Day 12: Montjuic and the Coast

We started out today with a trip to Montjuic, which is a park overlooking the city. From the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, you get the best views of the city spreading out below, and a view out to sea. We then walked around the park until we came to the site of the Olympic Stadium they renovated for the 1992 olympics. Barcelona is proud of their games, as they are one of few cities to ever turn a profit on them. The Olympic Stadium illustrates how they did this. They spent the requisite piles of cash on infrastructure and civic improvements, and you can tell that they took pride in those. This stadium, for the opening and closing ceremonies and track and field events, was an afterthought. Barcelona had several big stadia in use already (chief among them Barcelona football club's legendary Camp Nou), and so they renovated this to hold 55,000 people, and gave it pretty basic amenities. It now gets used once or twice a year for loud rock concerts, and looks like a mediocre college stadium, but that's why Barcelona made a profit on their games and Beijing didn't.

After Montjuic, we had a lunch of bread and St. Marcellin cheese (it's like super brie that you can't bring back home because it's not pasteurized and runny and delicious), and went for a bike ride. Barcelona has bike trails everywhere, but tourists have to rent bikes rather than use the cycle hire network. Some bike shops have quality equipment. Others do not. Ours was unfortunately the latter. One bike had a bent pedal and a gearshift that didn't work, and the other had a seat that was so uncomfortable we had to take turns riding it. Fortunately, the path along the coast is quite lovely, and we enjoyed ourselves greatly when we weren't the one on the bike with the busted seat. After this, we had another huge dinner at the hostel (with a lot of wine), and rang in the new year with 12 grapes, per Spanish tradition.