Barcelona, day 7!

Day 1 - Day 2 - Day 3 - Day 4 - Day 5 - Day 6

Our itinerary for Monday said "Tibidabo", so that's where we went. On our way there we encountered a really weird protest or something on the metro. A big crowd of people were standing blowing some blue plastic horns. The noise was horrible, and they managed to keep our train from leaving. Or something. The train arrived, stood there for maybe 15 minutes, then left without ever opening its doors. Then another train left with all the protesting horn-blowing people, our train came back, and we drove to the next station.. where the horn-blowers were. And our train stood there for another 15-20 minutes. Later, on the bus, I overheard a guy speaking on the phone in English, saying the protesters were keeping the doors from closing properly on the second stop, which is why it took so long time before the train left. I'm still wondering what the hell they were protesting, and why they needed to make so much noise while doing so D:

Oh well. We finally arrived at the Av. Tibidabo metro station, jumped on the bus to the Funicular station, and then rode the Funicular the rest of the way up the mountain. The Funicular is super cute and for some reason I never took a photo or filmed any while on it. OH WELL.

Tibidabo has an amusement park, which was mainly closed when we were there. We could still enter the grounds and have a look around, and a few of the rides were open. Closed amusement park equals less noise, so I was at least happy about that!

The only plan we had once we got to the top was "Have a look at the Sagrat Cor church and enjoy the view" - so we did.

The Sagrat Cor church is built at the very top of Tibidabo, at approx. 518 meters above sea level (that's 1700 ft for you 'murricans). It's technically a church on top of another church, I read somewhere. The lower part has a crypt, which we didn't get to see, and the top part has all the.. other.. church-y parts..? I don't know, we were inside and took a look, but our main interest was to find the elevator and get as high up as humanly possible. The first step was to climb the stairs to the upper main half of the church - there is a lookout platform thingamajiggy on top of the part pictured above. So, some pics of the views from there:

The Torre de Collserola communications tower.

Jesus stands on top of the church. Jesus has amazing views.

I just.. I needed to do this. xD

Montjuïc - you can see the Olympic Stadium (to the far left, right behind the Palau Nacional/MNAC) and the surrounding structures, including the white communications tower.

The Torre Agbar!

Montjuïc, the Olympic Stadium, MNAC and the Venetian Towers, plus Arenas shopping mall!

The Sagrada Familia!

This picture COULD have been nice, but then I had oogah-boogahs on the lens of my SLR. :(

One of the rides that was open.

I'm never ever going on that blue ride. Standing in that basket at that height without safety gear? HELL NO.

Okay, so we went inside to find the elevator.

"Haec omnia TIBIDABO, si cadens adoraveris me."

Tibidabo mountain is named so after the Devil apparently tried to make Jesus his bitch. It's in the Bible, too, in Matthew 4:9 - "And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me."
This supposedly happened at the top of a very high mountain, and seeing as Tibidabo is the highest mountain overlooking Barcelona and its surrounding lands, it was obvious to the locals that this is where that happened.

We found the elevator, paid 2,50 euros to go as far as it would take us, and then climbed the stairs until we were as high up as possible without climbing on the church itself. The terrace where the elevator stops is at 541,80 meters above sea level, and we estimated that the view point right below the Jesus sculpture was about 20-25 meters above that.

We spent some time up there before going down again, and it resulted in a lot of great pictures.

Two panoramas I snapped with my phone (click to see full-size):

And of course, it was selfie time:

I have no idea what my finger is doing, focus on the view.

Yes, those are people down there!

Just to illustrate how close I came to Jesus that day xD

Did I mention that Irene has a fear of unsafe things combined with heights? Well, she does. While I climbed up like a billy goat ready to see the view, Irene was shaking all the way up, and when we got to the very top she was pretty nervous. But she still did it! And she had to agree the view was amazing.

She was a happy camper when we came down from the highest points, though. xD

Thank you for an amazing time, Tibidabo!

After Tibidabo and Sagrat Cor, the plan was to see CosmoCaixa - the science museum. While we had a brief lunch at Mirablau restaurant, which had a nice view of the city, I suddenly remembered it was Monday - also known as the universal day of closed museums. We checked, and CosmoCaixa was closed. Of course! So we decided we'd go do some other stuff instead. "Other stuff" meant walking down Las Ramblas for a while, where we found these for sale:

...what?

Then we cut into the Born district, where we found a pretend building:

We were there to pop by Papabubble to buy some homemade hard candy, and on our way we also saw this:

I don't know what it is, but it's pretty!

After buying our candy, we sat down at a streetside restaurant/bar to have a beer before walking to Maremagnum mall, where we had dinner at Martinas.

So good paella.

Afterwards we went back to the apartment to look through the day's photos (so much beautiful retardedness). I started editing some of mine, and then we went to bed at 1 AM, super tired from a long and eventful day! :D