MegDesk – The Blog

On Sunday, we got back to Oslo from our two-week vacation and cruise to the Canary Islands.  We booked this ages ago when Anne and Johnny (our Australian friends from the Asia cruise last year) decided they’d come to Europe to see Anne’s Danish relatives.  We ended up picking an 11-night cruise on Royal Caribbean’s Voyager of the Seas (the original “big ship” and the first ever to have the on-board ice rink) that stopped at Madeira, the Canary Islands, Lisbon, and Malaga on a roundtrip from Barcelona.

Since Lucas had never been to Barcelona before, and since I had only been in August when it was hot, brown, and closed for the summer holiday, we spent three nights in town before the cruise.

We arrived around noon, checked into our hotel, and then spent the rest of our first day just wandering around La Rambla and the Gothic Quarter.  Unfortunately, we were still on our typical vacation schedule for meals, which involves endless sightseeing until around 3pm when we start to get really hungry.  The Spanish eat lunch late, but not that late!  We kept wandering from restaurant to restaurant in our guidebooks and found them all closed.  Eventually we opted for a little wine bodega that turned out to be down a seedy-looking, graffiti-strewn side street at the edge of the Gothic Quarter.  When we finally found it, it was completely empty and we very nearly turned back.  Hunger got the better of us, though, and we went inside for what turned out to be some pretty good wine and tapas.  And after we’d been there about 10 minutes, the local crowd started swarming in.

The next day was our “Modernism” day, which began with a tour of the Palau de la Musica that we both really enjoyed.  The theater is quite a spectacle, and the photos I’ve seen don’t really do it justice.  I ended up buying a postcard of the drop-shaped stained-glass ceiling to send back to the office, but it apparently never made it.

The rest of our day was filled with Gaudi from the Sagrada Familia to La Pedrera to Casa Batllo.  We went inside them all, and I think they’ve all kind of blended together!  The museum at La Pedrera was quite interesting, but the audio guide was almost tediously long.  Casa Batllo was a tiny bit disappointing inside given its spectacular facade.  Of course, the Sagrada Familia was amazing, even the second time around.  I actually enjoyed it a lot more on this visit, because our handy EyeWitness guide had great descriptions of all the details of the facades.  This time, instead of the confusing impressions I had last time, I came away with a much clearer understanding of what it all was supposed to mean.

In the evening, we couldn’t really find much to do aside from eating more tapas and walking up and down La Rambla, so we decided instead to try to find Anne and Johnny’s hotel.  When we reached it, I figured they would be out and about seeing the town, but we stopped to check anyway.  It turns out they were there, crashed in the hotel after their long, long flight and long, long delays from Australia.  We dragged them all out for a drink, and then we joined them for the flamenco dinner show they’d booked ahead of time.  The flamenco show was entertaining, although I think the host and singer was Bob Barker’s long lost Spanish twin.

The next day we went up to Park Guell to wander around and then took the metro to Barceloneta for a lunch on the beach.  It was nice to be near the ocean, even if it was too cold to go in.  It was also nice to have a slow, relaxing day.  We capped it off with our originally planned tapas dinner with Anne and company, where we had a fantastic meal at Taller de Tapas.

The morning of our cruise, we took the funicular up to Montjuic to see the castle, the view of Barcelona, and the ship.  After looking down at the Sapphire Princess towering over the bustling city of Busan, South Korea last year, we were expecting a similar look at the larger Voyager of the Seas.  However, the Voyager was much less impressive in the huge Barcelona port, and Costa’s big ship Serena pulled in beside her, making her seem even less expansive.  Unable to see the ship name from such a distance, we even started to worry that the Voyager wasn’t even in port, and we were looking instead at another RCCL ship.

After returning to the hotel to pick up our luggage and check out, a short taxi ride to the pier proved that indeed this was the Voyager of the Seas, even though she still didn’t look any bigger than Serena alongside her.

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