A Full Day of Tourism in Barcelona

A lizard, made entire of chocolate!!

The next day was the day that Penn State's football tickets went on sale for everyone in our group. Some of us weren't getting tickets for whatever reason; some of us had people at home buying tickets for us; but some of the people in my group were buying their own tickets that morning. Those of us that didn't need to buy our own tickets that morning spent the first part of the morning visiting the chocolate museum in Barcelona.We all had free admission to the chocolate museum since we'd bought the Barcelona 4-day passes. So we hopped on the metro and headed across town and traded our little tickets for passes into the museum—and the tickets to get into the museum were actually chocolate bars! I was pretty happy about that.

And the famous lizard from Guell park, also
made entirely of chocolate.

The chocolate museum was very cool. There were sculptures made of chocolate throughout the museum, along with displays showing and describing how the chocolate is made—from the harvesting of the cacao beans to the actual process that goes into making chocolate bars. But honestly, I didn't pay too much attention to that part of the museum. The chocolate sculptures were far more interesting. I

couldn't believe the kinds of things that people were able to create using nothing but chocolate!

After we went to the chocolate museum, we headed back to the hostel to meet up with the people that had to buy their tickets. Thankfully, everyone that was buying tickets was able to get their without incident—it's always a little nervewracking to have to rely on hostel or hotel wifi for something important. With our group back together, the six of us went to go take a boat tour. Our Barcelona passes included free tickets for an hour-long boat tour along the coast, so we decided to go do that. I was a little nervous about the boat tour because I get sea-sick, but I figured that for such a short ride, I would probably be fine.

The boat tour wasn't too bad—I did get sea sick, but it was only an hour long, and I didn't get sea sick until we were already about twenty minutes in. The views from the boat also weren't too bad, although we never seemed to really get out of the docks. There were cruise ships on one side and loading docks on the other. Past the loading docks, there were some pretty good views of the hillsides that roll down to the water's edge. And I did get to enjoy a bit of a view out over the open ocean—whenever there

Enjoying the boat tour...before I got sea sick.

was a gap between cruise ships.

After we got back to solid ground, we went off to find lunch. We stopped at the street market on the way there. It was just a little market made up of two rows of tents with people selling jewelry, purses, clothes, carvings, paintings, and probably even more stuff that I can't even hope to remember! I don't think any of us ended up buying anything then—we were two hungry. Lunch was good (just pizza) and Miranda was happy because our waiter was the best one we'd had up to that point in Europe. Miranda works as a waitress back home, and we'd had many waiters and waitresses that did things that Miranda said would've gotten her fired. But at the end of our meal, Miranda told our waiter that he was the best we'd had yet in Europe, and he was really happy to hear that.

About to pass the other funicular cart.

After lunch, we took the metro back through town to get to the funicular up to the top of Tibidabo, which is the tallest mountain in Barcelona. There was a telecommunications tower at the top (called Torre de Collserola) that offers a panoramic view of the city from the inside. We were on the metro and a woman who was a few years older than my friends and I approached us and said “You guys are American?” She was also American and she was living in Spain to study Spanish—what a coincidence! She ended up tagging along with us to the tower.

After getting off the metro (after sitting at the stop for almost five minutes before realizing it was the one we were supposed to get off at) we walked a short ways from there to find the funicular. Then we took the funicular up the side of the mountain and walked from there to the tower. We tried to catch the bus that ran from the funicular to the top, but they seemed to be pretty spaced out—we didn't see them often, and when we did, we weren't at bus stops, so the bus wouldn't stop for us. But the walk wasn't too bad, and we were at the tower soon enough. The girl that had joined us on the metro talked to some of the people around the base of the tower until we figured out where we were supposed to go.

Finally, we got to the ticket office at the bottom of the tower. We had free passes for this as well, so we went through pretty easily. Once there were about ten of us gathered in the waiting area, someone came to operate the elevator. We crammed into the elevator and it went up to what was marked as the eleventh floor, but was the first closed off level of the tower. We got out and walked around, enjoying the view from around the tower. Each window pane was marked at the top and bottom with a city that

The view from the mountaintop, overlooking Barcelona.

was in that general direction and how far away it was.

