To Barcelona for Alastair

The few days between returning from our trip exploring Cathar country to the north, and heading south to meet up with Alastair in Barcelona sailed by. Saturday night was rather a delight for us. Now we are one of the regulars at Bar Pablo we were invited to its free Xmas celebration with food and drink put on by the bar. We had a very enjoyable evening and got an extra hug from Bruno, the proprietor.

On Sunday there was a special Christmas market, and even carol-singing by a group of English ex-pats. A bit odd we had to come to France to hear English carol-singing.

Christmas is way quieter than normal at Bar Pablo, now closed until mid-January

The big event of the week was of course the trip to Barcelona to pick up Alastair on Wednesday. We took another different route down - if you don't take the toll-roads, there are at least three routes which all take much the same time, and we've been mixing and matching to see more of Catalonia. This time we turned right at Figueres to take the road for Besalu, a gorgeous mediaeval town. If we were ever to live in Spain, a town like Besalu would have to be our choice. It is so demonstrably old and full of history. Quite different to Céret. No trees for a start, but lovely paved squares, and there must be a university or something similar near as there are plenty of student-age people around, something we don't see in Céret. Prices are well down on France - coffees are closer to €1, and a bag of pastries would be only 2/3rds the cost. And you can get entirely chocolate-coated croissants! What more could you ask for?

We started our Barcelona stay with, of course, a trip to Ikea to stock up on a few things that needed replacement. A nice easy transition from our pre-booked Barcelona long-stay carpark (€7 vs 20 in the council ones) to our AirBnB apartment in the old city - a single 15 minute hop on the metro. The apartment is very handily located in the middle of a nice old area with minimal traffic. We filled in some of the time from arriving at 4:30 to Alastair's arrival at 9pm by wandering around getting our bearings.

The next morning we went for a long walk down to the waterfront, our first time there. It's such a lovely generous space, though very deserted at this time of year. Lunchtime rolled around, and we were looking for a place to appease our hunger when we were adopted by a local man. We spent some time talking in gibberish Spanish, before he led us to what is presumably one of his lunch haunts - Nass. It turned out to be just what we needed, a good hearty lunch on a bit of a grey old day. The weather turned wetter, so we had to give our walk away and headed gently back into the city.

Having had a good lunch, we didn't need too much for dinner, so had a delightful tapas/pintxos feast at Bilbao Berria. Great range of food all at €1.65 - they just collect the sticks and count them afterwards. Most enjoyable and a clever concept well carried out.

Our second day was spent just wandering through Barcelona, enjoying the streets and buildings. It's a beautiful city, ideally suited to just passing time. Our previous visits have been a rush from one sight to another, so it was very pleasant having time to absorb the city itself. We ended up at the Modern Art museum at 5pm, but just didn't have the oomph to go in and check it out.

Evening light on Gaudi's Casa Mila

Our AirBnB hosts required us out at 10:30am, so that we did, taking our bags back to the car. Alastair was meeting a friend (he seems to have one in every significant city as a result of his international life) while we headed towards Montjuic. With a bit if shopping on the way, we ran out of time, and we all reassembled at the car for the trip back.

We wanted to show Besalu to Alastair, so stopped there on the way home for a hot chocolate (excellent) and a quick look at the gorgeous mediaevalness of it all.