Wednesday, June 10: El Día de Orientación

Today was our Orientation Day in Barcelona.  We took a long walk around the neighborhood of our apartment and ended up in Parque Joan Miró, a lovely park dominated by a huge statue by Joan Miró, an artist from Barcelona.

A little strange for my taste, but certainly eye-catching.  It was a lovely park, with families and children and dogs.  There were parrots in some of the trees!

Near the park, we found a large arena.  We later learned that it had been the bull-fighting arena until a few years ago when bull-fighting was banned in Catalonia*.  It's now filled with shops.  We didn't go shopping, but we discovered that there is a big glass elevator leading to the top of the area, where you can walk around and take pictures, like this one, looking down at a beautiful monument.  You can see a little of the elevator on the right-hand side:

*For anyone who doesn't know already, Catalonia is a region that includes parts of France and Spain.  It was once an independent country and the region has its own language.  We hear Catalán spoken here in Barcelona more often than we hear Spanish and most signs are in Catalán (often with Spanish and English underneath).  It's a lot like Quebec or Scotland here; a large percentage of residents of the Spanish part of Catalonia would like to become independent from Spain.  I haven't read up on all of the politics, but Wikipedia says that the Spanish government has not agreed to requests for an official referendum.

After the elevator and a bit of lunch we caught a sight-seeing bus -- one of those buses where they drive you around and point out places of interest and you can get on and off to explore when you want to.  We mostly stayed on the bus and rode around to get our bearings and understand the sections of the city and make lists of things we'd like to see later on.  Barcelona is a beautiful city with lots of variety and history.  Here are some of my favorite pictures from the bus:

more lovely buildings with balconies

my first look at the Mediteranean from ground level

one of many beautiful parks...

...and one of many fountains

the Cathedral's bell tower from the cathedral (12th century)

At the end of all this walking and riding in the sun, we were pretty tired.  We went back to the apartment and got cleaned up and rested a bit and then headed out for dinner.  The restaurant we had planned to go to turned out not to have any tables for us, but we found a lovely Columbian restaurant right around the corner and had a wonderful dinner.