Barcelona: Sietas, Paella, and the scarcity of Spanish

So after my exhausting week of assisting production, we went to Barcelona! I got home from seeing Harry Potter at around 2:15am, packed, sent an email to my boss (to request off for Thanksgiving and the day after of course, an important item on my list), and made sure I was ready to set off for Barcelona. I finished just before 3am, thinking I had time for at least 30 minutes of sleep, but I was wrong. Five minutes after I lay down in bed, the roomie's alarm went off. We needed to leave at 3:30am to catch a bus to the train station, where an express train would be taking us to the airport. We made it to the airport, had some very quick breakfast, then boarded our two hour flight to Barcelona. Once we got there, we checked into our hostel and set out for the day. A group of seven girls went, which made it really fun.


My friend Cat and I were excited to be able to speak some Spanish, even though Barcelona is in the Catalunya district of Spain where the primary language is Catalan, but even when we tried, people just spoke to us in English anyway. We walked down a street called Las Ramblas, which is full of street performers, artwork, and other random activities and found a nice little restaurant to eat lunch in. We got paella (a traditional Spanish rice dish) and sangria (I think you know what that is) and it was delicious! After lunch, we slowly made our way to La Sagrada Familia, which is a cathedral that Antonio Gaudi first designed, has been under construction since they first started building it in 1882, and which is completely funded by donations.


We then took the underground train to Park Guell, which was also designed by Antonio Gaudi as a stylish park for aristocrats. The park is situated on top of a large hill and we got to see an amazing view of Barcelona. We walked around a bit and found the terrace, which also gave us a great view of the city from an even more beautiful white snake-like bench that runs along the terrace, decorated in colorful tiles. All of this happened in a blur for me, having been awake for about 38 hours, but was still a great experience.


After that, we made our way back to the hostel to siesta (that's the Spanish word, or excuse, for taking a nap, and a welcome activity for my sleep deprived self) before setting off for our dinner at 10pm. In Spain, they do everything super late so that they can take hours out of the day to nap-- dinner is between 9pm and 11pm and going out around 2am till around 7am. After dinner, we hung out for a bit and got ready to go out and had a lot of fun mixing with the locals, and some not-so-locals. For some reason, Lena and I keep meeting people from Istanbul, which comes in handy when you are planning a trip to Istanbul in the near future.


The next day, we got up and some of us checked out of the hostel (Lena, Kelly, and I were leaving that night, but the other four girls were staying until the next morning). Our first stop was the Christopher Columbus monument. Its a tall dark column with a statue of Columbus on it pointing to the Americas, and at the base is surrounded by a bunch of lion statues. We said our thank you's to the most famous discoverer of the Americas and continued on to the harbor. The harbor was full of boats (duh), mostly sail boats, and we walked along the water until we got to Barceloneta, and made our way to the beach. It was a beautiful sunny day, so we sat on the boardwalk-type thing for a while just relaxing by the sand and sea. Kelly's friend, who is studying in Barcelona, met up with us to say hello before we headed to lunch where we got the most delicious falafel I have ever had. My mouth is watering just thinking about it.


Anyways, after lunch we went to the Picasso Museum, which is situated between some narrow and adorable typical continental European side streets. It was free that day (which is of course why we chose to visit the museum) so we waited in line for a bit before entering the museum. We took a look at his artwork starting at the beginning of his career, which was really interesting. His early paintings are actually realistic and very well done. I can appreciate his cubist paintings more now because I know he is actually talented at painting and drawing, instead of just famous for drawing silly shapes that are supposed to be human faces.

After the museum, we took the underground train again to Placa Espanya, which is a plaza situated at the edge of another park, Montjuic, (which we didn’t visit because it was dark out by then), and is a sort of gateway to the park and to the National Art Museum of Catalunya. The park also houses the Olympic stadium from when Barcelona hosted the Olympics. We rode the escalators to the top of the hill where the National Art Museum of Catalunya sits and saw our last view of the city. It was a great view, and this time we got to see the city from above at night.

After we got down from the hill top, Kelly, Lena, and I headed to the airport. After 10 million struggles involving delayed flights and trains, we finally made it back to our dorm and got some sleep.