My New Favorite City...Barcelona!

*warning: i took 579 pictures. yes, it is a problem.*

This weekend was so great!  I went to Barcelona with 10 other people...nine girls, one boy...what a trooper :)  It was SUCH an amazing group of people, I could not be more grateful for the friends I've made here! Barcelona is so clean.  I know that may sound strange, but everything from the airports, cafés, and restaurants to the sidewalks, parks, and buildings, is immaculate.  It is a very open city with plenty of parks and big walkways.  The people are amazing, everyone we talked to was extremely welcoming and friendly. 

We arrived around 7pm on Friday night.  We quickly hopped on a bus and were dropped off at La Plaza Catalunya.  The Plaza is beautiful! It is bordered by shopping centers and banks and contains many fountains and statues.

After making sure we were all present (I cannot remember how many times we counted ourselves..."I only have ten, who is missing?" "I have 11!" "Can we go then?" "Wait I think somebody went to the bathroom...hold on!" haha) we headed to the hostal.  Our hostal was located near La Rambla and the Plaza. It was perfect.

8 of us stayed in an 8-bed dormitory style room.  The sheets were clean and the pillows and blankets were nasty.  We survived our first hostal experience! 

So cozy :)

After a near sleepless night (no pillow + drunk neighbors + honking cars = sleepy julia), we woke up at 7:30, got ready in our bunk beds (we all opted to be dirty rather than use the community shower), and headed down to breakfast.  After a healthy, well balanced meal of water and little debbie muffins, we walked to the plaza.  There we found the greatest invention 

ever, the tour bus:

I do not care if it is lame or dorky.  I will forever profess my love for the tour bus.  Yes it's touristy, but we saw so many different important/fun/exciting places in one day! For $30! And you get to ride on the roof so it's basically just a giant convertible! Amazing.

My ten favorite Spain people getting ready to explore Barcelona!

The sun was very bright in my camera lens all day!   The weather was a little chilly, but cool and crisp and perfect for a day of running around town!

First Stop: Gothic Cathedral

See how the cross is an X?  This is because there were actually many different shapes of crosses and nobody is sure which was used during the life of Christ.  The cross we think of today, †, just became the accepted version a few centuries ago.

Second Stop: Museum of History of Catalunya

We were the only people in the entire place, so we may have interacted with the exhibits a bit...

Third Stop: The Marina 

My first glimpse of the Mediterranean!  So many boats...

Fourth Stop: Barceloneta

The water is so calm, there are almost no waves.  Until you can actually see the sea, you have no idea it is there.  The air is not humid and you can't hear the waves crash or smell the salt!  You literally stumble upon the sea.  This was probably my favorite part of the day.

Touching the sea!  Check out my right boot...it is now well acquainted with the mediterranean.  We were def not wearing appropriate beach apparal.

Fifth Stop: Port Olympic

When Barcelona hosted the 1992 Olympics, they had to build two new roads and an entire neighborhood to house everyone who came.  This is the olympic stadium!

We were starved by this point, so we dropped by a fancy restaurant on the beach!  There were ten girls at the table and our waiter was a good looking, trilingual guy from Holland.  He got an excellent tip.  I, however, was unimpressed. (Hi arch!)

Seafood Paella! Eaten while gazing at the mediterranean... :)

 

Sixth Stop: Torre Agbar

I could google this... but I thought it was kind of weird and out of place so I'm not going to. 

This wasn't an actual stop, but this is where the bull fights are!

Seventh Stop: Sagrada Familia

Ok, this is crazy.  This man named Gaudi was a psycho genius architect who designed a lot of stuff in Barcelona (including the cathedral from the first stop!)  This was his obsession, La Sagrada Familia.  He worked on it for decades.  However, the Vatican does not recognize it as a cathedral.  Anyways, Gaudi actually lived at the site so he could further obsess over the construction of the building.  So this goes on for years and years, and then one day he gets hit by a bus and dies.  I know, kind of anti-climactic right?  So that is in 1897ish (i think?), and construction resumed in the 1940's.  It is still not finished.  A big chunk of the outside is covered in plastic and the inside is almost completely filled with scaffolding and plastic sheets.  Impressive, nonetheless. 

It is MASSIVE, and SO detailed.  Pictures do it no justice. 

This was a door on the outside...do you see where it says "Jesus" in gold? there were a few key words in gold, and each word was about an inch tall.  The doors were about 15 feet tall.

Inside:

We took the elevators to the top, it was SUPER windy.  We could see the sea!

