Cruise day three Barcelona, Spain

Cruise day three Barcelona, Spain

                                                We spent a lot of time in lines today .<

On our second day in Barcelona I decided that we needed to hit all of the major attractions of the city. On the plus side the city of Barcelona has a fantastic subway system that will take you to any place in the city cheaply and efficiently. On the downside as they are the major attractions of an international city the lines and the price for entry were outrageous. We ended up going to many of the tourist destinations only to take pictures from the outside. Also there is the whole “mission creep” phenomenon. That is you see so many wonderful things it is hard for you to wait in line to see yet another wonderful thing. I have to say that I enjoy(ed) stumbling around and finding thing that may or may not be “major” destinations as much as if not more than hunting down specific “major” sites. It seems a bit more interesting to happen upon a site and then explore it. If it happens to be a “major” or minor site does not matter as you are just exploring having fun!

                                                         Sagrada Familia
That being said on the second day in Barcelona we decided to go after the big sites that we did not see the day before. I have to say right out that it was not as fun as the day before, but we did run into some fun things on the way and enjoyed them.

                                    David and Tita posing at Sagrada Familia- the kids refused !

The first thing on the bucket list was the Sagrada Familia the famous cathedral that is always being worked on!  “the Sagrada Família (Catalan pronunciation: [s?'??að? f?'mi?i?]), is a large Roman Catholic church in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, designed by Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926). Although incomplete, the church is a UNESCO World Heritage Site,” It was a nice place to visit and see but the work on it was still quite extensive so the outside was as not as beautiful as it is in the pictures. AS far as going into the inside the line was something like ½ way around the building and it is a huge building. Also as I have mentioned before you get a bit of overkill on all the cathedrals and it just gets to be a bit too much of the same.

                                             Andrew waiting in line at the Picasso Museum

After our obligatory visit to the Sagrada Familia I decided that I wanted to actually go to a museum. You have to understand that all of us in the family have become opposed to going to museums and cathedrals as the majority of them are ok but far from worth the $20 per person entrance fee. But I was sure that the Picasso museum was going to be different! How wrong I was!  
The long wait in line at the Picasso Museum!

I was a much better Picasso exhibit ( at traveling exhibit) at the Detroit Institute of Arts back in 1989. And I have to say that many of his more famous works of art were not even in the museum, sure they had a bunch of his early work, but not much of the historical works. I did enjoy seeing his early work as it showed that he was trained in classical painting and sculpting. It showed a side of his work that is usually not focused on. I did not enjoy the countless rough sketch work as it usually did not include the final work just the rough sketches and the studies that he had done. It would have been wonderful if they had a full collection of a few pieces of his more famous art. That is it would have been great if they had the rough art, the sketches, the studies and then the buildup to the final piece of work, but usually they had the sketches and that was about it. What was most disappointing to me was the collection of his work from the Blue Period, at the Detroit show it had a poignant selection of this period showing the melancholy that the artist was experiencing. All in all the museum was almost random collection of his work that did not show the true genius of the artist, which is sad as he had spent some informative years of his life in Barcelona.

  As I said at the beginning the day was not as much fun as wandering around aimlessly like we did the first day. If anything I felt it was a waste of time and money to try to track down the “must do” sites and attractions of Barcelona. Well not a waste but the hype overs shadowed the actual experience of the big sites while the smaller “found” sites easily were worth finding.

                                                         Train Station Barcelona

Barcelona, Spain- Day 1

Cruise day two Barcelona, Spain

Well actually this was days 3 and 4 as I had a bit too much fun on the night before my birthday and we ended up staying in for day two of the cruise. Not that it was much of a deal anyway as I was not to excited about Monte Carlo, Monaco. Sure it would have been fun to get off the boat and explore some of a country we had never gone to but the kids were pretty tired after walking for 4 hours straight the day before and we had heard that Monte Carlo was good for two things shopping and casinos. The first problem was that the shopping they were talking about was for high fashion items and I am cheap person looking for a great deal. The second problem is that I do not gamble, not out of principle or anything like that but I am bad at it and I just end up giving my money to the person- again I am too cheap to do that more than once.

Did I mention the FOOD! I guess that was another reason we stayed on board, it was hard to get off the ship when all the meals were served all you can eat buffet style, granted some stations prepared your food to order. The quality and selection were amazing! I must have gained 20 lbs. on the boat in the 10 days I was there. Also room service was complementary so if you did not get enough at the trough of breakfast lunch dinner- which melded into one continuous meal with different selections- you could order room service 24 hours a day at no extra cost. The only two things that were extra on the cruise were alcohol and soda. And they were so expensive that we tended to avoid them, tended I did not say I avoided them totally because happy hour was buy one get one, hence my trouble the night before.

