Cruising the world

Our first trip to Europe, after much debate, was Barcelona. We took a long weekend with the intention of seeing as much as possible. After checking into our hotel, we wandered towards the city centre and found La Pedrera-a museum dedicated to the life and works on Antoni Gaudi (Architect). It was built by Gaudi built between 1906 and 1910. It is one of the main Gaudí residential buildings and is more an sculpture than a building. Best way to describe his works is to have a look through our pictures...you will see it is really unqiue in design. We then checked in for our cycle tour, where we had a guide show us around the city, which was awesome as we got a chance to go down the alley ways of older Barcelona, through the red light district, to Port Olympic, an amazing Gaudi Roman-Catholic church-Sagrada familia, and most sights. The group finished up with a San Miguel beer by the beach and then headed back to base. Thankfully no injuries, as helmets aren't worn over there! We then checked out some of the nightlife down Las Rambles and had some Tapas and sangria and headed home to crash for the night. Day two involved an early start, as we decided to do a hop on/off bus tour, which covered outer Barcelona also. This meant we got to see the Olympic Stadium, and take a gondola ride up the hillside, which had amazing views over the city. It lead to an old castle-Castell De Montijuic, where we picked up some lovely paella and apple custard pie for lunch-definitely our best meal. We stumbled across a really nice food market too, where we stocked up on Iberico ham and yummy breads and cheeses. We headed back to visit Sagrada Familia, to tour the inside, which was amazing. This church Gaudi started working on in 1882 and is yet to be finished. There are 18 towers to be built, and at present 8 are finished. We cued to take a lift up to the highest view point-around 90m high. The detail was amazing and we would love to come back to see it finished (if we get a chance in our lifetime). Well worth a visit. James had heard of this water fountain, which was built for the Olympic games, which had a sound and light show that occurred most nights...so after creating blister upon blister we found it...and it was well worth it....it was packed with people and the water fountain display looked like fireworks it was so impressive. Day three we took a bus trip to Andorra, which was a three hour trip. An uneventful boarder crossing and we had changed countries. Andorra La Vella (the capital which we visited) has 25,000 people, with the country population being around 90,000. It is landlocked between Spain and France so we took a few pics of the Pyrenees Mountains surrounding it. Apparently its very cheap to ski/board here, but seeings it was summer and 34 degrees, none of that was happening! We shopped around before heading back to Barcelona. We headed back to Las Rambles and enjoyed the street performers and some focaccia's with butiffarra (spanish sausage) and chocolate crepes. We managed to get ourselves lost walking home, after both of us feeling overconfident that we knew where to go. We found the hotel, although probably walked an extra 2kms in the process. On the last day we decided to hit the beach (our first Mediterranean beach) and soak up the rays. There was definitely a lot of topless sunbathers there, it was really quite overwhelming, even for me! James put on a brave face to cope with the situation. Our initial swim was disappointing, as it was a man made beach, there was chunks of concrete to fall over and kick your feet on! We walked further along and found a sandy part which was great for swimming. There was so much salt in the ocean, we both felt very buoyant in the water. James's piece: I would live here it was awesome, it has to be one of the best cities in the world. My top picks 1) sagrada familia 2) cycle tour 3) the water fountain show for the olympics 4) the tasty meats 5)the worlds best job, life guarding at barcelona beaches.