Barcelona

Two weekends ago I went to Barcelona with two other girls, Lindsay and Magda.  I haven't written about it yet because all of last week I was still in recovery from lack of sleep. Turns out a 21st birthday celebration with our whole group combined with a 5:15 am alarm for the airport shuttle don't mix well, especially when you don't finish packing the night before.  Yolo? Never again.

Anyway, I managed after sprinting around the Plaza de Armas bus station in the wee hours of Friday morning to locate the airport shuttle, manage to get on the same bus as Lindsay, and arrived at the airport in time to be in the very front of the line for our RyanAir free-for-all-seating bus with a backpack that felt far too light to be holding all the necessities of a weekend trip.  Thanks mostly to Lindsay's directional skills and partly to my vague familiarity with Barcelona from a family trip four years ago, we were able to locate our hostel upon arrival, drop off our bags, and begin our whirlwind exploration of the city.  

We arrived around lunchtime, but I wasn't very hungry, having eaten my bocadillo (sandwich) from Marta at approximately 10:45, my rebel side relishing eating at an hour much before our delegated 2:30 Spanish lunchtime.  This was probably a good thing because otherwise I would have been tempted to buy everything at the Boquería, Barcelona's famous market where we found ourselves first.  It is chock full of the most amazing display of colorful fruits, aromatic spices,  gawking tourists, a terrifying assortment of dead fish that like to glare at you with their dead-eyeballs, all topped off by a constant swaying of Iberian ham legs over your head.  Fantastic.  

cloudy Barcelona

It was a cloudy, drizzly, chilly day and there were actually colored leaves on the ground! After the perpetual summer of Andalucía, I was practically bubbling over with excitement just to have a fall day.  We next attempted to climb up the mountain (otherwise know as small hill to us Colorado folks) of Montjuic to find the castle at the top.  A simple task, presumably, but NO. The hill, in addition to being a strangely far distance away, also turned out to be full of the windiest pedestrian paths and most useless maps (in Catalan.. thanks Barcelona) that you've ever seen.  Consequently, we never made it to the castle.  Instead we popped out of the trees in front of the Catalan National Museum, which we were too stingy to pay for but which had some gorgeous fountains and proceeded to take a much shorter route back in the direction of the city center.  Lindsay and Magda headed to the Picasso Museum.  Since I had already been to this (amazing) museum and remembered it well and I was feeling so tired that I possibly would have just ended up finding a nice corner to sleep in anyway, I decided to pass.  I said I wanted to walk around, which actually meant finding a snack and returning to the museum to fall asleep in the courtyard against a stone wall.  

stormy skies atop the cathedral

After some more wandering in the glorious old Gothic quarter, we returned to our awesome hostel where I proceeded to nap through dinner. Our 12-bed dorm room was surprisingly not weird or dirty, which was nice.  We decided to be cool cats and go out with a group from our hostel that night, because everyone running the hostel and staying in it had impressed us with their friendliness.  They took us to a hilarious little bar where anything you ordered was likely to come with a show and some weird props, including but not limited to: fire, neon colors, marshmallows, tabasco sauce, candy fish, whipped cream, and blindfolds.  It was a hoot.  We made new friends from Australia, Germany, Brazil and Canada.  We also didn't really sleep much. Oops. 

Day two started bright and early anyway and turned out to have a Gaudí theme.  We hopped on the metro and headed to Parque Güell, which had an incredible view, crowds of tourists and some rocking street musicians.  We really should have bought their CD.  

Lindsay, me, Magda

The Gaudí day continued with the Casa Batlló, la Pedrera, and finally the Sagrada Familia.  Gaudí's candy-land cathedral was just as fabulous the second time around, and I was excited to note the significant differences from when I last visited four-years before.  It is the wackiest architecture I have ever seen, like children's-fairytale-meets-candied-fruit-meets-human-bones.

inside

After exploring the wonders of Barcelona all day, the balls of my feet felt like I was walking on a pin cushion with every step.  We finally took a break to have tapas at 4:30.  Correct, we didn't have lunch until 4:30.  Which meant I was running on nothing but a chorizo-filled croissant and three hours of sleep on a camp bed with a sweater over my head to block the light.  And correct, I was feeling like I was about to faint.  I refuse to be this tired again until Dance Marathon 2014. Slightly revived by sausage, potatoes and paella, we spent the rest of the night exploring the city center, chatting with our new hostel friends, missing a fountain show due to faulty information, drinking sangria and making friends with the guys at the empenada store.  All the while me inwardly wanting only my pillow and outwardly trying to be a chipper traveling companion.

Sunday we awoke at the crack of 7 am to hop back on the plane.  I felt my whole body heave a sigh of relief as we zoomed over the Giralda and my bed came closer and closer.  I proceeded to take the most magnificent nap ever, rising only for Marta's chorizo tortilla española.  Despite my sleep deprivation, we took Barcelona by storm and I couldn't have asked for better traveling companions or a more adventure-filled weekend.