Yesterday we arrived home from a day at Montserrat to find Colins undies sitting on the bonnet of a car in the street where our appartment is in Barcelona. It seems that they blew off the balcony of our 4th floor room! Did I mention there are 70 steps up to our appartment? Oh yes, I guess I did.

We spent the past few days exploring Barcelona by foot. From our position on Barceloneta beach we have walked up past Placa Calalunya to the Gaudi appartments and to the park where parliament house and the zoo sits. We’ve rambled up la Ramble many many times to watch the Barcelona crowds elbowing through the buskers and market stalls. We scrambled all over Mount Juic and up to the castle where we experienced our first FREE castle entrance. Yes we have over walked 25 K’s a day and then after tea we go for a walk along the beach. Pity we are eating so much or we would be loooking pretty lean!

Do you know you can buy a beer at 8am but not fresh milk? Fresh milk is pretty hard to find in France and Spain but it doesn’t help when the Supermarket doesn’t open until 9am (hours after the bars… or perhaps they just don’t close from the night before!).

Yesterday we sprinted 3 k’s to the spot where we had to meet our tour bus for the day. Our one and only tour for the 7 weeks in Europe, was to Monserrat, where we were taken by bus up into the mountain to see the Cathedral, monastary and village with 1000’s of other tourists. Our tour guide was incredible in giving us a commentary along the journey in 4 languages: Spanish, English, French and Italian, customised for the mix of people on board. He was fluent in all languages. I couldn’t help but wonder how many others he knew.

Monserrat was pretty awesome, although we only had a short time there and would have enjoyed a walk across the mountain tops but we were happy to inspect the famous black mother Mary from a distance and the cathedral, which was pretty spectacular. We arrived back at the respectable hour of 3pm and walked another 3 k back to the appartment and climbed the 70 stairs (collecting Colins  undies off the car bonnet on the way).

The photo below doesn’t show that the buildings are actually WAY up the mountain side, true Europe style. I wasn’t able to photograph it from where we were but you can imagine it or look it up on Google.

While writing this, Colin put nutmeg on his boiled egg instead of pepper. One of the joys of not being able to read Spanish;)

Tomorrow we leave our beach appartment for one near the airport, since our flight changed to 7am from 8.30am!! Strangely, our travel agent didn’t notify us of the change. Grrr!