Live life with no excuses, travel with no regret.
-Oscar Wilde
Barcelona was our very first international trip we had done together and it was quite the learning experience as well as an eye-opening experience. Would we go again? Yes in a heartbeat! What would we do different? We didn’t utilize public transportation which is so easy to access and we stayed in one hotel/area, although for what we had on our list to do it all worked out really well for us. Some things that we had learned: eating and drinking is at a much slower pace (compared to the U.S.) and servers do not rely on tips so they do not cater to you as much as you may be used to, most restaurants provide multi-language menus and most people also speak English (otherwise we would point to what we wanted on the menu if there was too much of a language barrier). Most restaurants and cafes do not have a host/hostess, it is open seating and there is SO MUCH patio seating available (cigarette smoking is very common). Water always cost extra, mineral water is very popular along with Coco-Cola w/ lemon, iced tea w/ lemon, and Fanta sodas. In the variety of bars we went to we realized that gin is favored (besides wine) and taking shots of alcohol is rare. As for transportation, we noticed that scooters, bicycles, and Vespas are more prominently used than cars (we are sure that public transportation is used most often too) and there are a lot of skateboarders cruising through the tight alleyways. Barcelona has three prominent languages that are spoken, Catalan, Spanish, and English. Although neither of us are fluent in another language, we often spoke Spanish for greetings and in restaurants which we would get positive responses back, most people could tell right away we were foreign tourists and would do their best to help us out because we would try to communicate in their language. The currency used is Euro and we used our credit cards in some restaurants, which was super easy.
A huge resource we used on our trip (besides Google) was Rick Steves Barcelona Fourth Edition travel book. We carried it with us every time we left the hotel and it was extremely helpful!
There is currently a Fifth Edition available.
We hope this blog article inspired you to travel and to put Barcelona on your bucket list! Adรฉu!
