After Porto, we visited Barcelona for four nights during our Portugal & Spain trip.

Saving money at the airport

As we landed in Barcelona, it was 90F+ hot and waiting in intersections would be a pain but Uber seemed too expensive ($45 USD). I looked up ways to get to the city center on the train and use Uber for the last leg. We took the airport shuttle to Terminal 2, then got on the R2N train. It runs only every 30 minutes and we had to walk fast to buy our T-
Mobilitat casual 10 tickets ($15) and catch it just 3 minutes before it departed. This time, directions from Gemini to find the ticket machines and the train station worked out perfectly. Then we got off at El Clot station and called Uber from there. Cars in the taxi category ($10) were not available, so we called the Uber category instead ($15). I’m a bit puzzled that all this hustle only saved us about $28 – both at how cheaper the full taxi fare was than expected (with some small Bolt discounts) and how expensive it was to get a taxi for 2 miles in 10 minutes.

We repeated this in the reverse direction on the day of our departure and it was pretty seamless. Take a taxi to Clot Station, use our last T-casual tap, wait 20 minutes in the still hot station, 30 minutes in the air conditioned train with plenty of seating, cross the pedestrian bridge and catch the shuttle to Terminal 1.

Hilton Diagonal Mar Barcelona Hotel

We were assigned a room on the highest floor 23 at first but were then reassigned to floor 15, the same floor as the hotel lounge. That’s a bit more convenient as drinks and sitting space would be just a few steps away. Being on a high floor, there was almost always a strong breeze and after it cooled down on Friday, we could keep our windows open without AC and it was fresh enough. Although it seems like the AC keeps running even when we turn it off?

We went directly to the hotel pool and got an early dinner there. The pool was not in an ideal setup for us. It seems that they contracted out the pool part to a brand called “Purobeach”, which runs a similar, party and tanning focused pool experience in multiple places in Europe. They hype it up as a high energy party vibe in the hotel’s own marketing. This meant trance-like heavy bass music, couples kissing, and people smoking everywhere. So like those annoying Cancún resorts that cater to young people. Maybe the music volume was more civilized. 

The pool was on the small side for a facility of this size. Like 30×100 feet. It was almost five feet deep, and people were diving into the pool often. Hotel policy says it’s for ages 16+ but there were a decent number of children there as well. The nice thing was that all recliner seats and cabañas were properly shaded, and there was no extra charge for cabañas as long as you grab it early enough.  

But the smokers… There were many smokers, a lot in the seats immediately next to the pool. So you were surrounded by them. Many were smoking hookahs. I saw one guy in a seat overlooking the pool just smoking and shaking his leg the entire time. It reminded me of what image I give when I’m shaking off my leg. Christine doesn’t like the smell of cigarettes and she can detect them very early on and gags. I thought I was fine with smoking smells, spending so much time after college around smokers, but there was one time in the hotel lounge’s balcony area where three people were smoking next to my table and it finally got to me.

I floated in the pool while Christine spent time reading her book by her seat for an hour or two, before we decided to go back to our room. Even in the water, it was too hot. In the evening we headed out to the Diagonal Mar Mall, which is just across the street from the hotel. Either this neighborhood is called Diagonal Mar or there’s a landmark here, but everything around here is named Diagonal Mar. There’s an Avenida Diagonal Mar, a park, hotel, mall… It was still super hot at 9pm but we were hoping to chill in the air conditioned hallways. Unfortunately this day was so hot that even the mall’s AC was not enough to keep the place cool. It was hot. Or maybe it was because people kept many of the entry doors open. We were sweating. We got some wok noodles and ice cream.

Basilica de la Sagrada Familia

On Thursday, we got up early to go to our 9am Basilica de la Sagrada Familia tour. I had visited here with Mingjie twenty years ago on our little Europe trip. I couldn’t remember what it looked like back then. All I remember is going to the bookstore and looking at a book about Catalan independence. But now they finished the nativity facade and were inching towards completion. Also, I just realized this now, but this year is the centenary anniversary since Gaudi’s passing. I worried that we had shown up too early at 8:30am for a 9am entry. Turns out that a dozen people were already in a line, and they let us in pretty early – like 8:50am? There was a German couple from Thüringen in front of us, who also had last visited the basilica twenty years ago. We struck up a brief conversation with a mix of English and German. The German guy was easily amused and was marveling at every little detail that he was discovering while standing in the line. Later when passing through the basilica security, they told him to show his belt area, and he lifted up his Hawaiian shirt with so much enthusiasm that we got to see his nipples.

We had been instructed to bring an audio guide app with a narration that would guide us through the church, but I didn’t bother bringing a headset as we would have only one headset anyways. We entered the church grounds, but no one was going inside, and two security guards were standing by the entrance. We figured that they wanted us to listen to the audio guide and enter the church when the audio guide was timed to tell us “now, let’s enter the church through the south facade”.

The church is, as always, awe-inspiring. That thing is so tall. And it’s filled with details everywhere. And unlike other massive gothic cathedrals, this one is smooth and round and the cylinders slowly rotate upwards. It’s incredible. The night before, we had seen RealEngineering (a Youtube channel)’s 1-hour introduction to the Sagrada Familia’s building techniques and the process of plan reconstruction, so we had some general understanding of its principles.

We thought of using the guide’s written text to guide ourselves, but we get bored easily… so we raw dogged it and just walked around.