Last October I went to Barcelona / Spain on a field trip with the firm I worked with. We were around 30 by number and were pretty much excited about the trip. Although the main focus of the trip was to attend the World Architecture Festival held in Barcelona between 22-25 October 2008, I knew that the opportunity to visit this beautiful city and Gaudi’s buildings was enough to make me happy. Our visit to Barcelona was very short, we were going to tour on our own and I had done very little preparation as to where to visit. I already knew many sightseeing spots, but because I had no time, I hadn’t studied the guide books or decided on any trip routes. Our trip was to be spontaneous, however as you will read we managed to create our own route and it was quite successful too.
Although I think 3 days is definitely not nough for Barcelona, you can use the notes on this post for a quick tour, especially if you are visiting Barcelona for business and you have limited time for seeing the city’s attraction points.
DAY 1
We left Istanbul early Wednesday morning and checked into our hotel by afternoon. After a 1 hour’s rest, we left the hotel to begin sightseeing, since our stay in Barcelona wasn’t very long. We decided to go to the Aquarium because it was close to the hotel.
1. The Aquarium is located at the Port Vell close to the Port Olymipic. We took the subway and got off at the Barceloneta station. The building houses 35 different aquariums, 11,000 animals of 450 different species. It was a very relaxing tour especially after our flight.
2. After the Aquarium, at around 9:00 PM we took a look at our maps and decided to have a quick tour of Las Ramblas, the street where the city nightlife takes place, and have somethings to eat. The street was full of tourists gift shopping and dining. The general atmosphere somewhat resembles Istiklal, (the street that never sleeps) in Istanbul. We strolled around looking for somewhere to dine and after 1 hour of searching we finally decided to eat piaella (local dish with rice and garnitures such as fish or meat of your choice) somewhere and ate. We ordered other local dishes as well, however nobody seemed to like the Catalan food served at the place we ate. Honestly speaking the food was bad. During our stay at Barcelona, neither the food we ate at restaurants, nor the breakfasts at the hotel were good. Maybe we didn’t know where to dine. But it shouldn’t be that difficult get a decent meal should it? Having had something to eat we left to our hotel. Since we were exhausted we decided to see Las Ramblas again the next day. We also decided to plan the rest of our trip that evening, so that we could make the best of Barcelona, otherwise we would waste much time wondering and deciding what to do next.
Because this is going to be too long, I’ll be writing about the rest of the trip in the following posts…
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