Day 2 - or adventures in a Mediterranean city - The Bishop/Kalinowski/Olsen Tour

Tuesday morning the group met, refreshed and rested, ready to hit the town. Today is Barcelona day. A chance to see the city up close and personal. Our visit to the city center coincided with Spanish Labor Day, so many shops were closed, but it also meant that we had more free reign in the sometimes tight lanes of the Gothic Quarter. As one of the group is the organist for her church, this morning we took the liberty of stopping in at Santa Maria del Pi, an unexpected stop but one where the organ was playing on through partially refurbished pipes. The church itself, with it's massive rose window and unique Catalan Gothic architecture, is a great place to visit. As the least visited of the three main churches in the old city, it retains a certain small town charm. That charm was quickly fused with the vibrant reality of the city from the moment we stepped from the stone lit interior into the bright sunlit plaza on the other side of the door. The local products market in the Plaza del Pi provided samples of cheeses and other delicacies before winding our way over to Las Ramblas.

Our morning visit of the old city having left us ready for a refill, we headed over to the Born district for some tapas. On the way we passed street stalls and vendors who were selling hand crafted products, then walked past Santa Maria del Mar church before alighting for lunch. We came, we saw, we ate. Then we proceeded to go across the city and up to Montjuic for a panoramic view of Barcelona. Well, that was the plan. It was interrupted along the way, however, by hundreds of spectators and lots of police who were trying to get some stranded tourists down from the Statue of Columbus at the foot of Las Ramblas. It appears that somehow 6 tourists had been stuck up there for hours, and the resulting convergence of traffic meant that everyone got a great view of the statue from a variety of slightly different angles.

We finally made it up to Montjuic, and a chance to see the city we had just spent the morning exploring from above. We also stopped into the Olympic Stadium, site of Carl Lewis' dominance and over to the Palau Sant Jordi structure, site of the original Dream Team. At the end of the day we headed back into the city with a dinner reservation (with a surprise) awaiting and Montserrat calling for the following morning.

For more information or to plan your own private guided tour in Spain, contact The Spanish Touch at 888-80-0013.