Happy Friday! Hope your week has been great so far.
As promised, here are some photos of the places the 4 ladies and I visited during my short trip. My friend (Mercy) and I left Vienna for a 2 hour flight to Barcelona on 18th August. We arrived about ten minutes to midnight, all excited, pulling our luggage behind us and no one - absolutely no one - checked to see if we had visas or not at the airport (which was quite strange). We hopped inside a Taxi and giggled all the way to the hotel.
Anyway, we arrived at the hotel. Over the internet, this hotel room
looked like heaven. Yeah that's what advert photos can do to someone.
It
was a shoe box. A very comfortable shoebox. For 100 euros. But just
look how beautiful the hotel and its environ's facade is. After I saw
this, everything else faded to silence. Nothing mattered.
Barcelona is beautiful. It is everything I'd pictured how an ancient city with such a rich history would loook like: a maze of narrow winding streets, renaissance style buildings, gothic, baroque - In other words, it was my dream and I was drooling all over the place. - my friend handed me a hanky to cover my mouth.
Here is a picture of the room.
I won't mention the breakfast the next morning. I'm just glad Starbucks was next door. Once I stepped through Starbucks doors, the smell of fresh coffee was enough to make me swoon. It was like falling inlove for the very first time. :)
So, aside from the room. The people are super friendly. - I'll ammend that. Some of them were. See, the hotel's location is in a very busy street. And with that it attracts other kinds of business. I noticed that as we climbed out of the taxi. About 5 girls wearing extremely skimpy clothes stood closeby. From their expressions, they didn't seem happy to see us. Anyway, 30 minutes after our arrival, we freshneded up, then decided to check out the Irish Pub across the street because with all that adrenaline pumping in our veins, sleep was a foreign thing.
The hotel receptionist warned us about being careful of pickpockets. They love crowds, possess experienced fingers and are very fast in what they do.
As soon as we stepped in, every body shifted on their stools to look at us. Silence descended. Eyes swept over us. Both of us are really tiny so the 'checking out' didn't take long. As I mentioned above, there were those 5 girls we encountered upon our arrival. Dark skinned girls. My friend and I were glued on the spot, inhaling beer, stake and whatnot scents. Finally we snapped out of our momentary shock. We began searching for the door to flee. In our panic, we forgot where the door was. Turns out it was just a breadth away from where were standing.
We went back to our hotel room, not even trusting ourselves to take a walk down the Carrer De Ferran - the street's name.
But the next day - after laughing off the previous night's events - we had a chance to visit some places - We didn't see alot. It was Sunday and most places were closed, plus we were on a deadline to get to the port.
Here are some photos of some of those streets and buildings.
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| this is the street the hotel was in. |
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| Little old me. This place was a hotspot. For some reason it was a photographer's and a photographee's dream |
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| puppet shop |
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| Architecture |
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| bridge/architecture | |
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| Some places we encountered groups like this playing beautiful music. Sounded so romantic though I couldn't understand the lyrics. There was a lot of swaying and dancing. |
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By 2.30pm we were exhausted. Having been smacked left, right and centre by the scorching sun (it was about 35 degrees if I remember correctly), we took a taxi to the port and joyously stepped into what my friends and I called - the floating city :)
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| Me with the red handbag with my friend Janet. |
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| Janet, Mercy, Alice, and me..haha that red bag again |
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| me and Bernice |
From Barcelona, the next stop was in Naples, Italy. Man, that was fun! I'll post the photos next week.
Hope you have a great weekend. :)
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