First stop for the day was the Nou Camp stadium, home of FC Barcelona. Amir was convinced he had found a better train route to get to the stadium, so we had a race off for it. He claims he got lost walking to the ground, and arrived about half an hour later than I did. It was weird to see so many people lining up to buy a ticket for the tour, surely 90% of them don't know anything about football. Between the tour and the official store, the team must be making millions of dollars each week, or day. The team museum was kind of ridiculous because either Barcelona or Madrid seem to have won everything for the last 75 years. Also got to walk around and see some other parts of the stadium.
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| About the only thing I could get a photo in front of. |
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| More than a club. Not sure what that's supposed to mean. |
Next was Plaza De Espana, which was another feature intersection! This one was actually ok, had these twin towers at one exit, and some Arenas De Barcelona at another. The street with the towers also leads down to the massive Museu Nacional d'Art that sits up on the hill. The museum was closed but still looked impressive, and you can look down where you've come from once you've climbed all the way up to the top. Around the back of the museum was this very odd shaped Telefonica Tower, as well as the old stadium where Espanyol used to play - that we would have incorrectly turned up to the previous day. Not a very convenient location for a stadium. Speaking of inconvenient locations, right need to the football stadium was the athletics track they used for the Barcelona 1992 olympics. It is certainly a nice place to be, but seems very impractical to get to.
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| The Arenas de Barcelona and some viewing platform. |
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| The big museum. |
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| The rest of Barcelona. |
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| Apparently it doubles as a big sundial ! |
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| The olympic athletics track. |
From there we took a cable car further up the mountain to the very top, where old Castle Montjuic sits. The cable car ride was alright and the castle was in pretty good shape. Took the cable car down again, which connects with a funicular to get back to the metro train line. A funicular is like a small train that is specifically design to run up and down a slope.
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| Entrance to Castle Montjuic. |
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| The cable car back down. |
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| A funicular. |
In the evening we came back into the city to Port Olimpic. Checked out the casino and then on to the restaurant district near the port. We chose some tapas kind of place and ordered a meal and some tapas - crazy potatoes and crazy salad, where crazy potatoes = wedges and crazy salad = some kind of potato salad type meal only with ham! Lucky Amir tried that one out before me. My suspicion was confirmed that tapas is nothing special at all and people just order it to sound special, tapas = small meals to share, only in a foreign country.
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