I’m the type of person who starts my stories about Barcelona by saying “well, I didn’t get pickpocketed, so that’s good.” I was pickpocketed in the metro in Rome (my own fault) so I spent a fair bit of time researching ways to avoid it. My current travel purse has a wallet chained into it! But I wasn’t, and everything was fine. We took the metro and the bus without incident. In fact, the Barcelona metro is very nice: well-signed, easy to use, and mostly full of people just getting from one place to another. Just like the Toronto Transit Commission, whose trains I rode just about every day of my working life (and still take several times a week without the least worry).

With that out of the way, we enjoyed Barcelona. The Sagrada Familia is batshit and incredibly beautiful. The stained glass! That light! We heaved ourselves up the hills to the Park Guell and then took a taxi home (one of two times we broke down and took a cab – the second time was when we got hopelessly lost trying to navigate our way up to the Montjuic castle).

We took a guided day trip to Girona and the Dali Museum at Figueres. We took in a choral concert and a tour at the very lovely Palau de la Musica Catalana. We found a place to buy local vermouth to take home (this was actually quite hard. You can buy wine etc in the grocery store but if you want something special, it’s a challenge). We went to the beach, because we figured we should. We did not swim.

We ate some of the best meals of the trip here. I can highly recommend Maleducat and La Mundana.

At the Barcelona airport, you have to go through passport control to get to the boarding area. This was no great hardship, as the passport control agents all looked like actors starring in a TV show about Barcelona airport passport control.

Anyway, we had a great trip and would love to go back to see a fraction of the many things we missed.