The wonderful adventure officially began at 5:00 pm, Sunday, April 22nd when the tour group and our guide met for orientation. Our guide, William, informed us that we would all feel like we were being shot out of a cannon during our week in Spain … so true.  We learned how to use our “whispers,” our ear plugs that that would connect us to what our guide was telling us without having to be clustered around him, the “buddy” system where instead of the guide several times a day counting to make sure we were all there, we each chose a person we didn’t know to be our “buddy” during the tour and whenever the guide said, “buddy check,” which was several times a day, my buddy and I would establish eye contact to make sure both of us were there.  I was thinking, “how in the world am I going to remember 23 names of the other tour group members” when we each introduced ourselves and I also noticed that some more “prepared” attendees, had their group roster with them and were taking notes by each person’s name during the introduction. With that said, within 36 hours after first meeting the group, I did know everyone’s name and began to learn about each person.  Our guide was around my age. He had decided to retire early from teaching high school Spanish in Seattle and being an enormous Rick Steves fan, to pursue his dream of giving Rick Steves tours.  The group was comprised of  travelers in their 50's,  60's, 70's with two adult children of one of the couples. It was a mixture of one family, couples and singles.  Everyone mixed and mingled and as I had heard from friends who had been on Rick Steves tours, being single on a tour was not at all a challenge.

The first evening, we did a short walking tour of Barcelona near our hotel, saw the remains of a Roman necropolis,  and then went to our first group dinner together. We had a delicious meal that night with many tapas, paella and the start of what would be many glasses of wines and other types of liquor served in Spain during that week.  Barcelona was mostly about the architecture and we are talking “Gaudi."   Our first full day happened to be on April 23rd which is the anniversary of the deaths of both William Shakespeare and Miguel Cervantes (he wrote Don Quijote de la Mancha)  and throughout Spain, this day is celebrated as a holiday called “The Day of the Book.”  Books are sold throughout Spain that day by vendors with stalls set up outdoors. The tradition is that a woman buys a book for a man and the man buys a rose for the woman. We were told that over 20% of books sold each year are sold on this day.There is also another holiday on the same day, called El Día de Sant Jordi. 

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Other activities were going to the wonderful Picasso museum in Barcelona. I had always found it difficult to understand Picasso but due to having an excellent tour of this museum, I finally understood the concept of cubism and, really appreciated Picasso’s development as an artist. Later in the day, our group went to La Boqueria,  which is several hundred years old. We had an assistant on our tour, named David, who is an Australian expat and has lived in Madrid for 3 years giving “foodie” type tours. David told us all about Jamón ibérico,  one of the most expensive types of ham in Spain. Here is David’s brief story about this type of ham. “There are black pigs which have an incredibly good life for their whole life which I believe is 3 – 4 years. They are totally free range, eat all the acorns they want and then, alas, there is one really bad day when they cease to exist.” Both this type of ham and another type called Jamón serrano were delicious .  

 

We saw Sagrada Família,  which was amazing!  We marveled at all the different architecture around us. On our last morning in Barcelona, we toured the cathedral in Barcelona,  took a panoramic tour on a bus of the city, saw Barceloneta, and then a really brief stop but with just enough time  for another member of the tour and me to run down to the beach and stick our toes into the Caribbean.  The bus also took us up to Parc de Montjuïc,  which had beautiful views and has their art museum. We saw these interesting medieval frescoes that had been painstakingly removed from the walls of hillside churches and placed in the museum.  These frescoes, with paint made from various minerals, depict biblical scenes and in medieval times were the method, it was thought, to educate illiterate people and most people couldn’t read.