Barcelona

Well sorry that this update is a little late but I’ve been really busy with traveling and school work as everything seems to be piling up right now for the end up the semester and before break. So anyways me and another girl from my CIEE group went to Barcelona from march 12-15^th, and I am going back there for a few days when mom and dad come for semana santa (Easter week). Barcelona is a very cool city and we were actually able to walk around and see the majority of the highlights in the couple days we had. The first day we walked to parc guell which is a park designed by Gaudi, very cool. We then walked to another cathedral and la Segrada female (which is also by Gaudi). The Segrada familiar is a really detailed building that was started over 100 years ago and is still being constructed with no end really insight as far as I know…needless to say it was really neat. After that we returned to our hostel and wandered around las ramblas which is a really big street with lots of stores, cafes, restaurants and street performers. This took us up to dinner because walking added a lot of time (we probably walked at least 10km in total) and we spent a decent amount of time at each thing location.

After dinner we decided to meet up with a kid I knew from Albion studying in Barcelona. He told us that the thing they like to do in Barcelona is botellon on the beach, a botellon is where a group of people get together buy some alcohol and go to a location outdoors and just any out. This sounded cool to us so we decided to go buy some drinks and head to the beach to hang out for the night. It ended up being one of the most fun things I’ve done here…we were just sitting on the beach enjoying the full moon over the ocean and singing songs, after we were singing for a bit a guy came up to us with a guitar and started playing and singing with us as well. This continued for a few hours and a few of the people that congregated with us left. After they left a group of teenage Moroccans came with a drum and some other instruments, we then continued to stay on the beach and dance with them for a while until we were too tired and just decided to go back to our hostel which was a good 30 minute walk from where we were.

The next day we walked around the city more, explored the port area of the ocean, las ramblas more and the gothic neighborhood. We ended up going to a place where there is an art museum and the Olympic stadium from when Barcelona hosted the Olympics. This also was a bit of a walk so we explored that area for a little while until dusk. Once the sun set there was a fountain show in front of the museum so we stayed for about a half hour to watch that which was really cool. The rest of the night we just relaxed, ate dinner and went back to the beach again to hang out although it wasn’t quite as fun as the night before. We woke up the next day and packed up and headed to the bus station thus concluding our trip. We got back to Alcala on Sunday afternoon and then the next wed night headed off to Valencia for las fallas because we had a short week due to father’s day here. Therefore las fallas will be my next update and hopefully I can get that up soon. Ta luego.