Oh Barcelona, May 8th

Waking up in a new city is both exciting and daunting.  Maybe it is the unfamiliar noises of your new locale or your stomach growling for some breakfast that finally gets you moving after your long day of travel.  

First on the agenda, find a mercado for some staples and local fare.  Barcelona has one of the largest and most well known markets in Spain,  La Boqueria.  It happened to be conveniently located within a ten minute walk from our apartment.  It defies description of scale.  We had visited before on our previous trip to Barcelona and it again did not disappoint.  It is "farmer's market" porn.

Finding the local and nearest grocery store can be a little more challenging.  A short walk got us to Consume market, the local chain.  It had most any staple required to fulfill my grocery list of eggs, sausage or bacon, yogurt, coffee, wine, olives and cheese. We found amazing inexpensive wines (2-3 Euros) that turned out to be fantastic. I bought Pancetta de Cerdo (thought is was a bacon facsimile). It turned out to be fresh pork (uncured pork belly).  The first attempt at cooking it for breakfast turned out "meh".  I figured it out for the second preparation and it was not bacon but yummy anyway.

I also purchased "gazpacho original" in a 1 quart carton.  This is one of my favorite food items in Spain.  Not such a good purchase, it did not have the rich taste I was looking for.  After researching, I learned that I prefer the taste of "Andalucian" gazpacho which has stale bread incorporated, giving it a creamier texture.  Live and learn.  I have since corrected my error and had some awesome gazpacho out of a carton.

And if you can't find exactly what you are craving at the local market or grocery, you can be accommodated at CHOK, for a Kronut or some other exotic pastry.  Check out the link to see how they hang their little masterpieces on a pegboard behind the register.  Very creative and delicious.

Arrival and the big reveal

We made it to the Barcelona airport, major milestone.  

Now begins the intrepid journey to exit the airport, make a phone call to your host to notify them of your rather inconvenient arrival time, find the right transportation, buy a ticket for the bus/train, know the right stop at which to exit the transportation and then channel your inner Magellan on foreign streets to the apartment you reserved several months ago at 11 PM at night. 

First stop outside the baggage claim/declaration gate, get local currency.  Chose the buttons carefully, don't want to lose the ATM card in your first hour in a foreign country.  

Euros, check.

Our host had sent us fairly detailed directions about the bus from the airport, we need the blue Aero bus. Most airports are laid out the same so ground transportation signs were pretty obvious.  We got a visual on the big blue bus and it's nearby ticket machine.  Mike began his quest to call our contact so she could meet us at the apartment.  I went over to the ticket machine to procure two bus tickets.

Mike's first couple of phone call attempts did not go through...tension mounting.  I navigated the ticket machine to the payment screen twice only to be stymied by a PIN number request.  Rats!

In the din of the airport I hear Mike finish a quick call with our contact. Whew!  As tension rises for me at the ticket machine, a very helpful person comes over to explain that you can pay cash for tickets on the bus. It a common practice that most, if not all credit card transactions using machines require a PIN in Europe.  This is not common practice in the US as Mike found out when he called both our credit card providers the next day.  "Our cards don't have a PIN security capability yet, you will not be able to use your credit cards for payment at those machines that require it." Thank you and have a nice day.  I guess we are no longer the center of the technology universe.

We got on the Aero bus and uneasily ride along, hoping we are on the right one. The airport suburb gives weigh to to lights and density of Barcelona.  I hear our destination, Universidad Metro on the recording, I think.  The instructions provided by our host indicated a 45 min bus ride.  Our ride seemed much shorter, but sleep deprived and disoriented we schlepped our bags from the bus onto a very busy plaza.

There were hundreds of people bustling around us a we went in the wrong direction a couple of times.  It was like we were staring in a Candid Camera version of The Amazing Race.  We finally identified a few of the landmarks from the directions.  Mike may actually be a direct descendant of Magellan...

We walked purposefully, but uneasily down the narrow, graffiti-laden street of Joaqin de Costa with our suitcases and packs. Really, no one even paid attention to us, but it was slightly intimidating.  We arrived at the apartment and waited about 5 minutes for our contact to arrive.  

I remembered discussing that the apartment was on the 3rd floor when we booked it.  No lift/elevator.  We figured 3 floors would be OK to carry luggage.  As we began to go up, it was more like 5 flights of stairs.  The first two flights were not numbered, then the last 3 flights were numbered Primero, Segundo and Tercero.  The building was extremely old and the automatic timer on the stairwell light expired as we schlepped our bags up the stairs, plunging us into darkness halfway up.

We waited for Danielle to unlock the apartment door for the big reveal...it was newly remodeled as advertised with hardwood floors, 2 bedrooms, very modern bathroom and kitchen and nicely appointed living salon.  A very welcoming place to start our journey and our revisit to Barcelona.  

Award Travel

Sounds like a good thing, you are being awarded for something...right? That is what it is called when you book airline tickets using award miles that you have earned via your particular airline loyalty card. Some restrictions apply. In our case, flying to Barcelona, Spain from Orlando, FL was a total of 17 hours of total travel time.

We booked a British Airways flight with "award" miles from its partner American Airlines. This meant an overnight flight to London Gatwick Airport (7 hours and 45 min flight), an 8 hour layover in London and then on to Barcelona (2 hour flight) arriving Barcelona at around 9PM. This was the best itinerary available for "award" tickets.

Some carriers now charge you a per seat premium to pre-book any seat assignment more than 24 hours before your flight, including British Airways. If you don't pay, you can only select your seat at the time of check in. We debated the relative virtue of the $90 ($45 pp) on an 8 hour overnight flight, kept checking the seat map every couple of days to see who was shelling out the extra money. It looked to us like no one else wanted to pay the advance seat fee either. We checked in 24 hours in advance, got aisle seats in the bulkhead middle row with an empty seat between us. Now we wait to see if the gamble of getting a row to ourselves pays off.

After an uneventful 1 hour shuttle ride to the Orlando airport at rush hour, we dropped off our two suitcases to be checked through to Barcelona and proceeded through a rather short security line to our gate. Our flight departed on-time, feeling really lucky now. PAYDIRT...a whole row to ourselves. It did not make sleeping on the flight any better but we had legroom and an extra tray table to place our wine.

We had a great selection of movies to pass the time. I watched 12 Years A Slave (terribly moving and devastatingly sad), then needed to refill my "happy" tank so I selected Saving Mr. Banks (how can you not smile at Tom Hanks as Walt Disney). We got a rough hour or two of sleep then we were in London.

Mike had hoped that we could find a reasonably easy way to get into London to spend the hours of our layover.  There was no easy way to store the bags we carried on and London Gatwick is not as close as Heathrow to the city, so we decided to hang out at the airport.

Luckily, we have a membership card that gets us into some airline clubs across the globe. We quickly checked into a very large club with reasonably substantial free snacks, drinks and wi-fi (the Traveler's Trifecta). Bleary-eyed, we mindlessly ate and drank every hour or so to fend of sleep and boredom, caught up on current events on-line, read our books and people watched. It was a very busy place and many people came and went while we spent 7 hours there awaiting our flight to Spain.

The flight from London to Spain landed a little early at approximately 9PM , about 24 hours from our departure from Orlando. Hola Barcelona!