All right, the long-awaited blogs about spring break have come! ;) I’m doing each place as a separate post so as not to be overwhelming, but I’m going to post them so that you can read them in chronological order of where we went. So here we go, Barcelona!
Kathryn, Emily, Helen and I left for Barcelona at 5:45 on Saturday morning. We were pretty tired on the trains and we had two train transfers (little did we know the fatigue to come… compared to other days on this trip, we were positively perky this morning!), but it was fun. We were excited. Our third train brought us into the Spanish countryside, and I was so excited to see it. It just felt Spanish to me, and everything on that train was in Spanish, and I could understand it, and it was like I could feel my brain start whirring. It was like being in Spain turned something on in my brain that had been dormant for a while. It just felt good to be there!
We took the metro to our hostel, which was fortunately extremely close to the metro stop. We dumped our stuff in our room, which was really nice. This hostel, Be Hostel Dream Barcelona, was GREAT. I loved it. We had swipe cards for the doors and lockers, which was super handy, and the kitchen and dining area was great. It was my first time staying at a hostel, and I loved the atmosphere. It was really cool to be around a bunch of people our age from all over who were all doing the same thing as us. It makes for such a friendly environment, and I had a lot of fun at the hostel.
After happily shoving away our suitcases, we decided to walk down to the beach, which was supposedly only five minutes from our hostel. Thanks to a lot of construction, it ended up being a twenty-minute walk to the nearest open beach, but we found it! It was my first glimpse of the Mediterranean and it was breathtaking. It was warm and sunny and the water was so blue and there were real palm trees and sailboats. We dipped our toes in, but we weren’t ready to swim or anything, so we made our way back to the hostel. Or tried. We got quite lost on the way back, but thanks to bus maps and our really great senses of direction (not really), we figured it out. By then, it was practically dinnertime. We checked our email, freshened up, and took the tube downtown. We were so hungry that we stopped at the first good-looking place we saw, which actually turned out to be an Italian place (who knew Mediterranean food just meant pasta?). I had fun speaking Spanish to the waiter and we all cracked up trying to figure out what language we were speaking. I taught Emily, Helen and Kathryn a couple of phrases, and then when the waiter came we all replied in French. It was a reflex! The dinner actually kind of sucked, but I ordered fresh fruit salad for dessert and was presented with a huge bowl of chocolate-covered strawberries, so I wasn’t complaining.
my first time at the mediterranean!
Sunday was possibly my favorite day. There was a company that led tours and excursions from our hostel, as well as our two sister hostels in the city, and we took a free Gothic tour and learned a lot of history. It was so interesting! We learned about the plague, Picasso and the treatment of Jews, as well as about the Roman roots of the city and its progression into the hands of the Spanish, and the longtime conflict between the Catalan and the Spanish.
After lunch, we decided to head to Parc Monjuïc, which I had read about. I had heard there was a great view there, so we assumed that it was a regular park where we could hike up to a point or something. Imagine our surprise when we got off the subway and were presented with three huge buildings, a pavilion with big pillars, a spectacular fountain, and a huge set of stairs leading to a palace! It turned out that the park housed the National Museum of Catalan Art, the old Olympic stadium and a ton of different types of botanical gardens! It sprawled out over this huge hill, and it was amazing. The weather was hot, and we hiked up all the beautiful stairs to the top, where the palace/art museum was situated. A man up there was playing traditional flute music, and we leaned against the railing when we got to the top, listening to the music, feeling the sun on our shoulders and looking out at the most breathtaking view of Barcelona.
hello, barcelona
so excited to be there!
Because it was Sunday, the museum was closed, but we explored the rest of the park and found our way to the Olympic stadium, which was quite cool, as well as into a couple of gardens. It was really fun. I spoke Spanish with a man at a food stand, and he just replied to me like normal and didn’t give me a funny look, pretend like he didn’t know what I was talking about, or speak to me differently. He just replied. It was quite a refreshing difference from the French! ;)
We went back into downtown for refreshing cones of gelato when we were done at the park. Gelato was everywhere in Spain and, of course, Italy, and being able to get it every day was pretty much the best thing ever. We wandered over to a park to eat it, where we discovered a huge festival/market in full swing! We later found out that it was the Earth Festival for two days of peace, which I thought was really cool to stumble upon! I bought a handmade African purse from a very nice man who chatted with us in Spanish for quite a while.
