Catalonian culture and Spanish summers

A well-deserved sleep meant that we were later than we wanted to be getting out and about this morning. However, it was surprisingly quiet at La Boqueria, a market on La Rambla. After some fruit pots and a ham and cheese crepe for breakfast we walked past Palau Guell, a mansion designed by the famous architect Antoni Gaudi for his major sponsor back in 1905. After deciding the admission price wasn’t worth it, we admired the view from outside and then made our way to

the Museum of the History of Catalonia.

What a great museum! It traces the history of humans in the area from about 700,000 BC all the way through the Neolithic, Stone, Bronze and Iron ages before going into detail about the Romans, the Moors and the numerous other groups of people who have called Catalonia home. 3 hours well spent.

After making our way back to the hostel for lunch we went to the train station to sort our trip to Granada tomorrow. Bit of a fail as trains from Barcelona to Granada are booked for the next two weeks! After some quick googling and research, it was decided that we would go to Madrid for the night tomorrow and get the early train from Madrid to Granada on Thursday… Problem sort of solved. It is the summer holidays in Spain, so everyone goes to the coast, and some rail tracks buckled in the heat last week. Now there are emergency works being completed to fix the tracks which means there are less trains running. We may need to decide on where we are going a bit earlier next time….

Back to the roof terrace of the hostel for a couple of hours of beers in the sun and catching up on this blog before dinner. We walked over to the Gothic quarter for dinner with Annie and Dan before heading to a Flamenco show, which it turns out has nothing to do with Flamingos. We squeezed in as a part of a Topdeck tour, as Annie works for Topdeck and knows the tour leader who was in town. Wow it was an impressive and intense 30 minutes. I would describe it as an aggressive form of tap dancing with a back up band of Spanish/Arabic sounding musicians. Fair to say it was way better than I thought it would be.

After a few too many drinks we ended up at a couple of bars on the less touristy side of La Ramblas. Firstly in a bar that looked like it had survived an ancient fire, and then around the corner where there was an impromptu Flamenco karaoke session with some locals. Bloody cool. Great last night in Barcelona.