. We got on the metro, and we were figuring out which stop we needed to get off of and etc. when two guys came to where we were standing and insisted to hold to the side bar we were holding onto. When the doors opened to get off, Natalie and Lionel went ahead but these two guys kind of pushed and shoved me so I was lagging behind. While they were pushing and shoving me one of them was starting to unzip my pocket on my coat and trying to grab what was in there. Luckily, I spotted him and pulled away and he ran off. Lesson learned: be very careful in Barcelona, don’t put anything extremely valuable in your pockets, wear a money belt, and don’t act like tourists because that’s a welcome sign for pickpocketers.
We then went and had some tapas in a massive fruit market which were delicious. We continued our day walking along the main street in Barcelona called Las Ramblas. Basically it’s a massive street with all sorts of entertainers and people dressed up in costumes, souvenir shops, pet shops, flower shops… etc. We walked all the way down to the water and watched some nearby seagulls and boats in the sea. After that we headed to the Gaudi buildings. Antoni Gaudi was an architect who was greatly influenced by nature and is known for his use of curved construction stones, twisted iron sculptures, and organic-like forms. The buildings were amazing and are one of the biggest attractions in the city. By that time we had been walking for close to 7 hours. It was extremely tiring but completely worth visiting one of the most famous and beautiful cities in the world.
With Nothing Toulouse,
Amy