FC Barcelona

We could hardly go to Barcelona and not visit the Barcelona Football Club for "The Barcelona Experience". It is officially listed as the 5th most popular tourist attraction of the city with 1,032,763 visitors a year. I was expecting this to be a bit like our visit to Real Madrid's Bernebeu in 2008. It was similar in many ways of course, but Barcelona's is actually better. It was soooo good, another stop on the way to football heaven!

There were so many highlights, here are a few of them:

• This is super impressive, I have a little video footage of it. There are half a dozen or so of these interactive walls. And these walls are huge - floor to ceiling and several feet wide to each panel, with panel after panel after panel. Like giant iPads - Apple take note. Each wall is a touch screen and they keep morphing, so there is no static or still menu, it is in constant (slow) motion. Touch on the wall, and a video or information panel springs to life. Brilliant.
  
  


• The 6 trophies they won last year, including the Champions League (apologies to United,supporters), World Club Championship, Spanish League, and Spanish Cup.
  
  
  
  
• The dressing room and running up the players' race to the team song and the roar of the crowd (unfortunately this was a recording, the crowd was at home watching the World Cup on TV).
  
  


• The ground itself.
  
  


• Sitting on the team "bench". I figured I had a pretty good chance of getting a game seeing as most of the first team is in South Africa! Note also that I am still proudly wearing the Aussie shirt despite our humiliation in the World Cup.
  
  


• A really simple but very effective display of photos in miniature. When the big screens behind kicked in, it was a montage of all variety of supporters sining the Barca song. Really well done.
  
  
  

There is obviously more than this but this gives you a flavour of what's there.

In closing about Barca I wanted to mention one of the things I picked up along the way, because it is a good thing. Among other initiatives in the same vein, apart from wearing the UNICEF logo on the shirt, the club contributes 1.5 million Euro a year to the UN for child welfare.