Barcelona!

We made it to Barcelona a little more than two weeks ago. We caught an Easy Jet from Paris and made it in about an hour. I love how fast and easy travel is over here. We flew in over the beach and got some gorgeous views of Spain.

Family in front of Barcelona Cathederal

Our apartment is in the Gothic Quarter, which is such a great spot for us. Really, it’s a great spot for everyone! It has so many different alleyways with beautiful architecture, yummy restaurants and so many places to shop and explore. We constantly find ourselves taking the long way home, just so we can discover what’s around the next alley. Normally, I used to think of alleys as scary places where sketchy hooligans would hang out, but that isn’t the case here. We have felt so safe and the people have been so friendly. We live really close to the Barcelona Cathedral. It is one of our favorite buildings here. We took a tour and got to walk around the top of it.

I could write a whole post on the food alone. Almost everything we’ve had has been SO delicious. We stopped at a busy local restaurant uptown that was popular amongst the locals. We decided to try the traditional dish here- paella. It is rice and seafood so it sounded safe enough. It came with all kinds of huge shellfish, completely in tact with their eyes staring up at me. When I picked at the rice to get my first bite, a long orange string came through my fork. I didn’t really think much of it-thinking it was a shredded carrot. I had a bite of the rice and the flavor was so good. I enjoyed a few more small bites before I hit something really crunchy. What I thought was a carrot turned out to be a shrimp leg! Then when we started to dig through the rice more, I noticed lots of other shells and that long orange thing was actually a shrimp antenna! Austin and I were both trying not to lose what little lunch we had right then and there. The whole rest of the day we kept downing water to try and get rid of the phantom shrimp legs we felt in our throats. Other than that one experience- the food really is amazing! I’ve never tasted fruit so delicious in my whole life, and it is so inexpensive.

On one of our first days here, we decided to take a hop-on, hop-off bus tour to get acquainted with the city and figure out where everything is. It was fun to get to do a lot of the tourist things we had on our bucket list, too. We got to see the Sagrada Familia church. I’ve never seen anything like it. Gaudi, who died before it was completed, originally designed it. It has taken over 100 years to build and they’re still working on it. It is projected to be finished in 2026. We stopped and walked around Park Guell, which was also designed by Gaudi. We wandered down Las Ramblas street, where they have artists, music and tons of flower shops. During a pit-stop to a playground, we stumbled across Barcelona’s Arc De Triomf, which is beautiful.

One thing I love about Barcelona is that they have little town squares all throughout the city. Most of them have some sort of water fountain and are usually in front of an old church. It is so beautiful. In the city center town square, there are so many pigeons. Austin pushed Sky in the stroller and chased them around and she thought it was the funniest thing.