Barcelona

      Barcelona, in addition to being the city of Gaudi it is also the city of staying up late, shot bars, smoking hookah with Israelis and getting water thrown out the window at you. Needless to say, it was a great time.

       I arrived in Spain around 8:00pm on the plane, which I thought would mean a quiet night and hanging out the next day. Not true. The girl I was staying with, Lindsay (who I'd never met before but was nice enough to even give me her key one night) informed me that Barcelona eats dinner at ten, is out at the bars around midnight and the clubs around one. Frequently people don't get home until five or six AM. Despite the appeal I still wanted to take it slow my first night and this was probably a good decision, as the bar crawl the next night helped me find out, staying out that late is hard to get used to.

      Walking around Plaza Catalunya on a Friday night you can see how active the city is. Corte Ingles, a huge shopping center, was still buzzing around 9:00, and La Rambla was a mess. Hundreds, if not thousands of people were gathered along this one tree-lined street buying and selling goods and looking for the party. All along the city streets Christmas decorations hung, but they weren't lit. Apparently its a tradition in Spain to put up the lights, but not actually light them till much closer to actual Christmas.
       I met up with Annie from Gettysburg and we spent the night catching up in her hostel with a few bottles of wine and friends. The evening took us to right outside the hostel with one of the people we had met who happened to have a hookah. It was awesome. Relaxing, a nice night, in good company, it couldn't have gotten better. We were gathered in a small stoop and as I had been delegated to get food with Annie, I ended up standing at the edge of the steps rather than sitting on them. I was casually listening to one of the group tell a story, minding my own business, when out of the blue an ice-cold bucketful of water splashed down on my head. This was met with laughs and I stood there, unable to determine a course of action. Apparently one of the girls in the group had vaguely heard someone say "Be Quiet" in Spanish, but the rest of us weren't informed. We decided to let whoever it was have their peace (after a few choice words shouted at the window the water probably came out of) and headed to bar, then bed.

      The next day we toured the city. To describe Barcelona as Gaudi's city isn't enough. From Parc Geul to the north, Sagrada Familia towards the water, and scattered Gaudi Houses, the city breathes his architecture. Barcelona is a big place, like Paris or Berlin rather than Prague or Amsterdam, luckily the metro there is easy to use and efficient. We made it all the way up the huge hill to Parc Geul and saw some great views of the city, then all the way down to Sagrada Familia. On our walks my friends took me off La Rambla to probably the single greatest place in Barcelona: La Boqueria. Its basically a huge marketplace with cheap, delicious, fresh food. Ham is big in Spain, and for a euro or two you could get little boxes of ham, similar to the boxes McDonalds fries come in, and some cheese. The ham literally melts in your mouth and with the fresh cheese, it was a great snack. They also have cheap fresh fruit juice and a huge assortment of candy stores. You could spend the better part of a day wandering around.
That night we dined on paella and enjoyed a pub crawl of the city.

       Tired (unsurprisingly) the next day, we lazily wandered the Gothic Quarter of the city. Here we saw Barcelona's beautiful cathedral. Its an impressive structure, on par with all the great cathedrals and even better in that it wasn't crawling with tourists. It had a serene quality that is lost in places like Notre Dame or Westminster. Here you could take time, enjoy the building and appreciate what must have gone into its construction. Also, getting to the roof was free and absolutely worth it. We then walked all the way down to the pier and saw a great Spanish sunset along with the rise of a bright full moon.When I got back to the apartment I was staying at, my friend Betsy was there and she took us out to a nice Japanese restaurant before we caught the Pats - Colts game (at around midnight our time).

      To make up for the relaxing weekend I had, getting back to England was a little stressful. I took the bus to get to the airport with a good amount of time to check in for my flight. The bus, however, took me to Terminal 1. My flight with EasyJet left from Terminal 2. I had to get on another bus to that terminal, but I got on the wrong one. The bus I got on took me to the employee-only parking lot, which begs the question why they would let me on that bus in the first place, oh well. I finally arrived at Terminal 2 forty minutes before my flight. No worries. Only, as I soon found out running around the Terminal, EasyJet doesn't fly out of Terminal 2. It flies out of Terminal C, which was 300 yards away from Terminal 2. By the time I got to where I was supposed to be and waited in line to check in, I had 30 minutes before my plane left. Unfortunately EasyJet will only let you check in 40 minutes before the flight so I was forced to buy another ticket. In the end I got back to school the same time I would have if I had got on my scheduled flight, and even if I did have to spend more money the trip was definitely well worth it.