Day Three

On Wednesday, we got up early, packed up & checked out of the hostal. We headed over to the much nicer hotel we are staying at during the conference (we are sharing the room here with third girl CF). It was quite far, so we used the excellent metro system to get to the conference area. We weren't able to check in, but we were able to leave out bags & head to park Guell. We arrived shortly after 11 am -perfect timing-they only open at 11 am but of course in the middle of the day it was hot.

TF & I have found that we are very different types of tourists. I hate looking like a tourist: camera out, taking pictures every few blocks, totting around an open guidebook and cramming the schedule to catch all the "sights". I never take pictures...always surprised when I get home from a trip to find maybe three or four pictures on my digital camera. The exceptions are for natural parks and my hotel room, which I find particularly helpful when jogging my memory. The rest of my favorite travelling activities I remember without photos; people-watching, eating the food, figuring out the transit system. TF, on the other hand, got somewhat impatient with me because I put off going through the guidebook to make my "must see" list as she had already done. She also needs to take lots of pictures to document every part of the trip, and she likes "playing tourist" in general.

Related to all this is the fact that I'm bad photographer. (Hey, postcards do it better than I ever could with my shitty digital camera, and probably with a dozen fewer foreigners.) But I'm not bad at figuring out where we are, and where we are going (like I did on the bus from Girona). She 1) does not inherently need to find herself on a city map and 2) takes much nicer pictures than I. Complementary talents but we are going to get home with 300 pictures of me posing in front of the opera house/cheese stand/Gaudi monument which will be filed away never to see the light of day again, whereas she will have only 5 "good" pictures and many, many crappy shots of unfocused/uncentered/underlit objects or people because I had to take them. Since I'm at the conference now while she's off sight-seeing, she'll have to rely on strangers to take her picture so she'll probably be better off.