Yesterday we walked to Sant Sebastia / Barceloneta beach and spent a few hours laying in the sun. Of course, we greased Joe up with SPF 1,785 before finding the sun. We had to take our hotel towels with us to the beach, because we didn’t think to pack beach towels, but I don’t think that was a problem. The beach was full of beach chairs and umbrellas but they required payment in order to use those, so we just spread out our towels on a small spot and did some people-watching. Contrary to my previous thoughts, there were not nearly as many topless women as I thought there would be. I was definitely not the prude American who wouldn’t take off her top! There were SO many people on the beach for a Wednesday afternoon – could be that some came from the cruise ships, but most appeared to be locals. We read somewhere that Spaniards get up to 20 (TWENTY!) paid holidays per year, so maybe this was one of those holidays. Joe took a dip in the Mediteranean Sea, he said it was great, and I read my Nook; it was a fantastic few hours of relaxing in the sun.
We stopped at a restaurant called Pizza Marzano on our way to La SuperCopa for dinner, and had a delicious Bufalito pizza – very authentic neopolitan. Almost like being in Italy! The pizza had chunks of chopped tomato, buffalo mozzarella, and fresh basil leaves. We’ll definitely try to make something similar when we get home.
We took the metro to Camp Nou to watch the game and arrived about an hour before gametime. Our seats were AMAZING – 4 rows from the field in the corner by a goal. We took some fantastic pictures and videos wearing our new Barҫa jerseys and cheered on the team to a great win. FC Barcelona won 3-2 over Real Madrid: Iniesta scored the first goal for FCB, and Messi scored the second 2. The crowd cheered and had tons of chants that (unfortunately) we couldn’t understand because they were in Catalan. But we yelled with the best of them after each goal and during the presentation of the trophy! We noticed that the fans seem to whistle instead of boo when they dislike something, which made things somewhat confusing at first because we thought good things were happening… We picked up on the difference after a while though, they seemed to whistle a lot whenever a Real Madrid player (especially Cristiano Ronaldo) was announced or had the ball. The stadium sold only non-alcoholic beer, and surprisingly, there were a ton of people drinking it. They also sold “authentic” hot dogs! Pretty funny.
We decided that Spain needs to work on their anti-smoking campaign (Melissa – this could be a goldmine!), because the stadium had a TON of people smoking! It was awful – our throats hurt so bad from the second-hand smoke, not the yelling, at the end of the game. The stadium wasn’t quite sold out, though it was probably close, and the noise was deafening at times. We took the metro back to the hotel again, and got to sleep around 3:30a. The metro, and the area around the stadium, felt incredibly safe despite the late hour because there were police on every corner and at each metro station. The lack of alcohol available at the stadium may have helped too. It was such a cool experience, we would recommend this to anyone traveling in Europe!
FCB’s official song/chant (in the original Catalan):
Tot el camp
és un clam
som la gent blaugrana
Tant se val d’on venim
si del sud o del nord
ara estem d’acord, ara estem d’acord,
una bandera ens agermana.
Blaugrana al vent
un crit valent
tenim un nom el sap tothom:
Barça, Barça, Baaarça!
Jugadors, seguidors,
tots units fem força.
Son molt anys plens d’afanys,
son molts gols que hem cridat
i s’ha demostrat, i s’ha demostrat,
que mai ningu no ens podrà torcer.
Blaugrana al vent
un crit valent
tenim un nom el sap tothom:
Barça, Barça, Baaarça!
PS – more pictures have been uploaded, but none of the game yet. We’re working on it 🙂