5th Day in Barcelona - Two Cathedral, the Beach, and L'Aquarium

These pictures are from the cloister of the Barcelona Cathedral.

Today we made our best effort yet to start the day earlier, waking up at 8:20. We only had two days left here and planned to do a lot today. After breakfast, we made our way first to the Barcelona Cathedral. It was some sort of holiday today in Barcelona/Spain and a ton of shops were closed and the streets quieter than we have seen this last week.

The cathedral was really cool and had an awesome cloister where there were palm trees, some fountains, and 13 white geese in honor of Barcelonas patron saint, Saint Eulalia who was 13 when she was martyred by the Romans. We also took a lift in the church up to the roof. There were great views from there of the city.

After the cathedral we went down to one of the cities beaches called Barceloneta. The weather was excellent and the water not too cold (we ran in, put our heads under, and ran out). We grabbed some doner kebabs for a late lunch then checked out the other major cathedral in the city, Santa Maria del Mar. The gothic cathedral was cool, but very bare inside since the interior had been burned by the those opposing Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War.

We went to L'Aquarium after this, a place Alison has been talking about since the first day we found out we were going to Barcelona. The aquarium is the largest aquarium in Europe and had different tanks recreating the aquatic ecosystems of different bodies of water throughout the world. The coolest part was a moving walkway that led you in a tunnel through a huge tank with sting rays, 5 or 6 enormous sharks, and a bunch of other fish all swimming together. I guess they have it figured out by now which fish will and won't eat each other, but I kept hoping I would see the sharks chomp some of the other fish as we moved by.

We walked home on Las Ramblas and saw some of the sights Rick Steves points out in his travel book. We went to dinner at a resaurant near our hotel called Wagaboo which was one of the better places we have eaten. I got sea bass and Alison got noodles, chicken and vegetables.

Tomorrow Is our last day here and were trying to make sure we see everything we had planned to by tomorrow. Were also getting ready to leave Barcelona and are at the moment doing some laundry in our small sink bowl. Well see how that goes.

I also though I broke my camera at the aquarium, but somehow managed to set the lens back in place. My camera cheats death yet again.