The admissions director, Brenda K. Keene, gave them her standard half-hour tour: the six flight simulators, the classrooms, the airfield.

It contains original medical equipment as well as some 70 wax figures and is visited on a guided half-hour tour.

In the Ticino, Chocolate Alprose offers half-hour tours for individuals, available in English.

An entertaining half-hour guided tour is included in the admission price, and entrance is managed by timed tickets to avoid overcrowding.

Sign up for a free half-hour tour, offered Saturdays and Sundays from 1 p.m. to 3:30 p.m., by phone (216-368-4771) or online (www.weatherhead.cwru.edu/tour).

The half-hour tours (generally in Spanish or Catalan but you can book ahead for English or French) provide some fascinating insight into life in wartime Barcelona.

Guided half-hour tours depart every 15 minutes 9.30am-7pm Monday-Friday, 9.30am-3.30pm Saturday.

As you enter the palace, a Turkish-speaking guide will take you on a compulsory half-hour tour through the building.

Guests at the Peace Hotel might take advantage of the free half-hour tour of the hotel offered by the concierge or another manager.

Groups of 10 visitors are taken for half-hour tours of the restoration laboratory next to the basilica for a firsthand look at the painstaking work going on there.