Today we were still pretty faded, so we stuck close to the hotel to have a home base for hot soup, naps, and an endless supply of water. As we’ve said before, the location of our hotel is so central to so many interesting things, this was plenty to keep us busy with our greatly diminished energy levels. We made a few short excursions, and took many breaks in the hotel room. The day was short on major sights, but long on Barcelona charm, and we sure saw more today than yesterday.
We visited Las Ramblas by day, which Daniel had strolled the night before. And as always, there were lovely streets all around.
We saw a neat public sculpture:
We headed to Palau Guell, the palace of the aristocratic Guell family that had served as patron to Gaudi. This was an early Gaudi design, with a lot of wrought iron work on the outside. The overall effect is that this is the most Goth building in the Gotico, and it’s easy to imagine it’s now haunted.
We’ve been gunshy about going into buildings, even while masked, so we opted not to go inside today.
We headed back for the first of many breaks in the hotel room. After a bit, we headed out to Ciutadela Park. On the way, we took side streets through El Born, one of the city’s more chic neighborhoods. There were art spaces and really fun bars, and way fewer souvenir shops.
At the park, we saw the citadel that gave the park its name.
This was a fun park with lots of zones for people’s varied interests. There was a pond with rowboats. There is a zoo – but not giraffes randomly appearing in the middle of the park like Lyon! There is a formal garden, but that was fenced off for some reason. Overall, this is a well-loved and well-used park, and it was great to see it being enjoyed by the citizens of Barcelona.
What’s the story here about the pelican and the fox? We will make up our own. In our story, they are close friends and sometime rivals.
This was a big botanical garden that appeared to be closed.
We even saw the Parliament of Catalunya building.
We plodded back to our room, as we tire out pretty easily these days. We had a fun video chat with Daniel’s mom and dad, then Daniel went out to secure us some food. I am thrilled to report that he brought home some truly excellent pizza – we’d been eating Cup o’ Noodles made with the hotel room’s electric teakettle for the past 48 hours, so real food was extremely exciting.
We hope to feel well enough for longer trips tomorrow, but for today, we were happy we hadn’t overdone it for once. After a long time of trying to do too much on too little energy, today felt just right.