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| Fountain overlooking Barcelona from the Olympic Park. The Olympics were held here in 1992. |
| Erin's Barcelona Journals 5-31-02 We went to the open-air flea market today, in hopes of finding a place to exchange books. We'd been looking for 2nd hand bookstores everywhere, but each one we'd found was either never open or had no books we wanted. And since we weren't finding any in the hotels, we were sure we'd get a worse deal than the even trades we'd managed to find previously. But when you need new books, ya gotta take a raw deal sometimes! The flea market was huge, with a lot of mostly junk. It looked like someone's neighborhood garage sale on a grand scale. People were selling everything under the sun, and the one area we did see stuff we liked was in the only permanent looking stalls, which housed mostly furniture. But how would we get it home? And what home, we didn't have one!!! So we didn't buy anything there except a handy dandy bottle opener/corkscrew. We had been needing one for a long time, and had to peel a few bottle caps off with a key or whatever was handy! It was really hot out there, so we were done within a couple of hours and ready to head out. There was nothing like a used bookstore near there, so we gave up on that and headed back toward La Rambla. We thought it would be a better idea to go sunbathe on the beach, as we were getting a little snippy with each other and were ready for some quiet time. We'd heard about the Olympic park area on our bike tour, and decided we'd fit that into our 'on the way to the beach' agenda. So we Metro'd over to the right area, then got out and walked around. There were some fabulous fountains and the Palau Nacional there, which we passed by. We circled around the back, looking for the Poble d' Spanya (supposedly a mini-village with stores & restaurants representing all the regions of Spain), but never found it. Instead, we saw the various stadiums used for the 92 Olympics (pretty cool!) and headed for a castle on the hilltop. There was a gondola ride up to the top, but of course WE chose to walk. So we got up there exhausted, and enjoyed the view of the port & looking back at the city. On the way down, we found a park that had an even better view of the waterfront, and stopped to get an ice cream and lay on the grass. We knew at that point we'd never make it to the beach for sunbathing, so we stayed on the grass till almost sundown and then found our way down the hill. Finally we reached the Columbus monument at the foot of La Rambla, and we shot some photos of me with the cool bronze lions at the foot of the monument. By then we were hungry, so we decided to keep thing simple and went back to La Fonda again for good, reasonably-priced food and sangria. Afterward, we hit Easy Everything for some quality web work time, then headed back to the hostel for our 1am deadline. |