It’s already Wednesday evening and a long and exciting day has ended. Barcelona is great!
We’ve added some photos from yesterday’s double-decker bus tour of part of Barcelona. Essentially, you have a fountain, of which there are many of outstanding quality, along with photos of some of the architecture.
Here are the immediate thirty impressions of Barcelona:
1) Clean and organized
2) Very wide boulevards
3) Very few high rise buildings
4) Lots and lots of bike lanes and wide pedestrian areas
5) Lots of green areas in streets (islands)
6) Nine Metro lines (subways), plus tram lines
7) An abundance of upscale shopping areas
8) Many real restaurants, as we have in the United States
9) Two languages (Catalan and Spanish)
10) Top infrastructure from world expositions dating back to the 1800s up to the 1992 Olympics
11) All cabs are painted exactly alike and look like they are brand new
12) Restaurant food from McDonalds on up the ladder seems to be at least 30% less expensive than France
13) More police visible than anywhere else we’ve been
14) Great weather (low 60s today and mid-50s the rest of our stay with little or no rain forecast)
15) Subway (Metro) line we were on was very modern and high-class
16) Great interest in their football team FC Barcelona or Barca as they are known
17) Extremely well organized waterfront from the site of Olympic sailing in 1992, to miles of beaches, to great waterfront buildings and walkways and a large commercial port just down the waterfront from downtown
18) Mountains (not overwhelming) surround the city, which adds a terrific dimension
19) Fabulous site for the 1992 Olympics on a hill overlooking the city, with the Olympic facilities well-developed for use today
20) Dynamic old buildings and some architecture similar to France, but more variety
21) Apartments after apartments after apartments, but few modern high-rises like you see all over Marseille and to some degree in Nice
22) People and activity dispersed over wide areas of the city, creating an electricity not found in most cities
23) Lots of scooters and some motorcycles
24) Very orderly drivers throughout the city
25) There are circles (roundabouts) like in France, but they are few and far between, mostly as high points with art in the middle
26) Much more similar to the United States than French cities
27) A language where they say every letter and a language much easier to understand than French
28) Franco was the dictator here in the 1970s and they had a civil war not that long ago
29) Lunch is 1:30 – 3:30 and dinner begins at 9:00, though one restaurant I checked out announced they begin dinner service at 8:00 pm
30) The city is big, but so well organized it seems very manageable and pleasant
Today we went to the the Barcelona Aquarium (a move for the kids), had a very late lunch at a very nice restaurant in a very high-class area, and ended up taking a different double-decker bus trip, ending with a quick coffee shop (not like a U.S. coffee shop) stop near our apartment for liquid refreshment and a sweet. No dinner tonight. It’s just after 9:00 pmand we’re thinking bed, not going out to eat.
It doesn’t stop now, there’s more to come.
The apartment tv still is too much for us to operate, so Marlene is waiting for my computer so she can live stream MSNBC and be sure that Barack Obama is still president and that the Republicans still want to make the rich richer and not support many of Obama’s ideas to create jobs, upgrade infrastructure and spread the wealth around to more people.
The Wilsons
