Steps Crepes and Miscommunication Part Dos

Half way through our week of vacation me and 7 of my friends repacked our bags and headed for Barcelona. We got up at 5am on Wednesday, got ready, cleaned the apartment, and took a metro to a bus to Beauvais airport. Everything went surprisingly smoothly considering all the running around and the fact that everyone was crabby and tired. The reason we had to go to tiny Beauvais airport which is way outside of Paris is because we flew Ryanair. Ryanair is great when it comes to prices. I think my round trip flight was something like $18 total. However this means you only get one very small bag that can't weigh more that 10kg. They mean it when they say only one small bag. We all had to show them that our bags were the right size by putting them in this metal box to make sure they would fit on the plane. If it doesn't you can either pay around 60euro to check the bag if they have room or throw a bunch of your stuff. Luckily no one had a problem and we were ready to go.
We arrived in Barcelona and went straight to our hostel to check in. I was nervous. I had never stayed in a hostel before and the directors at IES didn't do much to calm my nerves. They sent out a memo before break telling us we needed to bring our own sheets to the hostel because girls last semester had gotten scabies from staying in a hostel over one of their breaks. Gross. Our hostel actually turned out to be great! It was really clean and really nice (and really cheap 8euro/person/night!). The entire staff was really helpful and we even had free wifi and the use of a kitchen and a common room. We dropped off our stuff and went around the corner to go get lunch. It was at this restaurant that we all began to wish we could speak Catalan or at least Spanish. Everyone had told us before leaving for Barcelona that everyone speaks English. Which I didn't fully believe but was hoping to be able to kind of get around with nothing but Hola Addios Gracias and English. This was not the case. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say 90% of the people we encountered spoke little to no english and absolutely no French. There was a serious language barrier. We worked things out by randomly guessing what to order in restaurants and miming and using hand signals. I am actually kind of glad that there weren't a ton of English speakers. It makes me feel better that English hasn't gotten to everybody yet. However, next time I will try and learn a little more of the language (even if I just memorize a few phrases). It helped a lot that everyone we attempted to talk to was incredibly nice and genuinely tried to help us.
Anyway after a lunch of tortillas patatas we went to Parc Guell. The park was designed by Gaudi and has a lot of really cool curved architecture and mosaics. It also contains a famous mosaic lizard. We walked through the park which overlooks a huge area of Barcelona. It was beautiful! There was also a really weird guy playing guitar and singing in the park. I'm pretty sure every other word out of his mouth was either cowboy or fuck which made for some pretty interesting songs/dance moves.

 

After Parc Guell me and my friend Hannah, for some reason, were desperate to find a starbucks. I know this is ridiculous but we just really wanted a latte. We are both coffee addicts at this point and will go through quite a bit of trouble to find a cup of coffee. So we started to walk around the city looking for areas that seemed like they might contain a Starbucks. Little did we know that this incredibly long search for a Starbucks would lead us through an area of Gaudi architecture. It was a really pretty walk. It probably took us about an hour but we finally found a Starbucks. After 2 months without a vanilla latte our drinks were phenomenal and I couldn't have been more content to sit outside and watch the spaniards walk by as we sipped our drinks and talked.

The next day we went on a free walking tour of Barcelona. Our tour guide was a guy from Dublin and he really knew what he was talking about. I know very little about Spanish history so the walking tour was incredibly interesting. He talked a lot about the political struggles Spain has experienced in the past and we even saw a square where a bunch of people had been executed by Franco. The walls were filled with bullet holes and it was really sad and shocking to see something like that in the middle of a city. After our walking tour we checked out the market and a street called La Rambla and had paella for lunch. After that we headed for the port of Barcelona. The port has a really cool statue of Columbus pointing towards the "new world" which I have to say is my favorite landmark that we saw in Barcelona. It was really warm in Spain so we spent a good amount of time walking around and laying on the pier in the sun.  (The first picture is a drawing Picasso did on a table cloth making fun of another artists work. Franco found the table cloth after Picasso had left Spain for France and put it on a building to prove he could still display Picasso's work even without his permission. (or something to that effect))

That night we decided to check out the famous Barcelona night life. Two guys from our hostel (one from Chile and one from Italy) were heading to the same club and said they would show us where it was. This was perfect because it meant we didn't have to attempt to figure out the night buses by ourselves and I got to practice my Italian. It was pretty basic Italian with an atrocious accent I'm sure but it was still Italian. I could understand what the guy was saying and he could more or less understand me. We went to a club called Shoko which was on the beach. They were having a Great Gatsby themed party so some people were dressed up in really cool flapper style clothing. We didn't stay at the club for very long because we were all exhausted but I'm glad we went. It was cool to see a Spanish club.
The next day we checked out of our hostel, threw our stuff in the luggage room, and made our way to the Sagrada Familia. The church was amazing. It was completely different from any church I have ever seen. It's already amazing and it won't even be complete for another 15 years. It's really hard to see in pictures but the church is incredibly detailed and covered in statues. We spent the rest of the day wandering around looking at architecture and the different streets in Barcelona. We also searched for a bookstore so I could get a copy of the Little Prince in Spanish (aka Principito apparently). I am hoping to collect a copy of the Little Prince in the native language of every country I visit. Then when I am older I will have the same book in a ton of different languages. Now I just need to find a really beautiful copy in Nantes and the collection will be up to date. We spent the rest of the evening sitting on the pier watching the sailboats until it was time to head back to the hostel.

Our flight left at 6:35am so we decided to spend the night at the airport instead of paying for a hostel and having to leave at 3am. The owner of our hostel was nice enough to let us hang out in the common area until 1am so we could hang out, use the wifi, and play cards until it was time to leave. We got to the airport around 2am and tried to sleep for a while on the marble floor. I had been asleep for about an hour when the security guards woke us up and told us we couldn't sleep on the floor for whatever reason. Shortly after that it was time to check in anyway. After our flight back to Paris we once again had to take a bus to a metro to a train back to Nantes. It was really nice to be back in Nantes. It surprisingly felt like coming home which is a good sign I think. Me and my friend had talked in Spain about how we weren't homesick for America but for France which is a weird experience. I think my mom was a little offended when I told her this. It's not that I don't miss my family and friends and I do miss small american things as well like my room back home and my mom's monster cookies but I really love Nantes. I am so totally happy here that I really missed it while I was gone. I didn't really realize how comfortable I have become in France until we left.

Well that was vacation. Now I need to try and get back into school mode which is really hard considering it feels like Spring outside and all I want to do is sit on the fountain near IES and read. Too bad midterms are coming up. I'll have to figure out some way to continue to work hard in school. Maybe I can attempt to do all my studying on the fountain instead of just reading there.