¡Vive Barcelona!

I spent this weekend in Barcelona. What an awesome city. