Barcelona! Week 5: Friday, Saturday, and Sunday

Friday:

Casa Batlló

After school today Bailey and I went to Plaza Poniente to get on the Linecar bus to go to the airport and then to Barcelona! Two other girls from our school were going too and had the same flights as us, but were meeting other people there. Our flight was an hour long and with Ryan Air. Emily, one of the other girls flying there, said people on Ryan Air flights always scream on the flight, then clap at the end. Sure enough, whenever we hit some turbulence or dropped a little, the people in the back screamed as if we were on a roller coaster and then when we landed everybody clapped. Also, the entire time, the flight attendants were trying to sell food, drinks, newspapers, lottery tickets, sunglasses, perfume, etc.

After we landed, we took a train and the metro to get to our hostel. Between switching from the train to the metro, we saw Casa Batlló, some apartments designed by the famous Antoni Gaudí. They were so strangely designed that no one wanted to live in them and now it's a museum and restaurant.

La Boquería market

Our hostel wasn't quite as nice as our hostel in Madrid, but it was still fine. There were ten beds (5 bunk beds) to a room and the whole floor shared a bathroom. After checking in, we got some maps and then walked to La Rambla, an incredibly busy street that's lined with stores and restaurants. Barcelona is in Cataluña, which is one of the autonomous communities of Spain, meaning it's a section kind of like a state that has its own government, has immense pride in its own history, and, in the case of many people, wants independence from the rest of Spain. They speak Catalán, which is very similar to French. Most of the signs were in Catalán, Spanish, and English. It's such a major tourist city that everyone seemed to speak English as well. Other Spaniards that aren't from Cataluña can't understand Catalán, and when someone from Cataluña is speaking on the news, they have Spanish subtitles.

On La Rambla, there's a market called La Boquería. We went inside, and there were stalls selling fresh fruit, candy, raw fish (that were still whole and looking at me), other meat (baby pigs, legs), cheese, and cooked foods as well. Bailey and I bought calzones there to eat for supper. At the end of La Rambla is a really tall Christopher Columbus (Cristobol Colón, in Spanish) statue, and beyond that is the Mediterranean Sea.

At fountain show at Montjuïc

From there we went to the Font Mágica (magic fountain) de Montjuïc, where there's a cool music and light show at the fountain. A lot of people were there to watch it. In that area, near that fountain were the Olympic buildings and stadium where they held the '92 summer Olympics, but we didn't see them.

After the fountain show, we started walking back to the hostel. Now in Cataluña bullfighting is illegal, because of animal cruelty and other political reasons. Barcelona had three plazas de toros (bullrings). One is being torn down, one is now a museum, and the other (which we walked by tonight) has been turned into a shopping mall. They also raised up the entire structure and put another floor underneath it and a restaurant on top with an elevator going up the outside.

Las arenas, mall that was once a bullring

We got back to our hostel and went to bed. I calculated that we walked 6.8 miles today.

Saturday:

The population of Barcelona is 1.6 million and right now the highs are in the 80s and the lows are in the 70s. Our hostel didn't provide breakfast but there was a little grocery store just across the street so we got some cheap donuts and water there. We walked back down La Rambla, went back to La Boquería and got fruit, and walked to the beach.

The beach was really nice, but crowded. It was really fun to feel the waves and swim in the sea. It wasn't like the beach in Valladolid. We may have gotten a little sunburned...

Beach

Palau de la Música Catalana

La Sagrada Familia

Next we went to Plaza Jaume for a bike tour. It was called Fat Tire Bike Tours (it's also in Paris, Berlin, and London); we were provided bikes, and a guide led us around the city. Our guide was Australian (the tour was in English) and he said he came to Barcelona for the world cup and decided to stay and live there. There were fourteen people in our biking group, from the U.S., Australia, Scotland, Canada, and Puerto Rico. Barcelona is a really biker friendly city. There's bike lanes everywhere and lots of bikes in every plaza available to rent. Still, we all almost got hit by taxis a couple times, but it was still fun :) We would stop at different places to take pictures and for the guide to talk about each one. We stopped at the cathedral, Palau de la Música Catalana (a theater also designed by Gaudí), the Arc de Triomf, a fountain in the Parc de la Ciutadella, the bullring that's now a museum, and Sagrada Familia. Sagrada Familia is a church designed by Gaudí that was unfinished when he died in 1926, and is still unfinished. It is under construction, and although Gaudí's original designs were destroyed in a fire, they are trying to build it according to what they think his plans for it were. When it is finished, which is projected to be in 2026 (the hundredth anniversary of his death), it will be twice as tall as it is now.

My paella!

Our last stop on the tour was a restaurant on the beach. Bailey and I had nachos and we sat there for a little bit and watched people play soccer in the sand. After that, we went back to the bike place and the tour was over. It was four hours long.

We went back to the hostel for a little bit, then went out in search of a restaurant that had paella, a popular Spanish dish. We stopped at the first restaurant that had it (we didn't want to walk any farther). We were the only people in the restaurant and we watched handball in the Olympics on the TV (which actually seems to be a popular sport here). Paella is a rice dish that is yellow (because of saffron) with some kind of meat, depending on what kind you order. We got a mixture, so ours had chicken, spareribs, mussels, prawn, and squid. I had Bailey's squid and she had my mussels, and she had to rip the head off my prawn for me because I was too afraid to (it was good though, it tastes like shrimp). After the paella, we called it an early night because we weren't feeling great: a mixture of sunburn and dehydration, I think.

Sunday: 

In Park Güell

 After checking out of the hostel we went to Park Güell, a gigantic park designed by Gaudí that was originally supposed to be a housing development filled with mansions, but once again no one wanted to live in his houses, so it was turned into a park instead. It's filled with strange structures, houses, and mosaics. To see all my pictures from Barcelona, go to: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.3658125574575.2134912.1317690207&type=1&l=ab1113a4a3 . After the park, we took the metro and the train back to the airport. We were afraid we were going to miss our flight because of several delays, but we got there as it was boarding. We then taxied the runways for forty minutes before taking off and arrived at least twenty minutes late. Ironically, they didn't play their usual message at the end of the flight talking about how 90% of Ryan Air flights are on time. After we got back to Valladolid, I Skyped with my parents, grandma, and sister, but otherwise didn't do much of anything the rest of the night.