It was hard to leave the cruise ship and all the English being spoken, however time to break out on our own! After having a discussion with the taxi drivers in broken English as to what taxi best suited us (the walker confused them), we ended up at the Renaissance Barcelona Fira (which was a change in hotels for those tracking us on the spreadsheet) which I had changed us to when we were given some points for the Westin Hotel in Rome fiasco. What an interesting hotel and a place that my mother would NOT enjoy staying at! We were upgraded to a “junior corner suite” which really just meant that it was a hotel room with the bathroom in the corner – we did not have a corner view! The window was an horizontal “eye” in the sky – you will see in the picture below. Not much light in the room when it was dark! The hotel actually was two buildings close together with a walkway between them in the middle and at the side where the elevators were, a platform on the 14th floor for a restaurant and then the 26th and 27th floor for the fitness centre and roof top pool and bar. The LOVELY glass elevators going up and down between the buildings were very special too – there was no getting away from them! Drove me crazy as I had to keep my eyes closed and sometimes got off on the wrong floor when someone else got into the elevator! I cannot handle glass elevators! That said, it was a very nice hotel! The hotel was also really accommodating, I had let them know that we probably would be arriving around 10 or 11am and they had our room ready! So we were able to have an early siesta and then in the afternoon went for a walk to get some staples that we normally have when travelling – something to take my medication with and some snacks such as turkey and cheese plus some GF crackers. We walked over to the Carrefour store and we found that it was in a huge mall! Google did not tell us that! Also the grocery part was downstairs which we did not know. Luckily a security guard heard us talking as we were leaving confused not finding groceries and pointed us in the correct direction – down the flat escalator (like a moving side walk going down) and BOOM! Gluten free bakery items! I was in heaven! Okay, lets focus on what we really need. Cheese, turkey cold cuts, beer and chocolate milk. Got the first two thanks to Google Translate telling me the name for turkey, sent Andrew off to the beer section and I checked out the HUGE gluten free section. Oh my – check out those pictures! Now to find chocolate milk – little tetra packs will have to do! It was about 30 degrees during our walk back to the hotel and we took it easy the rest of the afternoon and evening and had some of our snack goodies that we had purchased for dinner.
