Bye, Bye, Barcelona!

The "Magic Fountain."  Apparently it's quite the water show, but it was starting up for the summer the evening after we left Barcelona, so we didn't get to see it.  Bummer.  Next time.

After our Gaudi afternoon, we decided to trek down to the train station to get a ticket for the next day to Madrid--and good thing we did, since we waited in line about a half hour to finally get our tickets!  

Again my debit card wasn't working (arghhhh!), so I had to call my folks AGAIN to get them to call my bank.  Holy annoying, Batman!  But they are awesome and they got it all figured out for me by the next day.  That meant that Ben (who, if you remember, was NOT all about making decisions), who insisted we have a place to stay before arriving in Madrid, had to be the one to figure it out.  He told me I could figure it out and he would just pay for it, but I decided he needed to be in charge of it, so I gave him a few tips on finding a hotel on the internet (not that hard, right?) and went to bed.

See how BIG La Sagrada Familia is??  Geez!!

Montserrat--a huge basilica up on the hill above Barcelona!  St. Ignatius went to school there for a couple years!!  :) 

 

The next morning was, again, beautiful, and since our hostel provided free luggage storage, we decided to make the most of our last few hours in BCN and wander down to the palace we'd seen the day before (see the first photo on my first BCN post).  We ran across some amazing street musicians, one playing the Hang:

And another playing Spanish guitar.  Gorgeous.

We then found our way to the Olympic Stadium from the 1992 Barcelona Olympics--sooooo cool!!  :)  (Did you know that the 1992 Olympics were the first Olympics South Africa was allowed to compete in since 1960, because of apartheid?  It was also the first Olympics since before the Cold War that Germany to which Germany sent a unified team, and it was the first Olympics where baseball was an actual event.  There's your random trivia for the day.)

Remember when the archer shot the flaming arrow over the cauldron to light the big torch?  Yep, that was Barcelona.  Cool, huh? 

On to Madrid...