Barcelona, Spain

We arrived safely on the ground at 8:00 am local time and braved a local commuter train and city bus to get to our hotel. Within minutes of being on the ground I realized how much of a challenge the language would be for both of us -- and I even watch TV in Spanish at home. Many conversations so far have broken down into a game of sharades with both participants trading slowly pronounced nouns of the others language. However, I've run into the occasional patient Barcelonan (such as the bank teller I dealt with at El Banco Santander) who is willing to hide his/her smirk as I mangle the language. Rashmi seems to be getting along fine, too.
The flight fast-forwarded through 7 hours of time zones, and after getting only 3 hours of rest during the flight we arrived in this city with one word in our thoughts: sleep. But sleep we could not as we tried to adjust our bodies to the new time zone. Thus, we spent most of the day walking around the south side of the city, seeing La Rambla (a long street that is as much a carnival as it is a shopping district), a city port Port Vell, and finally the beach along the Mediterranean Sea.
Note on the pictures: (1) Rashmi wades in the Mediterranean. (2) The Mercat de Sant Josep off of La Rambla. The seafood in this market was so fresh it was still moving. (3) Christopher Columbus points the way back to where we started our trip