We spent about a half an hour at the tower before we headed back down. We walked back out to the road and waited at the bus stop for the bus to come and pick us up. There were more attractions (more popular ones) further up the mountain, so by the time the bus got to us, it was so packed that it just drove right past. I was not going to wait around for a half an hour just to have another packed bus drive right past without picking us up, so I said that I was going to walk back down to the funicular station. Everyone else wanted to wait for the bus, but after a minute or two, they joined me.

We took the funicular back down the mountain, walked from the funicular to the metro, and went from there to Sagrada Familia, which is this huge, constantly-under-construction church in the heart of the city. The girl that we'd met on the metro was still with us, so our group of six (plus one) climbed up out of the metro to see it. One side of the church was covered in scaffolding and there were a few cranes poking into the sky behind the church. I don't know how long it's been under construction, but I do know that all the postcards I saw in Barcelona that depicted Sagrada Familia showed it under construction—so it's definitely been under construction for a while.

The line to get into Sagrada Familia wrapped halfway around the block, and we would have to pay to

The front columns of Sagrada Familia.

go in. Since it was already later in the day, we decided just to go to the park across the street, take some pictures, and figure out where to go from there. That was when the girl that had joined us for the day left us and headed back to her host family in the suburbs of Barcelona. Now that our group was back down to just six Penn Staters, we hung out in the park for a little while, watching a street performer who made these huge bubbles using two ropes strung between two sticks. It was really mesmerizing.

Finally, we decided that we wanted to go see Park Guell, since it's one of the biggest attractions in Barcelona. The five of us girls still had time to go sightseeing the next day, but Sydney was leaving super early, so we wanted all of us to be able to see the park. We took the metro to the stop nearest Park Guell, not realizing that the park was actually at the top of the hill, at least a twenty minute walk from th metro station. When we first got off though, there was this beat-up patch of a back yard. We were looking around, trying to see the park or how to get there, so I said “And...there's the park!” Thankfully, that wasn't the case.

We finally got up to the park after a pretty steep fifteen-twenty minute climb up the side of the hill. Fortunately fo us, once we'd gotten about three quarters of the way up, there were escalators to take the rest of the way. My first impression of the park was that it was nice, but nothing to write home about. We'd come to the park from a side entrance, so we weren't seeing any of the tiling that the park was famous for. It was just plants, some short stone walls, and a packed earth path winding through all the plants.

The view from the highest point of Park Guell.

Our first stop was this wooden fencing post with scribbling all over it. There was a pretty good view through and above the fence of the city, and we all agreed it was the perfect place to add our names to the countless names already written there, just to memorialize our time in Barcelona. After we'd written our names there, we continued on through the park and found our way to what has to be the highest point in the park. There was a cross stuck into the ground at the top of this mound of piled rocks (this seems to be a pretty common theme across Europe—crosses at the summits of mountains and famous sites). We took a bunch of pictures of the city, since there was a 360 degree view of Barcelona. It was yet another one of those moments where I felt like everything that had led up to this point was worth it, just for bringing me to this spot.

Gaudi's tiled benches of Park Guell.

Finally, we found our way from that peak to the iconic section of Park Guell—the tiled benched that curve all around the park. There's a tiled lizard at the main entrance to the park that's probably one of the most famous sites in Barcelona. The park was all but abandoned at that time of night—it was probably about eight at night. So we ran around, took a bunch of pictures, and Katie, Sophie, Marissa, and Miranda did a vine (a 6-second video) of them singing the Cheetah Girls song that they sang in that same park.

With the sun setting, the six of us decided it was time to find dinner and head back to the hostel—especially since Sydney had to leave so early the next day, and the rest of us still had to check out by ten the next morning, even though our flight wasn't until much later in the day. So we got dinner, made our way back to the hostel, packed up some of our stuff, and called it quits on our long day of tourism in Spain.