Barcelona

FINALLY,

I’m sure that more than a few of you have been waiting for an entry on my trip to Barcelona with Uncle Kevin… here it goes.

This trip marked my first time to try to navigate airports/ buses and whatnot by myself, and it ended up being ridiculously easy. Along those lines… A lot of people tell me, “Wow, I can’t believe you’re studying abroad. I could never do that. You’re so brave. I can’t believe you can travel by yourself, etc…” That is bogus. I have been on a 2.5 month vacation since leaving in late January. Basically, my classes are very easy and require little to no effort. My main job while I am here is literally to make Spanish-speaking friends and hang out with them. All I have to do is talk to people, and I am doing well. I just figured I’d get that off my chest before starting. Don’t put me on some pedestal.

Ok, when I arrived in Barcelona at around 9:30 PM, I simply followed my Google MAPS directions to get to the hostel, and who is the first person I see in the hostel? It was none other than our family’s world traveler, Kevin Stout. He had been kind enough to wait for me to eat dinner after hearing that Spaniards don’t eat until around 9:30 or 10:00… and he was starving. Therefore, our first job was to find a cool place to eat.

Nita, if you read this, I know that you’re cringing… Uncle Kevin and I are terrible at choosing places to eat. I’m going to take a positive stance and say that it is due to our adventurous natures to think that there always might be something better ahead, but together we cannot choose a place to save our lives. We ended up sitting down to eat dinner at 11:15 PM. I had some sort of spicy sausage or “chorizo”, and I encouraged Uncle Kevin to try some conejo… rabbit. They both were delicious, but we were ready for bed – because it was around 1:00 AM at this point, so we made our way back to the hostel and tried to sleep through the sounds of the metro flying beneath our beds.

At this point, I’ll have to be a little less detailed with my descriptions or this will be a post that no one finishes (which it very well could be already). Thursday, we decided, was walking day. We set out on our first Gaudí tour and saw two of his famous houses. They both were a little steep in price, so we then headed to the Sagrada Familia, one of the most impressive things I’ve seen since being in Europe. The Sagrada Familia is a Cathedral that was started a little over a hundred years ago and still is not complete. In fact, the projections say that it won’t be complete until around 2030. We spent about 2.5 hours in there, and the Lonely Planet book really enlightened us on a lot of stuff. Also, we met two exceptionally large and masculine British women… who ended up being imposturous men pretending to be women! It was kind of funny because they ended up being pretty lame drag queens because they flirted with the girls in our elevator and not us.

Well, when we finally left the Sagrada Familia, we made our way to the giant colorful cucumber building. Barcelona advice: don’t bother going to the colorful cucumber building. There is absolutely nothing there. It’s a water-treatment company.

That night, we went to a cool two-story bar and had great conversation over some good wine…. Then called it a night.

On Friday, we rented bikes to travel a little further than the 8 hours we spent walking the day before, and it was a blast. We went to Park Güell, another Gaudí creation, the Barcelona Stadium, the Museum of Catalonian Art, which had the best collection of Romanesque art in the world, the Olympic Complex from 1992, and the end of Las Ramblas, where there is a pretty stylish (like most things in Barcelona) dock. We spent the majority of the day (7.5 hours) on our bikes bravely weaving in and out of traffic, our hair blowing in the wind. We were only yelled at on two occasions. The first was a shopkeeper who saw Kevin riding up a one-way street. The second was a bus driver telling us to get in the bike-lane. Also, some cops stopped and checked us out when they saw me laying on the dock trying to take pictures of the water. I suppose they thought I was recuperating from the famous Barҫa nightlife.

Well, early on Saturday morning, Kevin had to catch his plane and head off to India. It was an awesome weekend, and I had a blast. Besides the restaurant indecision, we made a pretty good team. Thank you, Uncle Kevin, for an great weekend.