Fuimos a Espana

Wednesday
Our flight leaves Athens at 3am and we arrive in Barcelona at 6:30am. We get there as the sun is rising and the city is just beautiful. We take the bus and get off at Placa de Catalunya. The city isn't awake yet so the streets are pretty empty and the air is fresh. And guess what? THE STREETS ARE BIG! and there's actually sidewalks made for people to walk on! So we roam around the streets until we find our hostel Sant Jordi Alberg. We buzz the hostel, but no one answers, so we find this little breakfast place and sit down, dump all of our luggage in this tiny cafe and get us some coffee and breakfast EMPANADAS! :) they're were delicious. So at 8am we try the hostel again and this time someone buzzes us in. So we check in, but our room isn't ready yet, so we store our luggage and then we all just fall asleep on the couches. It was perfect because we took a 4 hour nap and when we woke up it was only noon and our rooms were ready :) We got an 8 bed mixed room so we dominated the room basically. We put down our stuff, put our sheets on our beds and headed out to explore the city! This time, when we walk out, the city is hustling and bustling with people, buses, cars, and mopeds. So we take our map and head out to Passig de Garcia, where we got dropped off by the bus from the airport. This is a main street on Barcelona so we headed back there and started walking toward La Rumbla, which is also a central city with lots of cafes and restaurants. Along the way we found this really good sandwich place called El Mo's and they had the best tuna sandwiches. The spanish are a fan of tuna let me tell ya. So we grab food there and continue on our way toward La Rumbla. When we get there we spot a fruit market! Our favorite! So we go in and this place is just massive. They have the best fresh fruit juice too for only a euro. So we buy a cup of that and we just explore. It's a fruit, meat, and seafood market with random little restaurants in the middle. Our group gets split up while we're in the fresh fruit market, so me, jess, and liz go our own way. We continue down La Rumbla and there's is just so much stuff. There's a block of fresh flowers, then random people selling rabbits, ferrets, chicken, etc. There were also lots of people dressed up as leprachuans..gargoyles, vampires, taking pictures with people.

We decide to head towards the Picasso Museum. It was really cool. It didn't contain a lot of his famous work because this museum was special because it was created when he was still alive. CRAZY! His friend created it for him and he donated a lot of his works to it. That's why there are a bunch of sketches that he made of people and just random doodlings that he did. that was pretty cool because you never really get to see that stuff from artists. We weren't allowed to take pictures though :(

Then we got lost on the process of getting back and we ended up at the arch (i forgot the name of it :(). But it was pretty cool. We basically just explored the city that first day, getting lost and just appreciating the beautiful architecture EVERYWHERE.

Then we finally got back to our hostel and just crashed for another 4 hours.


Thursday
Today we headed to Park Guel, which also had the Gaudi Museum. It was a huge hike. The hill we had to climb to get up was super steep, but it was cool because there were escalators built into 2 sections of the street to transport people up. It was beautiful. This man was a genius. This entire park was composed of mosaics just everywhere. You have to see it to fully appreciate and understand it. It felt like Disneyland, but in a Dr. Seuss world. It was awesome. His house was also there and was changed into a museum. It didn't have much, just showed the different rooms of his house. He was also the first person to customize furniture to a person. Made chairs to fit individual people. Genius.

Then when we left the park, we went to this little figurine museum that people at our hostel said they had gone to. It's basically run by a Spanish war veteran in his garage. It was a little mysterious going into it, but he just had THOUSANDS upon THOUSANDS but little figurines. Toy soldiers to pretty much all the disney characters, the simpsons, pirates, indians, cars. He told us a story and was really interactive. There was a firecracker that scared the living daylights out of us too. At the end of the story we each went through an initiation with a flag. It was...pretttyy interesting.

After that museum, we just wandered our way home seeing the city and just where we'd end up.


Friday
WE WENT TO THE BEACH! It was sunny and warm, but really windy so it was actually pretty cold. I started getting sick so I didn't feel too well. I took a nice little nap on the beach :) It felt good. It was also weird though because people would walk around offering people massages. Literally every 5 minutes someone would walk by offering a massage. There were also people selling henna tattoos, beer, etc. It was kind of annoying really. NO, I DONT want a massage. Just leave me alone. But it was a pretty day :) Very relaxing. Jess and I ended up playing some volleyball with these Portugese guys.


Saturday
I think Saturday was my favorite day. We went to the La Sagrada Familia, which is this enormous church designed by none other than Gaudi himself :) I don't have pictures of that right now because I forgot my camera that day..I know retarded but I will be getting them from a friend soon :) It was really cool because there was an exhibit talking about Gaudi and the designs he used to build the church and everything was pretty much modeled after nature from the shapes of the columns used and the intricate designs on the outside of the church. It had a very gothic feel to it. I loved it :) Then we proceeded to get lost some more, had an unsuccessful shopping evening, but it was fun nonetheless :)


Sunday
I pretty much was really sick Saturday night to Sunday. So we checked out of our hostel, got breakfast...then Jess and I went back to the hostel and just vegetated on the couch for the rest of the day. We talked to the Prague kids that were going back to Prague. Then we watched Black Hawk Down (forgot how good that movie was) and made friends with some Aussies. We left the hostel at around 830pm for the airport and didn't get back into Athens until about 4am :( It was pretty tiring.



I was surprised because as much as I liked Barcelona, I started to miss Athens. I liked the beauty and the open space, but I missed the crowded streets of Athens. I missed hearing Greek everywhere and having people be so friendly. I didn't think I was going to miss Athens. I was afraid I was going to miss Barcelona when I got back to Athens, but surprisingly I don't.

But the trip was really fun overall. I also loved the hostel we stayed out. The people were really nice and hospitable and the hostel was very clean overall. They were very accommodating especially the day we got there and the day we were supposed to leave when we didn't have anywhere else to go. First time at a hostel and a very successful one at that :)