From there, we headed to one of the sister hostels to meet up with the tour company, which offered a night of tapas and flamenco for just twenty euro. Authentic Spanish food with the quintessential Spanish entertainment—great deal, right?? That’s what we thought. We met up with the tour guide and some other travelers, and it took forever to get to the restaurant. We sat down at a table with, coincidentally, a bunch of other American girls, and we chatted while we waited for our food. They brought us sangria, and it was awful. That’s not just me talking—no one liked it and it was terrible quality. (We had other sangria later that was much more delicious.) That should have been our first clue. We kept waiting for our food and it kept not coming, and after a while our tour guide came in and told us that to make up for the wait we could buy another sangria for only a euro. That should have been our second clue. We didn’t want any more of the stupid sangria so we declined. Finally a row of tapas and potatoes was brought out and we hopefully waited to be told to get some, but instead another group of students came and took it. By now it was about 9:30 and we were starving! A few minutes later, our guide came and told us we could go eat. We were allowed five tapas but we were supposed to start with three, and they served some vegetarian ones, so I grabbed three of those. They turned out to be little slices of French bread (and I mean little), a slice of brie, an apple slice and a prune. The next ones they brought out consisted of a chicken nugget on a piece of lettuce on a tiny slice of bread. Not very Spanish!! We each grabbed a few but we were waiting for more to come out. Well, it turned out that the other group we’d seen earlier was part of our group, and, not listening to instructions, they had ended up taking all our food! There were no potatoes for us and there were hardly any tapas left. We each ended up with three wimpy slices of bread and cheese or chicken nugget! The restaurant wouldn’t bring us more even though there had been a mix-up, and just as the new round of sangria was served, our guide came in and called that we had to be at flamenco in fifteen minutes, so bottoms up, let’s get going! So people didn’t even get to finish the drinks they’d bought, and we were a deliriously angry crowd as we made our way out into the street. It was hilarious in a completely horrible way—we joked about stopping at every restaurant we passed and people kept yelling about how they had eaten a piece of bread for dinner. What was worse, we’d paid twenty euro for a dinner we hadn’t received!
When we got to the flamenco club, it was standing room only. The dance was actually really amazing to watch and I was really glad we got to see it. However, I was so tired after that day and no dinner that I could hardly stand and all I could think about was food, so the experience was kind of ruined. I am glad that we saw it, and the dancers were incredible, but it only lasted half an hour and the circumstances were just not ideal. Our guide had told us he was going to find a way to fix the situation, so we gathered around him hopefully when the show was over—and he told us that he had secured a free beer and a free shot for everyone at a nearby bar in compensation. Well, that was the last thing we wanted, clearly. We took the half-hour metro ride home in silence, watching our haggard reflections in the window. It was after midnight when we got home, so I ate an energy bar and we went to bed. Voila our completely failed attempt at an authentic evening of Spanish food and dance!
The next day more than made up for the ridiculous evening before. We stopped at the grocery store and got picnic fixings and then took the tube to the beach. (Well, we thought it would let us out at the beach. We ended up wandering around for about twenty minutes and I had to talk to three different shop owners before we were given good directions, but we found it!) We went to Bella Mar beach, and the weather was absolutely perfect. The sky was cloudless, it was sunny and a light breeze kept it from being too hot. We ate our delicious sandwiches and then lay out in the sun for the rest of the day. It was lovely.
jumping for joy on our beach day
That evening, we stopped back at the store and got dinner makings, which we prepared in the kitchen at the hostel. Groceries in Spain were so cheap— our dinner of ravioli with sauce and a huge salad and dessert was only 4 euro per person! We made dinner every night after that, and it was so much fun. There were always lots of other people around and we made delicious food if I do say so myself!
