Barcelona Day 2...or where we met Jean Valjean

Here are a couple pictures from the morning and then the train ride to Montserrat. I forgot about them, because they're from my phone so in a different folder.

Adrienne squinty eyes

Adrienne non-squinty eyes

To pick up where I left off, we arrived in the Placa d'Espanya and decided to look around the grounds of the palace.

Anna had read in the Rick Steves book that they had a fountain and light show every 30 minutes starting at 7:30. It was about 6, so we decided to linger and wait until the show started, then get dinner afterwards.

We walked around and stared at the beautiful palace, waited for a while in front of the columns that you can see, then realized that nobody else was waiting. We'd been waiting for a long time, but no one else was looking at the fountain and it was almost 7:30.

Anna had misread the book and it didn't start until 8:30. We were starving, so we decided to head for dinner instead, since Anna had been so wrong.






Oh yeah, I had also read the section about the fountain show, but that's beside the point. Clearly it was Anna's fault.

Here they are dancing over.

The columns we waited at and some of the fountain.

Waiting.

And waiting.

And waiting.

And waiting and Anna being creepy, secretly knowing she was making us wait forever.

Anna, the culprit.

We can ignore that I was equally the culprit.

We decided to try this restaurant we'd heard was really nice and splurge a little bit (It was about $20 each, our most expensive meal on the trip). We attempted to follow a walking tour through the Old Town on the way to the restaurant, but in her hunger and exhaustion, Allison got lost and we had no idea where we were the entire time. We did the walking tour again the next night, much more successfully.

A beautiful fountain.

The old walls and city.

Barcelona Cathedral. Tis enormous.

Continuing with Barcelona Cathedral.

Adrienne and I laughing at something hilarious.


Probably her jumping in my photo.

That is a person

This is very famous.

This is the government square, with the various government buildings being there.

This is a section of the Roman wall.

This is the square our restaurant was in.

Here we are at our restaurant.

L'Academia.

The food was amazing. One of the best meals I've ever had. Allison and I ordered the salmon with mozzarella and tomato, followed by Catalan Creme Brulee. So delicious.

Adrienne and Anna got the cannelloni and Adrienne got chocolate cake instead.

This was the beginning of a running situation and joke, where always ordered the same thing, so we'd end up with only 2 different things between the four of us.


Anna had a bread explosion.

My amazing meal. There were also caramelized onions with the meal.

Adrienne and Anna's meal

We had an embarrassing moment here. Our waiter looked extremely similar to Hugh Jackman as Jean Valjean. Like eerily similar. It was all in the eyes. So we spent the meal being a little giggly.


Then Adrienne was very determined, with our encouragement, to get a picture of him.

She tried to be sneaky, but was unsuccessful. At one point, he said "You'll have to email me that picture."

We stayed a lot longer because I went to ask for the check and ended up just awkwardly saying "Hi."

Then Allison tried to ask for the check and just giggled.

That was repeated with Anna.

And, after all that, we didn't get a picture.

Here is Jean Valjean's blurry profile.

A distance shot, which we clearly pretended was a picture of Anna.

Jean Valjean's blur

The back of his head.

The back of Jean Valjean's head again

His blur at the deserts.

His blurry profile again.

We eventually gave up and left, disappointed.

We headed back to the hostel after walking around a little at night.

Adrienne and I accidentally left from the wrong exit and ended up wandering around for quite a while, realizing we were completely lost and had no idea how to get back to the hostel. We ended up at a completely different subway station, getting back on the subway, then being a bit more careful about the exit the second time. All in all, it was a successful second day in Spain!