Thursday we slept in and lounged in the morning. We drove to the Gothic Quarter to have lunch and some individual shopping time. We visited the Picasso Museum, which was very neat as it showed a lot of his early work and the progression through his life. I enjoyed the later years drawings of Degas shown with prostitutes, documenting what Picasso experienced in his youth.
The Feast of Sant Joan celebrates the start of the summer. It is the longest day of the year and what is known as the Summer Solstice in England. It is one of the most important feast days for Catalans and is celebrated throughout the city. Roberto’s friend Paco Briseño suggested a great way to celebrate it. The Fabra Observatory, located in Collserola, a mountain overlooking the city of Barcelona holds a yearly dinner in which you can see all of the fireworks over the city, they then let us peek through the 100+ year telescope (the Fabra observatory is one of the oldest observatories still functioning in the world, and among other things it’s where the atmosphere of Titan, Saturn’s moon, was discovered), after dinner, fireworks, looking at Mars, and getting a lecture about Mars, we tried to make our way down to the beach closer to the house (in Cabrils), unfortunately we were all exhausted and could not park the monster car, so we just left the celebrations to the experts and called it in around 2 am.

Food

For lunch we split up. Sarah and Roberto ate at an amazing tapas place around the corner from the Picasso Museum, where Roberto discovered the joys of home-made Vermouth. Bodega la Puntual
Dinner was at the observatory, the food was decent, but not amazing, however the rest of the experience was well worth it.