On Tuesday we got up early to go to the Picasso museum, whose very very long line we had seen the day before. We thought we were being so smart by beating the crowds, but everyone else had had the same idea, and the line extended for blocks! It moved pretty quickly, though, and we had a great time at the museum. I really loved seeing all of Picasso’s work, not just his more famous pieces. I’ve never been a huge fan of cubism, but I loved a lot of his earlier work.
the illegal picture emily took of me in the picasso museum... we thought it was okay!
We were too tired and time-crunched to do another tour, so we decided to make it a museum day and headed back to the National Museum of Catalan Art. I was really tired, but this museum was so great. It was huge and spanned from Gothic to modern times. I found a few pieces I really liked.
my favorite painting at the catalan museum
i loved this sculpture of a dancer
After the museum, we took the metro to Sagrada Familia, Gaudí’s famous church. We were really excited to see it, but it ended up being a huge disappointment: it’s still under construction, which we hadn’t known! There were cranes and scaffolding everywhere, so needless to say it was not as beautiful to look at. It also closes early in the afternoon, so we couldn’t go inside—not that we would have been able to that day anyway, since it turned out that someone had tried to set fire to it that morning! There was police tape all around it. To make ourselves feel better, we scoped out souvenirs (me and Kathryn) and gelato (Helen and Emily) and wandered around a bit before going home to make dinner (a delicious pasta salad).
the front of the sagrada familia
Tonight it had been decided that we would once again join the tour company for their pub crawl. We went to three bars and a club and chatted and hung out. The bars were not exactly hopping, and it wasn’t my scene, but the way we got home counted as another of our funny misadventures: we got a cab to the night bus stop, but then we couldn’t figure out which bus to get on. Due to a misunderstanding between us, we ended up waiting for one bus when we needed the other. We finally figured it out, and it turned out that although every other bus was at this stop, the bus we needed was coming to a stop across a large plaza. We started walking over, and as we went, we saw our bus drive up, so we started running. We had to stop and laugh because it was hilarious, four of us sprinting across a plaza in the middle of downtown Barcelona at 3:30 in the morning. We missed that bus and finally got home around 4:45. It was so awful we found it quite comical!
On Wednesday we took the Gaudí tour and saw the different houses/palaces he built in the city. It was super interesting and the buildings are so cool. My favorite was the house he dedicated to St. George (who slayed the dragon), for all the architecture is symbolic. The colored shingles of the roof are the dragon’s scales, the spiral staircase inside is its spine, and the balconies, which look like eye sockets of a skull, represent the people who were killed by the dragon. The mosaic tiles on the walls are the confetti from the celebration of the dragon’s death, with the balconies alternatively being masks from the celebratory ball that was held.
casa de san jordi
flower stand on la rambla!
We got falafel for lunch and some gelato and found ourselves in the middle of La Rambla, the huge, famed street market. We walked around, which was really fun, and then we took the metro to Park Güell, the park that Gaudí designed. It was amazing. High up on a hill, the park sprawled out across a lovely wooded area, with winding paths, sculptures and houses all designed by Gaudí. It was much bigger than we’d imagined and it was so much fun to explore. Aside from our day exploring Parc Montjuïc, this was definitely my favorite place we went. It was so beautiful and at one point there was even a man playing Spanish guitar, making the experience feel complete.
the four of us in park guell!
the famous dragon
And that was our last day in Barcelona! Barcelona was probably the place where I had the most fun on break. It felt like we were always exploring and discovering all these amazing, fun things in the city. We kept turning to each other and saying, “Oh my god, you guys, we’re in Barcelona!” and everything seemed so exciting. I loved speaking a little Spanish (and reading Catalan, although since it’s a mix between Spanish and French that really confused my brain!). The four of us had a really good time traveling together, too. In general, it was a great travel experience and an amazing start to break!
the view from park guell
No comments:
Post a Comment