Day 99 – 4/23 – Barcelona, Spain

When I worked in Frankfurt, Germany, and then later near Rome, Italy, one of my responsibilities included our Spanish disposable products business (think Pampers) in Spain. Their headquarters was in Barcelona, Spain. Because of this I have been to Barcelona 10-15 times before. This is Kathleen’s first visit to Barcelona.

However, all of my prior visits have consisted of drives from the airport to the office, all-day meetings, and then a dinner in a nice restaurant. I have never truly “visited” any of the sites in Barcelona.

An interesting aspect of the restaurants here is that they typically do not open until 10:00pm! When we had our business dinners, our local company had enough pull with the restaurants that they would get one to “open early” for us so we could start eating at 9:00pm. They knew that 10:00pm was just too late for we foreigners. Even starting at 9:00, you’d be lucky to get to bed by midnight, and that did not change the plans to start work early the next day.

We plan a simpler day today that we have done the past 3 days. We have no formal tour set up, but plan to use the “hop on, hop off” bus to see the city and to select a few spots to stop for longer visits.

Today turned out to be a national holiday: St. George day. This meant that traffic was heavy due to people being off work, roads were clogged, and the hop-on, hop-off choice was not a good one. We spent too much timing waiting for a bus and riding a bus, and not enough time visiting interesting places.

We concluded that St. George must have had something to do with roses and books. There were stands everywhere selling single red roses and others selling books. I think you were supposed to buy your lady friend a rose and then go read a book by yourself.