Across the border

Now we're in Spain

Today we packed a lot in, but didn’t really achieve much except to move our location from Lisbon to Barcelona.

We’re old hands at negotiating foreign metro systems and so we arrived at Lisbon’s Humberto Delgardo airport in good time this morning.

Just as well. As we found on arrival in Lisbon a few days ago, the airport is crowded and confusing.

The business of printing bag tags and boarding cards was made difficult by too many people and too few machines, many of which were malfunctioning and all of which gave contradictory instructions.

The business of bags on planes has changed in the last few years.

Gone are checked luggage and 7kg cabin bags. Now the limit for cabin bags is 10kg and it’s so abused as to be nonsensical. You could front up with a grand piano and they’d try to squeeze it in the overhead locker.

The result was more bags than could possibly be stashed in the overhead lockers, so many so-called carry-on bags were snatched and dispatched to the hold as we were boarding.

Plebian types like us are told we should push our small packs under the seats, but we’re having none of that and so we made the nearly two-hour flight with plenty of room to stretch our legs.

The contrast in airports is striking. Josep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat airport is spacious and follows a logical flow. It was still a long way to walk for our luggage pickup, but a seamless process.

We had a plan for the Metro and once we’d picked up our Hola Barcelona card we were good to go.

The card gives us unlimited use of city transport for the duration of our stay, so no worries about tickets and ticket queues.

At Plaça de Catalunya, we came above ground and quickly located our hotel, just a few metres from the plaza on Las Ramblas.

So far, so good.

By now it was 4.30pm and we hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so we set off in search of sustenance.

We found a little bar in a side street and had a very satisfying tapas plate and a drink before a little street wander.

As we could see from our hotel balcony, Las Ramblas was incredibly crowded, so we dived back into a nearby side street.

Along the way we passed the little church of Santa Anna, in the midst of commercial buildings.

A street artist.

Then a craft market, where we talked to a potter and Cath bought a small piece of clay.

Then on to the information centre and a quiet wander through narrow back alleys.

It’s early, but activity’s been unrelenting for a few days. We have a bottle of wine for a small digestif and we’re going to sit in our room and do some planning for the two days we have here in the very nice Hotel Lloret Ramblas.

If you couldn’t play the two short videos of Fado music I filmed last night, I’m not surprised - I have to work on that.

Here’s some real Fado (not from our show, but you get the idea).

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