It was a very wet train ride down from Lyon to Montpelier, and then along into Spain - once we were past the Pyrenees, it was visibly better weather and beautiful landscape, and by the time I was in Barcelona, had made sense of how to buy a subway ticket and actually find the right train line (Google Maps was for once not helpful), I was delighted to arrive at my hotel and find this out of the window ... I mean, I knew it would be there, but it was great to have a Gaudí in my view!
So off I went into the city for a couple of hours, heading due south ... I'm sure everyone's Barcelona pictures are exactly the same, but there are good reasons for this ...
My goal was the Cathedral - but it was shutting for tourists for Mass, and I had no idea whether that would be lengthy or not, so I shuffled away ...
with more excellent buildings distracting me on the way back.
More obvious sites will follow tomorrow - this is my whistle-stop tour of Northern Spain, where I've never been, unless you count riding through it on a long-distance bus in 1980 from London Victoria to Nerja, on the south coast - an experience that left me so disorientedly travel sick that I blew a whole lot of money that I didn't have on an air ticket back from Granada (after more buses between Nerja, where I have a strong memory of reading Gareth Stedman Jones' Outcast London on the beach), Seville, which smelt of orange blossom, and Cordoba, with its amazing Moorish architecture. That was even speedier a visit to Spain than this one will be ...
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