Viva Espana!

Last week Andy had a conference in Barcelona, so Claire and I decided to tag along. We had a lot of fun seeing the sights of the city and we were lucky to see Andy's friend from college Siko, who was also attending the conference. Sadly, at some point, our camera was lost or stolen, so we lost a lot of great pictures. These are all pictures from Siko. We ordered a new camera, so hopefully it will come soon.
Claire and I spent the first couple of days sightseeing on our own while Andy was at the conference. Claire really liked the zoo and the aquarium, especially the "daddy fishies", the hippo, and the wallabees. Our hotel was also across the street from a very cool plaza with about a zillion pigeons. Claire loved chasing them around and feeding them food we bought from one of the vendors. Our hotel was also right along the pedestrian walkway called "La Rambla" which was a great spot for people watching. I had a lot of cute pictures from those adventures, but sadly, they were lost with the camera.

Here is a picture of Claire and Siko on La Rambla, posing with one of the many painted characters along the walkway. This one was Edward Scissorhands. Claire was just fascinated by all of them and she called them monsters.

On Friday, Andy, Siko, Claire and I did the hop on hop off bus around the city and saw several of the very cool sites around the city. We visited a church designed by Gaudi called La Sagrada Familia.
We didn't really have time to go inside, but the exterior was very cool. The next stop on the bus was another site by Gaudi, which was a park called Park Guell. It was a very cool, expansive park that had amazing rock and mosaic tile work.

Then we went to yet another Gaudi creation, La Pedrera which is a very cool apartment building that designed and built in the early 1900's. It had very interesting architecture and an amazing rooftop, which is were we were in the following picture.

The next day we met up with Siko again to do more sightseeing. We visited the site of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, which was very cool.


The most interesting venue had to be the diving pools which had amazing views of the city.

Later we went to the beach, which was beautiful. Claire and I stuck our toes in, but it was pretty cold. She had a blast playing in the sand. It was hard to tear he away.

We were scheduled to leave Barcelona on Sunday, but because of the volcanic ash that was disrupting flights all over Europe, the closed the Barcelona airport about 20 minutes after we got there, just as we were getting to the ticket counter. We ended up just going back to our hotel to hang out for another day. We were pretty tired, so we didn't do much that last day and luckily, our flight took off the next day and we were able to fly into Naples without any problem. It was a fantastic trip!