Barcelona - Day 5, Summary & Review

Our last day in Barcelona, we visited the Pablo Picasso museum which featured many of Picasso’s works from his time in the city as well as his time in Paris.  Picasso spent a good portion of his life in Barcelona and drew inspiration from the city.  Unfortunately, we were unable to take any pictures.  After the museum, we spent the remainder of our day walking around and enjoying the wonderfully warm weather and charm of Barcelona.  We also made sure to stop and have some amazing crepes on our last day.

Summary & Review 

Barcelona had been a highly anticipated destination for us as many of our good friends had been there (or were from there) and we had universally good reviews.  Reflecting on our time there, Barcelona is a city with an amazing assortment of qualities to make it an easy place to like: great food, interesting history, amazing and unique architecture, fantastic shopping, and beautiful beaches. 

We absolutely fell in love with the tapas and Kate particularly couldn’t get enough of the paella and sangria.  We both were stunned by the work of Gaudi (who we had never heard of before) whose work is so completely unique that it stood out as a highlight of the whole trip.  And the people we met were fantastically friendly.  Barcelona has a great tourist information center that we highly recommend using.  There's many locations, in safe places, they speak English and can book tours for you.  They even recommended a few restaurants for us.

We really liked our hotel - the HCC Montblanc.  It was near the sites, in a safe area, a good price, with free breakfast and Internet.  We walked everywhere from this hotel!

Since we were being cautious with our money, we took public transportation to and from the airport to/from our hotel.  We tried the metro to the hotel and the bus back to the airport.  I think the bus ended up being the easiest for us but both were really great options instead of a cab.

Just a word of caution for anyone planning to visit Barcelona:  It’s the only place of our entire trip that we were warned multiples of times to watch out for pick-pockets.  When we first heard the warning we blew it off given the places we had already visited and survived unscathed, but by the 5^th or 6^th warning from locals, we started to get a sense that maybe Barcelona has a more acute problem.  While we ultimately had no issues, it appears that Barcelona has had a growing problem with pick-pockets to the point where it is considered commonplace and is starting to negatively impact tourism there.  If you plan to go, plan to be on your guard and be aware of your surroundings.

For us, Barcelona was a place to relax, eat some amazing food with Spanish wines and sangria and take some time to celebrate Kate’s birthday.  We didn’t take advantage of the abundant night-life that we had heard so much about as much as we probably should have (apparently the Catalonian people stay up all night long).  Even so, we had a great time and left feeling that we had a great experience in Barcelona.