Friday:
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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...
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| Beach |
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| Palau de la Música Catalana |
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| 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.
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| 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:
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| 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.
