Sunday—disembarkation day. Our Mediterranean cruise was at an end, so in the dark Barcelona morning, we dragged our wheeled bags down the gangway and hailed an Uber. It was still dark when we arrived at our hotel, Hotel Barcelona 1882, which I knew was a winner the moment we stepped through the sliding glass doors (to which one had to step lightly close if one wanted them to open; I kept expecting to bump my nose on the glass). I had picked the hotel because it was only about three blocks from Sagrada Familia, which we had tickets to tour on Monday. I don’t have a lot of great shots of the interior, but the website above gives you some, and here are just a couple more.
We knew that we would arrive at the hotel well before our check-in time and had planned to dump our luggage and just hang out for a few hours. On the ship, though, three separate people told use we HAD to make a day trip to Sitges (SEE-jiss) to the south west of Barcelona, we we had decided the night before to figure out how to navigate the metro and take a train down. I’m so glad we added Sitges to our itinerary. What a lovely little beach town! It made me think what it must have been like in the early and even mid twentieth century to take a break from London or Dublin and go to the beach for a day or a weekend. It’s an experience I’m wholly unfamiliar with except from books.
I was hoping to find a piece of street art—galleries were notoriously hard to find in all of our stops—but I never really found anything I liked. (Mark bought a couple small pieces in Florence, which are now happily ensconced our or bedroom wall.) I did, however, see a fair bit of public art, and I bought a shirt. We also stumbled on a nude beach, but no photos.
The dog in the last photo was a hoot. For at least a half hour, he kept escaping from his owner and running down the beach—on which dogs are prohibited, though no one seemed to care. He clearly loved running in the surf.
I did actually put my feet in the Mediterranean, finally.
Graffiti was ubiquitous in just about every place we went. Most of it was just crap tagging, but every once in a while, I’d spot something like this.
Mark had an unfortunate encounter with King Kong’s hand. (The city was hosting a horror and fantasy film festival.)
We spent a few hours in Sitges, had lunch, and then headed back to Barcelona to check in at the hotel. We went out looking for dinner, but it was Sunday night, and the only restaurants that were open didn’t appeal to us. Instead, we decided just to have a snack in the hotel bar, which turned out to be a nice way to round off the day. For the first time in more than a week, we turned on the TV and watched an American crime show until we fell asleep. (I figured out how to get the thing in English, fortunately.)