All Souls Day is the day after All Saints Day and certainly not a holiday here. The crowds were measurably smaller.
Our goal this day was the Museum of Catalan History, which we could see from our apartment window, and the gondola from the harbor to MontJuic, which we could also see from our window. We made the first. Not so much the second.
The museum took all of more than two hours, but it gives an excellent presentation of the history of Catalonia from prehistoric times through the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Visigoths, the Moors, the early Spanish empire, the Catalan empire and finally the tragic days of the 20th century Civil War. Catalonia’s history is not a happy one, and the museum helps you understand the reasons.
Hungry and leg-weary from our tour of the museum, we repaired to the Fastnet for a bit of lunch, early by Spanish standards at 13:00. Of course, we had not had breakfast, so we were ravenous. We ordered two baguettes from the menu, thinking these would be the one-sided open-faced slice of bread with some meat and cheese placed on top.
Instead, they came out as full poor boys, cut in two totaling a good twelve inches of baguette, chicken, chorizo and cheese each. Lynn’s chicken was loaded with two half inch thick slices of mozzarella cheese on each portion. My chorizo chicken included thinly sliced pieces of parmesan with the meats. Both were delicious. Both were more than we could eat for 7 euros each.
Stuffed, we took Lynn’s half in a bag and marched on toward the gondola, our goal for the day. The gondola runs across the harbor and all the way to Mont Juic; we can see it from our apartment window, and we have never taken it.
Now we know why. It moves slowly, there is not much room, there are only a couple of gondolas in operation at one time, it is not cheap, and the line was listed as an hour when we approached.
We chose not to stand and wait.
Instead, we walked the length of the harbor, goggling at the huge yachts as big as anything we ever saw in Monte Carlo and thinking we would come out at the other end of the marina. Wrong. We walked into the working end of the port at the W Hotel (why would people pay to stay there?) and had to catch a bus back to Passeig de Colom to avoid a long walk the other way.
