Barcelona is art city indeed!

You might have read our previous posts where we reminisce our honeymoon in Madrid and journey through to the south of Spain. Having made a circular route that included Portugal, we were back in Madrid. There we bade farewell to tour mates from the trip, some of whom we are still in touch after so many years.

But our honeymoon was far from over.

For an hour’s flight later we had arrived in the city of Barcelona. Distinct in language, customs and traditions, Barcelona had always been an artful city in our minds. This is because its most famous son is Antoni Gaudi. Now before we were there the impression we had was the mosaics. For aside from the Sagrada the only other thing we knew about back then was what WE call the “Salamander”… el drac as it might be otherwise be called.

How long did we stay in the city?

A week! And we took it slow. While we did not visit all of Gaudi’ iconic buildings, we did see quite a few of them. And next time take the lift when you are at the Sagrada. It’s definitely easier on the knees and a whole lot faster too unless you had time like we did. Heheh. People spend a few hours here. We were almost here the whole day, peeling off only for lunch at the nearby tapas restaurants. Read all about it and more of what we did here.

We wrote about the city becoming really congested and overwhelmed by tourists. How would you recommend managing this much love from tourists?

Driving across Spain

Did you know that the Roman emperors Trajan and Hadrian were both born in present day Spain? It was considered one of the most important provinces of the Roman empire. How about the fact that most of Spain was under Moorish rule until the late 1100s before the reconquista gradually regained most of the peninsula?

Well, we were on a tour that would take us due south from Madrid.

Through the cities that inherited moorish legacies coupled with a Spanish resurgence. Especially during the 16th century as Spain established colonies in the Americas and exploited resources far beyond the dream of other sovereign states in Europe. You just need to be there. And for those who were, are or about to, we are sure you will enjoy the journey as much as we do. Read all about ours here.

We’ve read about many others who have explored these beautiful cities. And we do regret that it was a group tour that did not leave us a lot of time to dig deeper. Unfortunately all we had were snippets of the country, though an excellent introduction for which we will use as foundation when we find a way back.

Where in Spain have you journeyed to and touched?

Madrid over the millennium weekend

Where were you on the eve of the 21st century?

Did you recall what you did on 31st December 1999? Were you too “young” to recall anything? Heheh… we jest. You might recall that the run up to this date was full of trepidation, in the tech world and all industries impacted by it. Which was almost everything…

The “millennium bug” was a phenomena of oversight from Mel’s view as an electronics engineer. For you see, back in the early days of computing there was limited memory in electronic systems. In vey simplfied terms, to represent the years the ‘registers’ in the integrated circuits used only the last two digits. Now that worked fine in the late 80s (when Mel first dabbled with it in school), but it proved to be potentially problematic as the world hutled towards the year 2000. Will the systems recognize it as 1900 or 2000?

Anyway.

While the systems folks were busy ‘patching’ things up (as they still do now), Mel and Suan had dropped all of that and was enjoying the start of marital bliss in Madrid. Yep. We had flown across the world to Spain to enjoy our honeymoon. Read all about our Madrid reminisce here.

You cannot imagine how much cash we brought in case the E-payment options were knocked out… heheh… And back then the Euro was not in notes yet, just in government accounting form… so we had notes of all kinds… Do you still have the old currencies of Europe before the Euro?