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.

This was very hot. The shuttle from T1 to T2 was very hot and crowded. At T1, we were racing against time and walking briskly in a very hot, open air (but shaded thank god) bridge finding our way to the train station. The train was air conditioned. Then at Clot, we waited another 20 minutes finding and waiting for the taxi. It was very hot.

We repeated this in the reverse direction on the day of our departure and it was pretty seamless and more fresh as the day was cooler and it was early in the morning. 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 read a review from someone who found the heavy bass repetitive music playing all afternoon by the pool to be dumb and annoying. Yeah, that was my general vibe. On the other end of the spectrum, someone who apparently only goes to “beach clubs” to party reviewed the pool and described it as “classy, older crowd and not for people who seek full-on pool party madness“. If this annoying heavy bass pool is considered “classy and not heavy on party energy”, I gotta polish up on my knowledge of party hotels and definitely avoid them like the plague in future travels.

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.

The hotel breakfast was excellent. They had a churros and hot chocolate station, rotating selection of cakes, tarts and puddings, middle eastern rice, jamón ibérico, the works. One morning I found that they had a menu item named “trigo saraceno” among the breakfast offerings. Which means buckwheat in Spanish. So I’m very allergic to buckwheat. Whenever we go to fancy restaurants, the waiter asks “do we have any allergies in the group today?”, and I always make it a point to tell them about buckwheat. Buckwheat is often used to make korean & japanese cold noodles. When we went to Chile, our fancy waiter had no idea what buckwheat was. “Es trigo saracén. Lo usan para algunos tallarines asiáticos”, I told our fancy waiter. He had never in his life had heard “trigo saracén”, either. That’s how far Chile is from anything Asian. I was so glad to finally see “trigo saracén” written out in a Spanish-language setting. It’s not just in my imagination! It exists!

Basílica 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’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. It hadn’t really cooled down all night. It was hot in the church. For half of the visit, I just stood in front of one of the fans, reading the audio guide, looking at the stained glass, and followed the fan as it turned.

Afterwards we headed to the Gothic Quarter. We walked through La Mercat de la Boqueria, and Mercat de Santa Caterina. Boqueria is known as a tourist trap but we actually found Boqueria more relevant as tourists. They had snacks and drinks. Santa Caterina was an actual market, selling meats, jamon iberico, breads – mostly stuff that needs to be cooked in a kitchen. I was too tired after the Basilica, so we returned briefly afterwards and tried to lounge in the pool area. It was too loud, though, so we mostly stayed in the hotel lounge and our room.

Diagonal Mar: Beach, Spider Man, Paella

On Friday, the temperatures had dropped noticeably. We opened the windows and we were getting fresh air flowing through the room. We walked around the Gothic Quarters again, had some pastries. We returned to the hotel and stayed in the pool area until 3pm. When we went to the pool area at 12pm, the cloth couches away from the pool were available and those were actually very comfortable to lounge at. It was far from the music, there was no sun as we were under the building’s shade, and a very nice breeze was blowing through the tunnel as we chilled on our phones. 

At 5pm, we rented ebikes and biked to Bogatell Beach and Llevant Beach. According to Gemini, Bogatell Beach was supposed to be a little bit more calm than Llevant. But at 5pm both beaches were equally rough and the wave advisory was showing yellow flags. We entered the ocean at waist-depth and jumped over the waves. After getting comfortable with it, we tried out our floatie on it. The waves were pretty high, but we managed.

After returning from the beach at 6pm, we were not quite feeling like dinner yet but didn’t want to take a nap and potentially break our time zone adjustment. So I looked up movies at the Cinesa Theater at the mall and we went to watch Spiderman: Brand New Day with English audio and Spanish subtitles. We were about 15 minutes late, but I figured it would still be playing trailers and that we would have plenty of time. (In the US, trailers play for 20-30 minutes after the supposed movie showtime.) I  also went ready for a freezing cold. It turned out to be very different from what I expected. When we walked in, it seemed like the movie had been playing for over 10 minutes already, and the A/C was only mild. It was comfortably non-hot and I didn’t need my jacket.

Afterwards, we wanted to try Paella but the restaurants in the mall only had Valencia style Paellas/squid ink paellas. We settled for one of the fusion tapas places and got shrimp salad, croquettes and yakisoba noodles. The yakisoba noodles were terrible.. It was so salty that it dominated the plate and even after we got a new, less salty plate, it was still super salty. The shrimp salad was nice.

On Saturday, we were not quite sure how to spend our time, and Christine was scanning the surroundings from our room window and pointed at the nearby Natural Sciences Museum. It looked like they had dinosaurs bones and could be fun! They had a “permanent exhibit” and “temporary exhibit with a focus on extinct animals”, and I chose the permanent one: Planet Life. The beginning of it was pretty impressive with cool lights, an interesting storytelling component and fun dinosaur bones. 

As we moved through the exhibit, however, it became a stale and overwhelming display of their entire collection, just divided into themes like chapters of a high school biology syllabus. They actually named halls “Photosynthesis Chapter”, “Next Chapter”. We would walk up to a section and they had like 200 bird bones on display, each one with their little name on a tag. It got boring fast. They had some AR-style touchscreens but it was at its core a menu-system display of encyclopedia-style information. I didn’t see children sticking around with the AR devices. I commented that it looked like the educators and scientists had a tug of war over how to present the information, and the educators won in the first 20% of the exhibit but towards the end the scientists won. After an hour, we left the exhibit a bit disappointed. I learned later that the Temporary Exhibit: Invisible  Animals is the actual fun one, with interesting storytelling and unique visuals.

We walked to Teva Casa to try their paella. Reviews were giving good marks. Most other restaurants I had looked at required the paella to be ordered for two people, but here they didn’t have that requirement. So we ordered both one serving of paella and one serving of blue lobster rice, and caesar salad. They only had outdoor seating, and we went out hoping that there would be no smokers around. There were none at first, but shortly before the food came out, voila some guy walked out of his apartment with his friend and they started smoking. When the paella came out, wasps started swarming us and circling the plates. We swatted some away, but more and more started showing up. Christine was very startled by them. At one point, I put a plate with the empty lobster shell on a chair away from us so that the wasps would go to that one instead of coming after us. The waiters watched us make a big scene around the table trying to swat away the wasps for a dozen minutes, and they invited us to an indoor seat. No more cigarette smell, no more wasps! The paella was delicious.

We wrapped the night by watching the latest movie in the Godzilla franchise that we had started watching last month. We watched Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. Oh my god is this movie bad. It’s geared towards ten year olds. The ice dragon legit looked straight out of the World of Warcraft Classic game footage.

On Sunday, we flew back to Los Angeles.