We decided to be hardcore and take the stairs down...

It was really narrow and tightly wound.  It was so dim that I had to pause a few times to let my eyes adjust so I didn't go tumbling down the infinite spiral staircase.

Eighth Stop: Güell Park

Remember crazy Gaudi?  He also built this park.  It is super random, but also really neat.  I think we would have been amigos.

Ninth Stop: La Pedrera

Another one of Gaudi's creations, which we ran into by accident the night before! It, along with Casa Batlió, were very close to our hostal.

Tenth Stop: Casa Batlió

Oh Gaudi, you are so crazy.  This one made me think of a Tim Burton film and of Willy Wonka!

After our tour, we were exhausted!! We got on the bus at 9am Saturday morning, visited ten different places, took millions of pictures, ate, explored, and were finally dropped off at the Plaza de Catalunya at about 7:30pm.  After wandering around for a bit, we found a restaurant, ate dinner, walked around the city for a bit, and then went back to the hostal.  We were all in bed by 11pm.  It was definitely comical to have eleven people brushing their teeth while wearing pajamas while a big group of people on our floor were getting super dressed up to go out for the night.  We didn't feel lame, we had experienced Barcelona all day! I was so tired I slept the night away without a pillow, with one sheet, in a hostal with a bunch of crazies and a drunk guy knocking on our door.  Now that's a day well spent.

The next morning, Sunday, we woke up at about 8.  After another nutritious breakfast, we went out in search of café con leche.  Mmmmmm :)  We then wandered down to the sea to take pictures with good ole Christopher Columbus.  

His statue overlooks the sea.

Rock fist.

After we bid Chris farewell, we ventured to the Picasso Museum.  I took a few pictures on our walk there.  The buildings in Madrid are so detailed and beautiful.  Many of them had funky wallpaper-esque paint on them!  Look closely at the detail...

 Sidenote: the bark on all of the trees is tie-dyed. I was obsessed with it and nobody else seemed to think it was nearly as exciting as I did.  I guess I'm just tree huggin weirdo.

We finally found the Picasso museum, but pictures weren't allowed! ¡Que lástima!

The museum was awesome.  Picasso actually donated most of the pieces while he was alive.  There were hundreds of paintings arranged chronologically displayed in multiple large, dimly lit rooms.  There were glass cases filled with tiny scraps of paper of his sketches.  Some were sketches of hands or  landscapes, while others were teeny sketch versions of some of his most famous pieces.  The sketches were my favorite part.  I liked them because they showed the raw process of his art.  His planning and inspiration was evident.  I also enjoyed the many postcard-sized paintings that he didn't even bother to sign.  I felt like we were getting to see something very private that was never meant to be viewed.  It was such a neat place.

Then we rushed to the Plaza, caught a bus, and went to the airport! Whew!

A few highlights:

1) While standing outside of our hostel at about 11pm, we saw 3 people in construction vests roller blade down the street.  We found this a bit odd but quickly forgot about it.  Minutes later, over a hundred people of varying ages, nationalities, and skill, roller bladed passed us!!! Most of them were wearing knee pads.  It was the most random thing ever.

2) We ate dinner at a funky Spanish restaurant that blared Avril Lavigne while we dined.  Loved it.

3) Ear plugs are a necessary investment when staying in a hostel.  Trust.

4) Barcelona is extremely Americanized.  This is probably due to tourism.  There was not a single circumstance or situation when knowing Spanish was necessary to get by.  Many stores, billboards, and signs are in English.  Every waiter, store employee, and bus driver spoke English and Spanish.  Most people speak Catalan (the language of that region of Spain) as well.  There are also plenty of people (like our waiter at lunch) who are not from Spain.  He spoke Dutch, Spanish, and English fluently.  It's amazing how much people in Barcelona know about different languages, I can't imagine being like that!

5)  After walking for a while in search of an authentic Spanish restaurant, we thought we had finally succeeded.  We were proud of ourselves for branching out and trying something new!  We finally opened our menus to see that the place only served burgers and bratwursts.  Excellent.  Our waiter then came and took our order (of cheeseburgers with fries and cokes) in English.  Fail.

Random Sevilla fact of the day: The King of Sevilla signs each college diploma issued in Spain.  I think that's awesome that he takes the time to do that!

I'm off to Granada on Friday morning with our entire Tech group.  We get to tour the Alhambra and visit the Moroccan spice markets and gypsy caves! 

Ciao,

julia