Christopher Columbus Statue

So the next time we got off the boat was on 30 July at the port of Barcelona, Spain. I have to say I really liked Barcelona and had a great time exploring the first day. We were in port for 2 days in Barcelona.  We started our wandering at the Christopher Columbus Statue (above) which then lead to Las Rambla which was a nice tree lined street with many off shoots in the heart of Barcelona.

I guess I had a better time on the first day because we just wandered around town not trying to see anything in particular. We ended up finding a lot of neat little churches and plazas that were nice and quaint and a bit off the normal tourist routes. One of the first little churches that we happened upon was St. Maria Del Pi. We found it in a nameless plaza that we had wandered into aimlessly.

  

 In fact we found our favorite building of the whole trip by wandering around aimlessly in Barcelona.

The Eyeball Building?

Actually the Palau de Musica was a good second contender for our favorite building on the trip as well. We- ok I – wanted to go in to get a full tour of the Music Palace but the tickets were $20 a person and there was no way I was going to cough up $80 to hear my kids bitch about being dragged through another museum/cathedral - and this was only day 2 for God’s sake!

I did convince the kids to go into the Cathedral de Barcelona, which was nice. It gave us some time out of the sun and they got to see a lot of wonderful architecture.  

The cool thing about the Cathedral de Barcelona was that it had a pound and pen for these swans! It was neat sitting in the plaza of the church watching the swans- granted they got pretty mean to one of their own - those priests need to raise them better.

Well we wandered around for the better part of 5 hours before we found ourselves back at the feeding trough – err I mean back on the boat to eat!

Pisa, Italy

Our first day on the cruise was a total surprise as we were almost not on the cruise. I had read the instructions to the cruise wrong and thought that we could not get on until 5 pm. Luckily Tita had read the notes carefully and saw that we needed to be on the cruise 4 hours before departure which was at 5 pm. Instead of taking the bus to the airport to the train station to Rome then to the pier in Civitavecchia , Italy we decided to take a private car (BMW 7 series) directly to the pier.

Our ship the ms Noordam

Our itinerary was …

Day        Date                      Port

0               27 July 2012       Civitavecchia (Rome), Italy

1              28 July 2012        Livorno (Florence/Pisa), Italy

2              29 July 2012        Monte Carlo, Monaco

3              30 July 2012        Barcelona, Spain ON

4              31 July 2012        Barcelona, Spain

5              1 Aug 2012          Palma de Mallorca, Spain

6              2 Aug 2012          At Sea

7              3 Aug 2012          La Goulette (Tunis), Tunisia

8              4 Aug 2012          Palermo, Sicily, Italy

9              5 Aug 2012          Naples, Italy

10           6 Aug 2012          Civitavecchia (Rome), Italy

I will hopefully post something for each day. I will post pictures of each day on my Facebook Account ( https://www.facebook.com/david.rumptz) if you want to see more than the few I send with the e-mail.

As you can see from the itinerary we do not actually land in Pisa, as it is not on the cost. We landed in Livorno then took a bus / train ride up to Pisa. This was actually very easy and very cheap. I was surprised how well they cratered to the tourist and how easy they made it to transit thought Livorno on your way up to wither Pisa or Florence. Not all cities were as easy to get around.

Once we got into Pisa itself we had to hike about 20 minutes up the Leaning tower area, which contains several structures in its walled area described below.

Pisa's Cathedral Square (Piazza del Duomo) is the area that houses the most well-known structures in Pisa including the leaning tower itself. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is the bell tower for the Cathedral  that lies behind it in my picture. The cathedral itself is quite impressive outside and in but after a while you get a bit of cathedral overload and just do not want to see another magnificent cathedral. But props to my Gesu friends and after a while I came to realize what a beautiful church we had growing up and think that its majesty could hold it place to some of the cathedrals in Europe, some.

Well back to the other structures in Pisa's Cathedral Square (Piazza del Duomo), I was smart enough to ask the person selling tickets which would be the best places to visit and she mentioned that the small museum south of the leaning tower would be best. And she was right though the museum itself and collection were pretty lacking the private courtyard it had just in front of the leaning tower made up for it in spades. We were allowed to have a private view of the leaning tower with no crowds to contend with and let me tell you there were crowds in the main area in front of the tower.

Although the leaning tower is the most well know part of Pisa it is really a city of wonderful small plazas that we discovered on our way back to the train station. Like this one the Piazza Dei Cavalieri truly a cool place to see sadly the pictures cannot capture all the beauty of such a small plaza. Granted this is the same plaza that holds the University of Pisa. “Pisa is also known for its excellent university, which was established in 1343 and has become one of Italy's top schools.”

For those of you that want to know more about the area a quick look at this web site gives you an idea http://www.pisa.world-guides.com/