Barcelooonah!

I traveled to Barcelona the weekend of Thursday 6 September to Sun 9 September.

The trip started with a delayed flight, making me come in late to Barcelona. The flight itself was pretty unpleasant, as I had some kid grabbing my shirt from behind , screaming like crazy, and kicking my chair. Gotta love the Dutch approach to raising children...just letting them do whatever they feel like and never yelling at them...no matter how much they piss off their surroundings...

The hotel was very easy to find, as I stayed on the Plaza Catalunia. My room was on the top floor, so the noise outside was not a problem. I walked down the famous La Rambla before turning in, watching different street-hustlers try to con tourists out of their money. There were human statues everywhere, with great variety of acts. Human statues are one of the most annoying thing about European big cities. Sometimes they draw crowds of people, clogging up the street. As a Polish friend of mine said "Easiest thing in the world! They just stand around all day doing nothing...Why should I pay them for doing nothing?"

Friday I got up early, grabbed a quick breakfast at a cafe, and jumped on a open-air bus tour. This was a two and a half hour affair, with stops along the main sights. The ticket was valid for a day, so I could jump on and off as I felt like. This was convenient as there was a new bus stopping every ten minutes at each of the major sights. I got off at the Parc Guell.



The Parc Guell is a park in the outskirts of Barcelona, designed by Gaudi when he was in his "nature"-period. It was a very nice park, with oddly shaped bridges and artificial caves. There was a very good view of the city from the top of the park.

After 11, the park started to get very crowded as the groups of tourists started swarming in. I hopped on the sightseeing-bus again, and continued the tour, going all the way around Barcelona.


After doing the full round-trip with the bus, I entered the famous Casa Mila , or "La Pedrera" ("The Stone Quarry"). This is probably the most famous building Gaudi ever made, and it looks very different. It also houses the Gaudi museum, which was pretty OK. The main thing to see is the roof, as it has the weirdest chimneys and decorations.

After visiting the Casa Mila , I went into the Casa Batillo, walked up the stairs, looked at the chimneys, and that was pretty much it. Not exactly a bargain, at 11 euros.

I spent the rest of the day walking around getting acquainted with the Barrio Gotic. I found the Barcelona Cathedral there, and spent some time looking at that, and getting my gargoyle fix.

In the evening, I had decided to go shopping for clothes. I wandered into the "El Corte Ingles"- department store that was right next to the Placa Catalunia. I didn't really find much I wanted, except for kitchen stuff that would not fit my suitcase.



Saturday I started out by using the metro go to the Gaudi Cathedral. The Gaudi Cathedral (or the Sagrada Familia) is a very special, modern church still being built in the center of Barcelona. This building is a work in progress...so it feels very much like visiting a construction site. They had closed off the stairs to get to the top of the towers, so one had to use the lift to get up. Naturally there was a loong line. They put up small signs telling average time to the lift, and I noticed there was a line up to the "60 minutes"-mark, so I didn't bother to stand in line for the lift.

Later i used the metro to get to the Parc de la Ciutadella. I found it very easy to navigate the metro, but it felt like a sauna in the stations. Funny how the trains were air-conditioned , but the stations were not. There was some sort of concert going on in the park, so they closed off half of it, the part with the fountains and the monuments, so there wasn't all that much to see.
I walked back through the Barrio Gotic, stopping at the church called Santa Maria del Mar which was reputedly the most pretty church in Barcelona.

In the evening I did some more shopping for clothes in the street next to catalunia plaza, visited the Maremagnum department store and the aquarium.


The city was very different on Saturday evening, compared to the earlier nights I had been there. The streets were full of people. It was very crowded, even by Dutch standards. On the square in front of the cathedral people were dancing, both traditional dances and more modern stuff. It was nice seeing probably a hundred people dancing in the traditional Catalan way on the square in big circles.

I had to walk around for a long time before I found a cervezeria which wasn´t full. The good thing was that the cervezeria I found had a very good selection of beer. They even had Paulaner! I was sitting on a sidewalk between two very busy streets, so it was very noisy and polluted, both from traffic and Spanish people smoking on tables very close to me. I probably lost a few weeks of my life from just sitting in the pollution. This was not near the tourist areas, so no-one spoke English and my Spanish is limited to things like "quenta costa cerveza?" and "Uno cerveza, por favor"...but through some inventive sign language, I managed to get some bratwurst and beer from them? I ended up sitting there for hours sipping beer, as they had Lövenbrau, which I had not drunk since leaving Norway...

Oh, and there was a traffic collision right next to the restaurant while I was sitting there..and the amazing thing was that the police were there like 30 seconds later. Amazing!

Sunday morning I got up around nine and walked around in the Barrio Gotic. The streets were empty, and everything seemed to be closed. I decided to go up to the Montjuïc hill, to look at the castle, and some of the museums up there. I took the cable car to get up to the castle, and from the cable car you had an amazing view of the city. From the top of the castle itself, the view was very nice. I visited the museum inside the castle, and this museum had a large collection of medieval weapons. It also had a number of photographs of army units taken in the 1890's which were very interesting. Lots of very intense guys posing for the camera. Slightly different from the haphazard snapshots we do today in the age of the digital camera.


