Jazz Barcelona

We stayed at this hotel during mid of March for 4 nights as a group of three. I reserved the hotel based on the reviews from tripadvisor. The first thing I want to mention is that the hotel is very conveniently located. It is just two very short blocks away from the subway's interchange station CATALUNYA, where you can connect to L1, L3 and other lines that virtually take you everywhere. L3 runs from the north to the south of the La Rambla. L1 let you connect to L4, which allows you to get ar...

Fish and shellfish are the best for Catalan food. Among all the dishes in Barcelona, I cannot have enough of Paella. Paella is the most famous of the arros, but saffron is less used than in the traditional Valencian dish. They came in variations. My favorite is the "black rice", in which squid inks are mixed with rice.  It is odd that besides Barcelona, it is not easy to find a Paella dish. For example, last time when I visited Madrid, the Paella dish tasted so different from the one in Barce...

My previous train trips within continental Europe have been always the second class seating. The worst was the one from Napoli to Rome. Even I booked a seat in a non-smoking cart, there were never short of any smokers. The high-speed train connecting Madrid and Barcelona just started a short while ago. Two years ago when my sister was in Spain, it took her 9 hours to travel from Madrid to Barcelona. So I was very excited that we can travel with this brand new service. We booked the tickets fr...

The map provided by the front desk of the hotel is quite useful, and on top of that, it is free! For your own benefit, save your money and stay away from MapEasy's Guidemap to Barcelona and Madrid. They are full of mistakes and mislabels. We tried three restaurants marked on their maps: One is located completely on a different street from what the map says - this incident happened in Barcelona. One is no longer there anymore (replaced by a Burberry Shop) and the other is closed - both occurre...