One hour in Barcelona.

I have done some extremely short traveling, like less than one day in Kristiansand, or less than three days in a foreign country. But to spend one hour in Barcelona was the most minimum I have ever done.

It started with a single thought when we were buying tickets for Croatia. It said that we will have around 6 hours transfer in Barcelona so we said that we could try to see the city at least a little bit.

At that time I was thinking that 6 hours is a small amount of time. How wrong was I you will find out later.

So our flight from Zadar to Barcelona was delayed around one and a half hours. Quite quickly we started to panic because our plans to visit the city could be simply impossible to realize.

We went to the one guy from the airport staff and asked him: “Is it possible”? He said it’s “risky but you could try”. I look at my partner and he looked at me. We basically almost ran to the taxi stop to catch something in the city center. Because of no time for busses!

The taxi driver was really nice, he asked about our plans with Barcelona, so he could adapt and drive us exactly where we needed to (none of us were neither in Barcelona nor in Spain in general). We decided to head directly to Sagrada Família, which is one of the most popular “tourist spots” to see.

You can say: “that’s a cliché”. As a quite experienced tourist, I should choose something more “hidden” and “characteristic”. But as you know, our time was limited to… an hour. Nothing more, nothing less.

When we came back it happened that we could spend more time in the capital, but we were too scared to lose the flight. I had to work the following day so I had to take this flight.

Surprisingly, the Sagrada Família wasn’t located in the city center as I assumed, it was “more to the left side” according to our taxi driver. And it was in such a place, that you wouldn’t imagine a humongous-size art nouveau basilica could be in. Oh lord, was it breath-taking.

Designed by Antoni Gaudí, it started being built in 1882, so it’s not that old. However, in my opinion, it looks like it’s taken from some baroque-times. I have no knowledge of architecture so don’t judge me on this subject.

When we were arriving at the basilica it started raining a little bit, so I became to worry. And I had good reasons to, because when we came out of the car and came to the building it was pouring rain. So much that we took pictures and went to the closest food van to hide and eat something.

The food was really nice and the coffee that we got, but it was really expensive. For everything 18 €, which is ridiculous. Prices like in Norway! I knew that in Spain it’s this currency, and it’s usually more expensive in the capital, but goddammit. Not so expensive.

Anyway, the rain stopped for a little bit so we headed around the Sagrada, to explore more. There was a small park just in front of it so we went there. So lovely!

Then we just went blindly in the streets surrounding the basilica. We couldn’t go far, because we got the information that taxi stop by Sagrada so it would be easiest to just catch it there. We still went here and there, and the rain came back. Thank god that Spanish people like to have big balconies, so we could easily walk just by the walls and not get wet.

Catching the taxi to go back to the airport was the most stressful thing from the whole vacation. Although we were waiting at the place where the taxi should stop, we couldn’t see any available one. We switched waiting places like two times before we finally caught anything.

So we were in Barcelona at 12 pm, at 1 pm we were on the way back to the airport. Our flight was at 3 pm, but later we got the information that it’s a little bit delayed. I was quite annoyed because I imagine how better I could spend this wasted time waiting: more time in Barcelona. But shit happens, as they say.

Was it crazy? Yes. Worth it? Definitely. You just have to take some risks in life from time to time to experience something really amazing. Because no good stories can be written at a safe place, home (I don’t talk about writing from home, I mean if you don’t go around, you don’t have those stories).

I hope you guys liked this “travel” post (travel in quotation mark because it literally lasted one hour). Have a lovely week everyone!