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We packed a lot into our 4 days in Barcelona, thanks to great sightseeing advice from the helpful people we stayed with, and to Rob’s driving us around for 2 of the days:

• 2 museums in Barcelona - Picasso and Contemporary Art
• La Sagrada Familia and several Gaudi buildings
• Barceloneta beach, including a relaxing nap in the sun, some shopping, seafood eating and lots of sangria
• La Rambla with its bird market and performing live statues
• Placa Reial with the oddest stamp and coin collection exchange/market
• The unmissable Boqueria market with yummy fresh fruit and a million other cooking essentials
• Visit to Montserrat and a steep hike to La Santa Cova to see where the Moreneta (Black Virgin) statue was discovered
• Yummy cava tasting at Codorniu in Penedes, about an hour outside Barcelona - best 2 euros we spent all trip! We got two full glasses each =)
• Leisurely walk at sunset around Sitges, a great Mediterranean resort town
• A very car-sickness-inducing drive up the Costa Brava, with a stop in Tossa del Mar, another gorgeous resort town surrounded by a medieval wall, with a castle and lighthouse
• The surreal and very entertaining Dali museum in Figueres

My limited fluency in Spanish (Castellano) was not of much use, since a lot of the signage in Barcelona as well as the locals’ preferred speech was in Catalan. Funnily enough, a lot of Catalan is similar to Romanian phonetically so it wasn’t too hard to understand.

I really liked some of the local specialties, like membrillo a.k.a. codonyat (quince jelly usually enjoyed with manchego cheese), pan amb tomaquet (toasted bread with raw garlic and tomato), and fuet (a local sausage).

We certainly got enjoyment out of every minute of the trip, right up to the very last minute. We were still at the Dali museum in Figueres 2 hours before our flight took off, which resulted in a mad rush to the airport in Girona, about 30 km away. We arrived with very little time to spare, and fortunately (thanks to Rob’s excellent driving on the crazy highway circling Girona) we made it onto the plane right in time for push-back, and we even got seats together.

However, I’m not sure whether I’ll book a flight from Prestwick again. It is quite a bit cheaper than flying out of Edinburgh, but it takes an additional 2 hours of travel on the train to get there, including a walk between the two train stations when transferring in Glasgow. In total, it was about 8 hours from the time we left our place in Edinburgh to the time we arrived in Barcelona - that’s a long time!

You can see the rest of the photos on Flickr, as usual.