I took the cable car back down the hill, and visited the surrealist art museum "Fundacio Miro". After a short while, I found out I didn't really like any of the stuff they had there, so I left. ( I like modern art, but mostly the freaky stuff...it should not be boring )

All the other museums were closed off for some reason, so I was left with having to take the metro back into the town center to get some dinner. It was hard to find a table, so I ended up having dinner at a shady-looking restaurant in the Barrio Gotic. The food was bad and service was almost non-existent, but that's probably what I deserve for eating in the touristy part of the city.

I decided to leave early for the airport, to see if I could find something in the tax-free before going home. This was a mistake, as the shops at the airport were very expensive. Some of the standard clothes-brands were twice the price of what I would pay if I had been shopping in Holland, so in the end I just picked up a bottle of Guatemalan rum and flew back to Holland.

Overall, Barcelona was noisy, smelly, crowded and expensive(compared to Holland anyway, not Norway). I must say..from the cities I have visited this summer, I liked Venice more...

Pictures are here

Scotland

On the weekend of August 31st to September 2nd, I traveled to Scotland, to see the Highlands, and travel on the famous West Highland Line.

This trip started out bad even before I left home, as I had a lot of trouble ordering train tickets from the website of firstscotrail.co.uk. At first, they refused to sell me tickets for picking up at the railway station, as I did not have a valid UK address. After a bit of googling to find a valid UK zipcode to keep the webshop happy, they refused to accept my credit card. I found out that they tried to validate the card using my full name...and the dutch cards are usually made out to firstletter dot lastname. The problem was - there was no way to change my billing name, so I had to change the first name on my account to "F.". The problems were not over, though. Somehow, they had cached the failed order, and now they charged me for TWO trips. To make things even better...in order to cancel my first ticket, they would charge me half the ticket price. I sent them an angry letter, and they promised to refund me the whole amount. We'll see if they make good on their promise...freakin' webmonkeys!

As if this wasn't enough, I had a lot of trouble booking hotel rooms as well. They had no online booking, only "response forms" accessible from the web. I filled out a couple of these and never heard anything more from them...so eventually I had to start calling around. visitscotland.co.uk has some sort of booking agency that can arrange accommodation in most of Scotland. Trouble was that whenever they offered me something, when I accepted, the room would be no longer available. After three failed attempts to book a hotel room, I had to accept a room at a B&B in a private home. I was a bit skeptical at first, because there was very little information about the property. The good thing was that it was very cheap, just 22 pounds per night.

I landed in Edinburgh and took the Airlink shuttle to Waverley station, where I picked up my train tickets at the ticket machines. Since I had a couple of hours to kill before my train left for Glasgow, I walked up to "The Royal Mile" and walked to the castle. I had been to the castle once before, but I was 11 at the time, so I didn't remember all that much of my previous trip. The castle is on the smaller side, but you have great views over Edinburgh, as the castle is situated on a hill above the city itself.

The ticket inspection system on the train between Edinburgh and Glasgow would put the ticket inspectors on the dutch trams to shame. My ticket was checked on entry to the platform, by a guy on the train and on exit in Glasgow. Three times for a journey of 45 minutes!

From Glasgow I boarded the diesel train going up the West Highland Line. The diesel train was noisy and slow, and there was nothing interesting to look at until a couple of hours had passed, and we started going past lochs and steep hills. I was amazed, by the way, that they sold whisky from the trolleys on the train...so you could sip whisky while looking at the grand view of the Scottish mountains. What I could see of the Scottish mountains, anyway. The sides of the railway track were somewhat overgrown, so at times it felt like we were going through a green tunnel. After a couple of hours it turned dark as well, so I missed out on seeing the area around Glencoe on my way up to Fort William.

The B&B I was staying at had given me quite detailed location information, so it was easy to find the house. The room at the B&B was fairly OK, good size and comfortable bed. The landlord had a shower in the hall, so it wasn't as spartan as I had feared. In the morning the guy running the place cooked up an enormous breakfast for me: Bacon, eggs, sausages, bread, potato cakes and black and white pudding. Very good value for the price I was paying. I walked down to the train station and boarded the local train to Mallaig on the coast. This is supposed to be "The most scenic train ride of the British isles". Unfortunately, the weather was rainy and foggy, so I didn't see that much on my way to Mallaig. On the way back, though, most of the fog had lifted, so I got to see the beautiful landscape that they used as backdrops in the "Harry Potter"-movies, among others.




Coming back into Fort William, I discovered why it had been so hard to get a room. This weekend was the "Nevis-weekend", so they were hosting a race for people to run up to the top of Ben Nevis and back down again. There were a number of hiking stores in the town, and they had a lot of good equipment for hiking in wet and cold weather. I bought myself a pair of waterproof, windproof gloves.

They also had a number of whisky-shops, and I managed to find something I had been looking for for years: a bottle of Port Ellen whisky. I had looked for this before in specialist whisky shops in London, so it was funny that I found one in a touristy whisky shop in a small town up in the highlands.

Sunday I traveled back by train the same way I came. The good thing now was that it was daytime, so I was able to see Ben Nevis, Glencoe, Rannoch, and all the other stuff I missed on the way up there. After a few hours most of the interesting stuff had passed, and then it was just another boring train ride. I spent far too much time traveling on Sunday, so I was very tired when I finally came back to The Hague.

I think the west highlands could be very good for hiking. I saw a lot of nice mountains over there, although it would probably be good to have a car for going from place to place. Didn't seem like there were too many trains up there. The roads were narrow up there, with lots of single carriageway roads. They also drive on the wrong side of the road, so I think it could be stressful to drive up there.

Pictures are here.