Barcelona

We are in
Barcelona at the Caledonian Hotel in the heart of the city.

This is a great walking city and the Ramblas is full of people. Shops and restaurants galore and several street performers on every block--- some of them have come up with fabulous costumes and characters.

We flew on Ryan Air, which is cheap, not great customer service but cheap. The seats don’t recline and the flight attendants are up and down the aisle selling you food drink and even lottery tickets. Its non stop, but its cheap. I think Annie and I paid about $70 for both tickets from Malaga to Girona (Girona is a secondary airport for Barcelona approx 60 miles from city center.

Today we walked thru the park, came a cross a very big Harley Davidson rally (its funny to see a rally in Barcelona based on a company based in Wisconsin. Then we visited the Joan Miro museum. He lived here in Barcelona and this is the largest collection of his work anywhere.

We went on a harbor cruise and saw Barcelona from the water then we went to the Picasso Museum and saw a large retrospective of his work. He was born in Malaga, but spent a substantial part of his life here in Barcelona. We must have walked 5 hours today.

Attention Harley Lovers
Annie and I were trying to figure out why so many hotels were sold out when we were looking for a room in Barcelona. This morning the reason went right by our hotel window. The Harley Days Barcelona 2010 is here this weekend. The final event is the flag parade and I am sure over 10,000 motorcycles just went past our little balcony . What a sight. The last one was in 2008 and over 100,000 people visited the city for that one. I don’t know how many people go to Sturgis, but if this isn’t bigger, this cant be far behind. WOW!!!

Today we took the .bus tour of Barcelona. This is a wonderful,clean cosmopolitan city and I could see living here. We saw several bldgs designed by Gaudi which are big tourist attractions. But there are also 4 projects here by Jean Nouvel, who designed the Guthrie Theatre in Mpls.
He has 2 park projects here and 2 bldgs.
One is definitely an icon of Barcelona—all glass shaped like a very tall cucumber with lights that change color in the night.
This man will make an impact on this city.

This eve we went to see Barcelona Opera Flamenc. This is a combination I never heard of before but there are a couple famous opera composers from Spain. It was a combination of Arias, flamenco music and dancing. Quite the interesting evening