Barcelona, Buses, Beer & Burnt Umber Rooftoops

Up quite early on Saturday, and glad I'd been sensible and eaten a lot of food to soak up the drink! We decided it was sight seeing day so we went to the Plaça Catalunya with our tour bus passes.

The Tour buses run East and West and take a few hours. The idea is you can sit through the tour and listen to the audio commentary through provided headphones, and hop off at designated tourist spots if you want, or just stay on the bus and enjoy the ride.

We took the West Tour and stayed on the bus. I don't tend to enjoy 'tours', preferring to do my own thing, but this was excellent. Great to see the City from an open topped bus and get some photo's. Barcelona really is beautiful. If it could sort out it's petty crime problem, I'd be happier to recommend it.

We'd already discovered that some of our friends and colleagues had been victims of pickpockets, despite best precautions. It's quite difficult to sing the praises of a city where petty crime is treated almost as part of the economy, but then my heart tells me it is somewhere that has spirit, great places to see and experience, and atmosphere in abundance.

We stayed on the bus, thinking we might go round again time permitting and stop off at places we wanted to see more of. As it was nearing lunchtime when the bus had gone full circle we got off at Plaça Catalunya and found a cafe for an apperetif that included Tonic and Gin.

This photo was taken at the fountain at Plaça Catalunya; and although the clouds looked threatening it was a gorgeous warm day.

Near our hotel was a great restaurant so we had a huge Paella for lunch (and more Tonic Water with the meerest splash of gin....) Beware when eating that if you are *given* bread rolls or any other things you didn't order, these will find their way onto your bill. We got stung for 3 bread rolls that were about 3 euros each even though we didn't eat them. So we left no tip and they were actually worse off as we would have left a generous tip.

Back to the hotel for a siesta before catching the tourist bus down to the marina area for the company award ceremony.

The second group from our company had arrived by then (we split the flights Friday to Sunday; Saturday to Monday) so there were quite a lot of us!

The award ceremonies are great fun - all tongue in cheek; awards for the messiest sod, best e-mail (the content of which included 'can whoever's spilled tuna in the mens toilets please go and clean it up....' wasn't me by the way), to name a few. Food was tapas and beer was beer - an excellent event.

I so wish I'd had my camera to get some photo's of the marina as the sunset but it just wasn't worth the risk.

It was also the celebration of 25 years since our company had been founded by one guy, and had grown organically since. There's been a long tradition of taking *all* staff (unless they didn't want to come!) on these annual events. In my time there we've been to Scotland twice, Portugal, Majorca and Spain. It's a great way of getting to know your colleagues, new and old, and just celebrating being part of a huge team that works incredibly well together.

Went to bed at 5.30am....

Still catching up - I've been working late tonight so I've only had time to upload this single backblip - hopefully I'll get more on tomorrow and be up to date by the weekend!

But I'm still behind on thank you's for comments, stars and hearts from last week, as well as commenting on your journals! I beg indulgence for a few more days! Later you'll hear about the flight delay and how our only sleep in about 24 hours was a lunchtime hour on the boardroom floor on Monday!