In the middle of the night, I realized we had left out all of our first morning.  We wanted to go to La Livraria Lello.  It is on the list as one of the 10 most beautiful bookstores in the world.  It is said that J.K. Rawlings used it as the basis for Hogwarts.  We decided to walk and Alan, having explored a little before, said we needed to take some stairs up.  So up we went, and went, and went, and went.  After scaling the Empire State building, we reached the top and then had to walk uphill some more to get to the part of town we wanted to visit.  Whew!  We ran into Marcia, David, and Rhonda several times.  They had come up on a street made only for mountain goats, so I guess we weren’t so bad off.

On the way to the bookstore, we explored the square and a church .

We then went to the bookstore.  You go down the block from it to buy tickets and then go to it to get in.  We were number 171 and at number 169, the electricity went off.  Luckily, for a short while, the computers were still working, so we were able to get tickets.

The bookstore is terrific.  The only way to describe it is to post some pictures.

After we bought a cookbook, we wandered back down towards the hotel, had lunch and met with the whole group for the first time.  The rest of  the day has been posted.