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Saturday March 15- Sunday 16, 2008
So I am finally back in Hull after another crazy two weeks! I am not even sure where to begin! So I guess I will just try to give you a little idea of how it went…here goes
After Palermo and Athens, I decided to come back to Hull for a few days to do some laundry and to repack. It was really nice being home for a few days before the marathon of countries began. But on Saturday, March 15, I took a train to London to meet Caitlin at the airport. She had gone to London with her brother instead of coming back to Hull. I met her around 3 at the train station and then we set off to the airport to catch our flight. On the plane, there was a group of English students traveling to their own spring break, so they were just out of control. They would scream and yell if something as small as the lights turned on. So it was a pretty interesting start to our spring break! Our original plan was to be in Barcelona for only one night and take an overnight train the next night to Antwerp, Belgium, so when we got to our hostel around midnight, we knew we had to be up for a long time. I am not sure if you know this or not, but the Barcelona culture consists of going out for the night around one or two in the morning and coming in around nine. So we had thoroughly planned on staying out all night and just being tired while we toured the next day. We met some girls in our hostel that were also studying in England for the semester and decided we wanted to go out with them. By the time six girls got ready to go out, it was already 3:30 am! Eric, my roommate also was traveling with us over break, but took an earlier train to Barcelona. He came over to our hostel around 1:30 and just patiently waited for everyone! We were told about 4 different places to go, but once we started walking and taking the underground to them, people kept telling us the "discos" were closed! So, although we never made it into a disco, we still managed to stay out until 5:30 or so. We actually ended up sitting on a street corner eating churros! I guess that is pretty authentic in itself But it was a lot of fun just hanging out. And the girls we met were really fun too! They actually even talked about visiting in Hull! So that could be fun! We got back to our hostel around 6 Sunday morning and went to sleep for 2 hours before heading out into the city to explore.
Sunday morning, we rented bikes to ride around the city. It was so much fun! My bike looked like a speed bike but had banana bike handle bars…pretty funny! We figured that since we only had one full day, it would be faster to get all over the city if we had a bike, so Caitlin, Eric and I took off on our wheels.It actually kind of became a hassle at times because we would get on really crowded streets and not be able to ride through people, but it was still a lot of fun, and definitely different than walking around like we are used to. The weather was unbelievable! Eric even got a farmers tan from one day! It was really really warm! The city was beautiful! We started by going to the Guelle Park. I don't really know its purpose, but it was a huge park full of flowers, trees, different walking/hiking paths, little vendors, cool architecture…pretty much anything you can think of. It was beautiful!We walked around in there for a while and got a really good view of the city and of the ocean. There were different layers of it, so you could go up fairly high. But it was beautiful! After the park, we rode directly south and headed toward the beach. We ended up stopping at the Temple de la Sagrada Familia (a gothic church) and they were having a huge festival. Since it was palm Sunday, there were palms everywhere that were decorated into fun shapes and painted all sorts of colors. People were all over dancing to a band that was playing. We ended up finding a restaurant in that area to eat at and sat outside so we could fully enjoy the sun and warmth, because England was definitely not warm when we left. After we ate, we headed to the train station to book our train out for that night to Belgium(and this is where we are stupid). We booked our train around 1715 and the man told us the sleeper train would leave at 1930. We still had not seen the beach, and for some reason thought we had enough time to go find it before our train left. So we went off to the beach. We found the marina and sat along the water and with about 45 minutes until our train left, decided we had better head back. We took the BUSIEST street back up to our hostel, and Caitlin and I even ended up getting separated from Eric so we were hoping he would make it back to the hostel. We raced back, changed quick, and then Eric showed up. It took us about 5 minutes to find a taxi and we got to the train station as quickly as possible. Needless to say, we got to our platform and saw the taillights turning the corner. We always happen to make our trips stressful because we wait to the very last minute and our luck finally ran out. We sat in the train station for about 2 hours trying to figure out how we would get to Belgium by the next night, since it was St. Patrick's Day. We ended up staying in Barcelona an extra night and just spent most of the night hanging out at our hostel. It actually turned out okay! We took an 8 o clock train the next morning and actually got some sleep! So it ended up okay! Pretty good way to start break though
But Barcelona is one place I wish we could have spent some more time. Not only was the weather great but the city was awesome! There was so much to see and I am sure we didn't see it all! I could have probably spent a week there-touring some and the beach some otherBut we had a lot of fun! If I got to go back, I would stay there for a week and probably even tour more of Spain because it was such a beautiful place! Caitlin and I really wanted to see a bull fight, but we missed the bull fight season by only a few weeks. I would still love to go back and see one of those and see the futbol stadium. But we had a fun start to break!
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