Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
We had the most amazing weekend ever! I apologize in advance because we did so many things that I foresee this being a very long post!
We arrived to Barcelona late Thursday and went straight to our hotel. Well, let me just say, the hotel was much lower than subpar. It used to be an old monastery, and I don't think they had taken care of it since then. The walls were full of mold and the bed sheets had clearly not been changed due to the numerous hairs all in our sheets. We changed the sheets and were in the room as little as possible throughout the weekend, but if I come home with asbestos poisoning, you know why. We went to sleep ASAP because our tour in the morning was at 8:30 AM.
Our tour Friday morning turned out to be so much more than we expected. The description said "walking tour" but we ended up taking an air conditioned van all over Barcelona to see every sight imaginable. We started by going up on Montjuic (mountain of the Jews) for a brief history lesson and panoramic views of the city. Did you know that Catalonia (the region Barcelona is in) wants to secede from Spain and be their own individual country? That blew my mind I had no idea! We then went down for a tour at Sagrada Familia which was absolutely amazing! The architecture is so abstract yet awesome, and it has been in construction for over 100 years! They estimate it will be done in 2026, so I'll definitely have to make a trip back once it is done. We then toured the Gothic Quarter and walked around there, then broke for lunch. We went to a tapas restaurant that our tour guide, Ana, recommended, and it was delicious! We had a little time to kill before we met back up again to finish our tour, so we did a little shopping. I found a great tapas cookbook, and I can't wait to make some of them! Also, that store sold jewelry whose brand name was Carla, and their logo was a sea turtle! How crazy! After the lunch break we went to Parc Guell to see where Gaudi lived. It is an absolutely gorgeous complex - I wouldn't have minded living there! Except for the giant mosaic lizard that welcomes you as you come in…. ick. We then went for a tour of the apartment complex that Gaudi designed, which concluded our tour. Ana was absolutely amazing and knowledgeable, she definitely added to the experience. Also, we saw a Starbucks, which was awesome because we don't have those in Italy! After the tour, we had a wine tour scheduled, and that was so unbelievably cool. We learned how to have a proper wine tasting, and facts about the four wines we tried. Cooler than the actual lesson, though, was the people we met on our tour. We met a pair of sisters, one of which has a daughter who was in Spain playing in a field hockey camp she had been selected for. She is being recruited by colleges (already, and she's only 16!) to play lacrosse by schools all over the nation. The other group was a couple that is newly pregnant and the wife's mother. They were a lively bunch and a hoot to enjoy our tour with. After the tour we went out for sangria with the sister pair at a hotel bar that our wine tour guide recommended and we got croquettas - yummy tapas! We then went home, freshened up, then went to the hottest night club in town for tourists: Opium. We got there around 11:30, expecting it to be crowded because that is late to go out at home. False. It was deserted. It was huge and included various bars, a dance floor, and an outdoor lounge to eat. Everyone was having drinks on that outdoor terrace and no one was inside the club. We decided to wait it out and just dance to the music even though no one was out there. Then, all of a sudden, at 1:30, everyone piled on the floor around us and suffocated us. We lasted until about 1:50 and then had to leave because we were so uncomfortable. We headed to bed quickly after showers so we could get up for another full day.
We woke up and headed straight to the bus for our hop-on-hop-off bus tour. We got to see the whole south side of Barcelona. This included Montjuic, the beachside and harbor, as well as many other things. We got off to go shopping about half way through the tour, then completed the 2-hour loop and got off back where we started and headed to our afternoon tour: a Picasso walking tour! We walked around to see places he lived and worked, and concluded the tour with the Picasso Museum. We couldn't take any pictures there and that was really disappointing. Our tour guide was extremely knowledgeable and that added to the experience. We then headed back to our hotel to clean up and change. We got ready and headed back out on the town for a travelling tapas tour. We met our tour guide and our fellow tourists which were an elderly couple from Brazil who were just too funny for words. We travelled to two different tapas restaurants and ate tons of yummy food, I even ate peppers, tomatoes, AND olives! Who am I becoming?? It was proven to us just how small the world really is when we walked into our second restaurant and the sister pair was there on a tour of their own. They bought a plate of croquettas and sent them over to our table -how sweet of them! We are now all Facebook friends so we can show them around Florida when their daughter comes on a recruiting tour. We left the restaurant and headed to the last stop on our tour: a Flamenco show. It was absolutely amazing and beautiful, it definitely brought me back to my days in Spanish Club at SJS (although I was clearly no where near their skill level). As we exited the show, we ran into the pregnant couple and mother waiting in line to see the show after ours! It was so crazy how small the city was that night. Walking between restaurants we had seen a sign for frozen margaritas which is something Laurel had been looking for for a while now - keep in mind they don't use ice in Europe) so we had to find it. Our tour guide tried to explain how t get back to it, but misunderstood which place we had been talking about and led us to Ryan's Irish Pub. We were just about the only people in the bar so we made friends with the bartenders. They each had an interesting story and were fun to get to know. They also gave us free drinks which was a plus. We headed back to our hotel fairly early because we had a big last day planned for Sunday.
We woke up and decided to go to the Swimming World Championships at the Olympic stadium from the 1992 Olympics. It was so awesome! We got to see the preliminaries for the men's and women's 400 and the men's and women's 4x100 relay. The only downside was that they took my water bottle away from me on the way in - I was so mad! It was so cool seeing Olympic gold-medalists mere yards away from us though - unreal! After those were over we walked down the street to this place called The Spanish Village, which is where they model all the buildings and restaurants after the styles in different parts of Spain. It was cool, almost as if we saw all of Spain in a day! We had a yummy lunch there - I had Paella for the first time, so good - and also bought friendship bracelets because we're lame like that, then rode the hop-on-hop-off bus around the loop (may have fallen asleep on it - woops) and headed back to our hotel to grab our bags and head to the airport. We landed and took a nice bus ride through parts of Rome we had not seen yet. We got home at about 9ish. I then spent my evening trying to get my backpack open. For those of you who don't know, the luggage locks I bought are terrible and every single one of them has become jammed on my luggage. The first two we were able to finagle off using a safety pin but this one we had no such luck - it had to be cut. The closest thing to a power tool our apartment supplied us with was a wine corkscrew, and needless to say that didn't work. I'm going to go on an adventure in the morning to find a place that has the abilities to cut it off. I'll be able to post pictures when I finally have access to my computer. Until then, it's bedtime for me. A domani!
- comments