Barcelona: Sunshine!

From rain to sunshine! :)

When chatting about me going to Leuven I suggested that we meet elsewhere to celebrate her birthday. A quick visit to Ryanair's site revealed that we both could take cheap flights down to Barcelona from Stockholm resp. Brussels. A few minutes later it was set, and flights were booked. Turned out to be a beautiful sunny week, particularly since it was cold and raining in Sweden when I left.

I took a night-bus up to Nykoping, and Allan and Ding went with me to the station. Thx guys, I really appreciated that! Wen stayed over night at the Charleroi airport.

Wen's plane arrived first, but when I got out of the arrivals, there was no one there. I send a quick SMS, and she said she WAS there. It took a while to sort out the confusion. Thing was, she hadn't noticed her flight had been rerouted to the international airport and we weren't at all at the same place!

After a couple of more SMS and some trips with local transport we finally met at the Arc D'Triomf.

Since we hadn't basically prepared at all and had no guidebook with us, I think we were quite lucky about the place, St. Anna Hostel, where we stayed the whole week. It is a small place, just off Las Ramblas, run by an old woman and her family, for 40 Euros a night. We checked out a couple of other places first, and then just walked by this place, and they had a room free for us. We didn't find a better option for us during the rest of the week, so we stayed.
Funny thing was that, pretty much every day we bumped into new animals in the apartment! It was really like a little zoo, with all kinds of cute.. and not so cute.. little animals. I think our final count came up to 2 dogs, 4 cats, 2 kinds of the animal she has in her lap in the pictures, and numerous laud birds! At noon a old guy, who I suppose was the husband of the lady, took the dogs for a walk. The man really moved like in slow-motion, and when he talking he only uttered some incomprehensible whispers.
Most of our very relaxing week was spent strolling around on the streets and hanging out on the beach.

And we celebrated Wen's birthday in the harbor, trying to eat a whole cake by ourselves.
We did actually manage to see some of the main sights...

.. but I guess we were too distracted of just enjoying the weather and the city.

Central Barcelona is really a circus of tourists, beggars, street artists, thieves, freaks, old locals, and people living on the street. Very entertaining, but also quite nasty.