SPAIN

Spain was amazing. It was everything Marcio and I thought it would be. We both loved madrid. It is easy to get around, the people are nice its build with the family in mind. You can find parks every few blocks and see everyone from the neighborhood congregating around the children. I think me favorite thing was just sitting in a little cafe drinking coffee eating freshly made treats "pan dulce" and watching Kian play on the park next to us. There is nothing touristy feeling about the city and you can just walk down endless beautiful streets with each one more beautiful than the next. We visited some of the big parks in the city. The largest being parque retrio that felt very much like central park to me, minus the carriage rides. We got around very easily on the metro on a unlimited 3 day pass and found it very easy to find where we were going. We immediately walk and found some restaurant and had our first dish of paella. It was very good and this was the first time that I have had prawns. I have seen them on shows like top chef but have never had one. They are really good, kind of a pain to peel and we weren't quite sure what to do with them but they were so good!

Barcelona is more city like it and felt more like NY or another big city. There were a lot more touristy type shops and less traditional spanish feeling (well what I think is traditional ha) We did have a hotel right across the street from the beach. One thing that was really cool was the sand had little specs of gold in it so where the waves broke and churned up the sand it looked like the water was glittering with gold. It was really cool. We had this mediterranean pizza with muscles, calamari, shrimp, and herbs it was the best thing ever. We went back a two nights and had that. Our favorite tapa that we ate was croquettes de jamon. They were little fried treats filled with queso y jamon and they were yummy. This isn't my picture but this is what they look like. We had them filled with beef in madrid but the blue cheese filled ones in madrid were the best.

We decided to do the tourist bus in barcelona. This is where we bought a two day ticket and went on a double decker bus that has about 60 stops that gets you pretty much anywhere in barcelona that you could want to go. Kian was very excited the ride the "decker" and it worked out pretty well we were able just just jump on and off when we wanted to see something. The was excited to see all the works by Gaudi that barcelona has to offer. My favorite had to be park Guell that was beautiful. The Sagrada Família was very impressive and I wish we would have gone into the museum and done a tour but we were reaching the end of our budget after fining out that spain is an expensive place to travel.