Barcelona

We just woke up in Barcelona after a 12-hour sleep. In spite of sleeping for 20 of the past 22 hours, her body still seems to be winning over the melatonin; it’s certain that it's the middle of the night on the west coast. Kaizen and I are in fine shape and ready to supplement that with some hot chocolate.

Our hotel in Barcelona is a very nice, clean, well-appointed little place near Eixample. It may be the nicest placed I've stayed in Europe thanks to Expedia, since in the past I've stayed in very budget pensions. This was even has good water-pressure.

Figuring that we are more tourists than travelers in this town, since we have less than 48 hours here, we took the Hop-on-hop-off bus around town. Live-and-learn! While it was good for getting our bearings, which was my main goal, I wouldn’t do it again but instead would spend half the cost hiring a taxi to give us a brief general tour. Of course, if I were on my own, or with children who weren’t as tired as Soleil is, then I might just have wandered by foot and skipped the vehicular approach altogether. Now the kids are swimming in the tiny pool on the roof of the hotel after which we’ll walk to the Rambla district, wander some more and have our dinner.

Today I gave Kaizen the chance to be the navigator of the walking portions of our wanderings. That type of real-life experience doesn’t come up very often in our day-to-day life driving around cities which I know like the back of my hand.

We decided today that we should have 3-word themes each day.

Kaizen: “It Felt Urban”
Soleil: “Bikes And Motorcycles”
Lisa: “Sticky, Stylish, Cleavage”