April 2007 I took a trip to Barcelona, the weather was beautiful and the city looked amazing with the sun shining on it and the blue sky in the background. Barcelona is an amazing city and my camera absolutely loved it. I failed to write a proper diary, so I just broke the trip into some bullet points.

Gaudi was a fruitloop.

No guide book ever made manages to successfully merge map, key, suggested route and information together in such a way to avoid having to keep 3 pages open at once. Must buy compass.

The Sagrada Familia is something of a monstrous hodge podge on the outside, not helped by all the cranes and scaffolding. The inside however managed to take my breath away even *with* the cranes and scaffolding. The view from the tops of the tower is amazing and there's a lift up. But you have to take the stairs down (I'm not sure why) and it's 275 extremely narrow spiral stairs with almost no gaps. It hurt.

When Lonely Planet says "this will be opening end of 2006" check the damn thing online to make sure.

Starbucks in Spain do a white chocolate and raspberry creme brule cheesecake type thing. Worth the trip alone.

Mopeds either do not have to, or do not care to obey traffic signals.

The difference between a 3* hotel (what I paid for) and a 4* hotel (what I got bumped to) is minimal. In this case it was the addition of a swimming pool (which I didn't see) and a 15 minute walk to get to where I wanted to be (which I did not need).

Las Ramblas is nice early in the morning when it's pretty empty. There's a chunk of it dedicated to little pet stalls and they just fold them up at night and leave them, meaning many of them tweet.

The Barcelona aquarium is quite nice, it has lots of octopi, a tank of reproducing cuttle fish (more than I needed to know), a huge tank with sharks and stingrays and a very small number of penguins who just looked a bit bored.

Sorority girls on spring break giggle a lot.

It's worth checking that the funicular up the mountain really is working before including the castle at the top on an itinerary. The castle isn't worth the effort except for the views. If it's hazy, there are no views.

The Olympic park is somewhat depressing, it's very very empty, the stadium is covered in scaffolding and all the fountains are dried up off.

Poble Espanyol is very cute - a little village made up of dozens of replicas of buildings from around Spain. I should have got the audioguide though as I had no idea what I was looking at.

The Font Magica is spectacular, a long sequence of fountains and waterfalls down to a huge fountain that dances to music in the evening. I stayed for three shows sat on the steps.

Whichever genius came up with the idea of a zebra crossing across 6 lanes of traffic should be forced to try and cross his own road for the rest of time.

The Barcelona metro charges just E1.25 for any journey and it's fast, spacious and clean. Each station however seems to have 6 exits which leads to a sort of whack-a-mole style game for tourists.

The 'beautifully detailed gothic cathedral' is neither beautiful nor detailed when covered in scaffolding. The cloisters were nice though. And had geese.

The Museum of the History of the City is a really very well designed museum, with free audiotours and good methods of presentation. Unfortunately the content isn't quite as interesting. I learnt more than I ever wanted to know about how the Romans did their laundry.

I never get tired of seeing palm trees everywhere.

Just a couple more photos