Barcelona - Day 1

Our visit to Spain started in Barcelona on beautiful warm sunny day. Coming from a wintry Sydney, it felt good to be in shorts and t-shirts.

After breakfast in our hotel, we spent the day walking through the streets of Barcelona.
We walked on three main streets. The first was Avinguda Diagonal, a street that, as its name suggests, diagonally cuts through the city of Barcelona.

Then we walked down Rambla de Catalunya, a wide central pedestrian boulevard flanked by narrow one way streets for cars and motor scooters on each side.

This eventually became La Rambla, a similar walkway, lined with cafes and restaurants, that connects the Placa de Catalunya with the Barcelona waterfront.

The highlight was the Mercat de la Boqueria, a colourful produce market, where they sold all kinds of food from meat to seafood to fruit and vegetables to cheese and olives.

We returned by retracing our steps, stopping for tapas and paella on the way.

A key observation was that motor scooters are popular and well catered for in Barcelona. We saw more of them than we had in Rome or Paris. The streets seemed so well set up to provide ample parking for them.

All in all a great day taking in this beautiful city, walking for 9 hours and around 20,000 steps according to Michael’s FitBit.Read more