Fri, May 13 - Barcelona Bus Tour

Fri, May 13 -We both slept pretty well and got up at seven. The Arts breakfast at the Hotel costs 68€ (!) per person so we walked next door to the Geni’s Café where the hotel staff eat and had a great breakfast of tiny sandwiches of Serrano ham and olive oil on crispy baguettes with good coffee and fresh OJ. Just perfect!

We decided to take the city bus tour to get an idea of Barcelona as we have such a short time here. The Red line cuts through the cultural center of town and circles back to the harbor. The Blue line circles the university and leafy suburbs climbing up onto the ring of mountains that surround the city. And the Green line travels along the coast, through the Olympic village.

We bought tickets that allow us to get on and off all the circuits all day and climbed up to the top of a double-decker bus and set off on the Red line.
We passed beautiful wide boulevards, apartment buildings with flower-filled balconies and saw Casa Mila with its undulating stone façade by Antoni Gaudí.

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We switched to the Blue line and headed towards La Sagrada Familia, the large cathedral that Gaudí started in 1882 and that is still being constructed! The tall spires looks like drip castles created from sand at the beach and are capped with flowers. The colors and shapes are amazing and are derived from shapes in nature. Unfortunately it is a major tourist attraction and the line to go inside wrapped around the cathedral and the line to get back on one of our busses was nearly as long, so we stayed on the bus rather than fight the crowd.

We continued up into the hills and saw the famous soccer stadium that can hold 100,000 rabid fútbol fans.

After transferring back to the Red line we got off the bus at the Museu Nacional d’Arte de Catalunya housed in a large palace on Montjuϊc, a hill overlooking the entire city. We found a small café where we bought larger ham sandwiches and Fantas, and then walked around the building looking at the beautiful views. Not enough time to go inside today.

After our brief walk we returned to our bus which took us through the beautiful botanic garden and down to the harbor where several large cruise ships were lined up and returned to our hotel for a brief rest. At five we caught the Green line bus and took the short loop up the coast and around the Olympic Village to complete our tour of Barcelona.

We entered Hotel Arts to change for dinner and got there the same time as fancy black Porsche was parking. A very glamorous young thing emerged attired in a very short dress dripping with crystal beads. She was accompanied by a young man right out of Vogue wearing a tee-shirt with a very low-cut scoop neckline. They joined us in the elevator making us feel somewhat under-dressed!
We cleaned up, caught a taxi downtown and met the Brucatos at 7:45 at Bar Mut, a popular eating spot and found that it was completely reserved, even at this very early hour! We walked a ways and found several other full places. Finally we found a small tapas bar, Cervasaria D'Or and settle in and ordered many small plates of fried artichoke, steamed mussels, sautéed potatoes with Aioli sauce, tiny sausages, and octopus.

All were tasty and washed down with a couple bottles of wine. We set off in search of gelato and found pistachio, our favorite, while passing many street vendors right out of the movie, “Biutiful“. Home to blog and bed.