All the (S)pain is worth it: Barcelona

I was in Barcelona! The city whose name intrigued me since I first heard about it’s home-club, FC Barcelona. The name itself sounds so grand; it’s a mouthful of a name. I don’t think I would have been happier if I were in London or Paris or any other city. I never dreamed of those. But I did dream of San Francisco and Barcelona. San Francisco hasn’t happened yet, but Barca did happen!

Our Spain-Portugal trip started with us landing in Barcelona on a warm August afternoon of 2018. We reached our hotel, freshened up pretty fast to hit the streets, as we had a packed schedule from the next day. We started walking around Avinguda Diagonal and after some time parked ourselves at a nice, chic roadside cafe. We visited the most happening La Rambla street and dined at the Terraza La Isabela at H1898. It’s one of the most high-end restaurants one can end up to, and we did just that following TripAdvisor. Can you imagine?

On day 2, we traveled to the Valencian town of Bunol for La Tomatina, which I will cover at the end of this post. On day 3, we were at the Port of Barcelona, ready to board our Royal Caribbean cruise, Vision of the Seas. I will talk about the cruise days in a later post. After five days of cruising, we headed back to Barcelona again for a day. We did a small tour of the city, covering the church of the Sagrada Familia and Gaudi House Museum, both famous for Antoni Gaudi, the exceptionally creative Spanish architect and advocate of the Catalan uprising. We visited the ground and museum of FC Barcelona, after which most of us decided to return back to the hotel.

I think vitamin sea can be declared as a best bet cure for everything that doesn’t go down well with one’s mind and time.

I still had something pending. I had to see the beach. I disconnected myself from the group, booked a cab, and got dropped at the Playa de la Barceloneta or Barceloneta beach. I had no idea where the beach was, nor did I know what to do there. My cravings for the sea made me do that all alone. I found a nice place by the beach, sat their with a cup of cappuccino, and I had the second best 90 minutes of my life. The best 90 minutes were spent seeing Shah Rukh Khan shoot.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BnFELVqHSuO

Tomayto, Tomahto!

On the day of the festival, thousands of people from across the world throng this place to throw tomatoes at each other or just see what the hype is all about. We could see a lot of Indians too! Before the event, there’s some festivities that happen, Mardi Gras type. The event starts when siren-blowing trucks, loaded with tomatoes, cross the main street, and people on the truck throw tomatoes to the visitors. It’s so huge in scale that these people don’t even crush the tomatoes, they throw them solid, hard. The local people stay in front of their houses, set with food and loads of sangria. My friends went inside the tomato frenzy, and I chose to stay out of it. Somehow, I wasn’t convinced enough to jump into that mess of tomatoes.

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