Skip to main content

Barcelona again!

Barcelona again! I was living there from 2010 until the end of 2013. 3,5 wonderful years in a magnificent city. It is the city that can combine everything from hard work to crazy nightlife.
Plaza de Catalunya fountain
Plaza de Catalunya fountain.
This time, I visited Barcelona because is want to take my degrees and see some old friends. Making the paper was not easy as I thought. It took them almost two years of "printing" the degrees, but finally, they manage it. I think Spanish public sector is more bureaucratic even than the Greek one. And then... we have the second phase: the legalization (Apostille). If you want to avoid the fees you have to go to an office of the Spanish Ministry of Justice (C/ Garcilaso, 123, Planta baixa - 08027). The line was going to the next road as you can see from the photo bellow. We arrived 08:45 (opens at 09:00) and we took the number 266. We took our paper around 14:00 and in the mean time we also went for shopping.

Waiting line at the office of the Spanish Ministry of Justice.
Waiting line at the office of the Spanish Ministry of Justice.

After spending two days for taking care our paperwork, it was time for us to enjoy the city. We stayed at Residencia Melon District Marina near the metro station Marina of the red line. Next photos are from the terrace of the building. The view is quite good, and there is a small pool if you are in a rush for getting into the water.

View from the Melon District Marina roof.
View from the Melon District Marina roof.

Torre Agbar or "Dildo Building" as show from the terrace of the hotel.
Torre Agbar or "Dildo Building" as show from the terrace of the hotel.
Swimming pool at the roof of the Melon District Marina hotel.

Walking in the City is one the best things you can do. Every part of the city contains something special that you can explore and admire. Unfortunately, we didn't have lot of time, so we skipped Sagrada Familia and Montjuic.

Arc de triomf of Barcelona.


Demonstration for the independence of Catalunya.
Demonstration for the independence of Catalunya.
Barceloneta is one of the best areas to walk in Barcelona. It is next to the beach and ends at the W hotel. Although the beach looks nice and the local authorities always clean it every night (!), I would suggest not to swim there and try to explore beaches outside of the city. The city has good rail connections with other cities, and you can visit much better beaches in about one hour.

W hotel at the beach. It famous and luxury hotel. The location is at the beach.
W hotel at the beach. It is the famous and luxury hotel. The location is at the beach. Maybe one day I will visit it.

View from the W hotel in Barcelona.
After five days enjoying the city we had to come back to our home. From time to time i really miss the life of the city and the energy that contains.
Labels:
Location: Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

Popular posts from this blog

Processing Milky Way in RawTherapee

This text is an analysis of a video I did some months ago how to process photos of our Milky Way in RawTherapee. You can find the picture here . The photo was taken by wiegemalt. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Editing: Step 1: Fixing lighting The first thing someone notices when opening the picture is the extreme noise due to high ISO used (1600 - check the picture on the right). The first thought is to de-noise the picture, however, if you do that you are going to loose the details of the night sky. The main reason for the high noise is the additional exposure Rawtherapee adds when the 'Auto' button is pressed. In particular, the RT adds +2.4 EV to equalize the picture. This is Wrong! What we want is to keep the noise down and at the same time bring the stars up. That's why we are going to play with the Tone Curve of the RT. To adjust the light properly we increase the cont...
Read more

Static linking with gcc and g++

In this tutorial, we will explain what the static linking is, how this affect the size of final binary, and why statically linking with g++ sometimes is pain. By definition, a statically compiled binary is a group of programmer ‘s routines, external functions, and variables which are packed into the final binary executable. The compiler or the linker produces the final object and embeds all the functions and variables and the linking phase.  There are two reasons of using dynamic linking and shared libraries: 1) Avoid creating a huge binary, if all the programs use a standard set of libraries why not having the operating system providing to them 2) Compatibility on operating system and machine dependant characteristics: sometimes the libraries must be implemented based on the architecture or the operating system and using dynamic linking is an easy way to avoid this catch. On the other hand, static linking is the ideal way of distributing one software product, pay...
Read more

Processing a High Dynamic Range raw image with RawTherapee

Editing High contrast images is hard because you have at the same time to decrease the highlights, increase the dark areas, and at the same time keep the natual colours. Although not always possible, shooting RAW always helps. The RawTherapee offers a plethora of tools to "fix" your images. To illustrate the tools available in RawTherapee, we will edit a picture taken by Ivan Sagalaev and released under CC license in the Play Raw competition of the pixls.us forum here . Image after importing to RawTherapee. Step 1: Preparation. First we fix the distortion (if exists) in the Transform tab. Before start editing we always try to fix possible distortions of the image. Initial Histogram of the picture. Step 2: Editing the light.  The second step is to press the "Auto Levels" button in the Exposure tab. This will light the dark places of the picture, but it is not enough.The sky now is it much lighter than before and the colors washed out. Exposu...
Read more