Barcelona was AMAZING. I had high expectations for Spain because I've always wanted to go there- Barcelona did not let me down. I'll blog about my weekend in two sections so that it is a little more manageable… I'll start with Friday and Saturday.

BARCELONA, PART 1

Izzy, James and I got in late on Friday, dropped our stuff at our hostel and went searching for food. We ended up at this amazing restaurant on La Rambla- the main shopping street in the city- and had an excellent meal and dessert for a fraction of what it would have cost in Lyon.

Saturday morning we got up early to secure a room at a much cheaper hostel that didn't take reservations- I used my Spanish to ask the lady if there were any vacancies and she said to come back in a few hours to see if anything opened up. This gave us the perfect opportunity to explore Las Ramblas (the region including and surrounding La Rambla) and what turned out to be the most incredible market I've ever seen in my life. La Boqueria had hundreds of stands filled with meats (many of which still had heads), cheeses, fish, vegetables, fruits I had never heard of, chiles, breads, eggs (even ostrich eggs)- you name it, it was there. James and I made a mental note to go back later and buy a Pitahaya (a beautiful fruit that ended up being pretty flavorless). We also got some early Christmas shopping done at a nice row of stands set up by local artists and vendors.

Once we secured our hostel, we headed up to the Picasso Museum. For 4€ I got to see over 3,600 of Picasso's pieces from throughout his life. It was awesome to see the various stages of his art and how drastically different his early art was from his more famous modern pieces. I could have spent hours in this museum alone, but we had many more sights to see and so we headed off to the Chocolate Museum down the road. I'm not a big fan of chocolate, so I don't know what I expected exactly, but it was basically a few rooms about the history of chocolate and its place in history. We skipped most of the educational stuff, but if you look through my Barcelona photo album you'll find some really cool sculptures and scenes made entirely out of chocolate.

On our way to find the cable cars that connect Barcelona's Mediterranean beaches to the mountainous Montjuic section of the city, we found Spain's very own Arc de Triomf and walked through a nice park full of palm trees and sculptures. We walked on the beach and then waited an hour on line for the cable cars- totally worth it for a spectacular view of the beach, city and mountains all at once. We arrived on the other side and explored the Olympic Stadium (1994 Summer Olympics) and the impressive exterior of the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya/Palau Nacional before taking a cab back to La Rambla for dinner and some really good home-made ice cream.

I think my pictures will have to support the majority of these events because everything was so visually impressive. Since I'm blogging after returning to Lyon (though the date indicates otherwise), I can say that this holds true for the entire weekend. In other words, don't miss the Barcelona photo album… I condensed it quite a bit, but over 150 pictures still made the cut. Barcelona Part 2 coming soon.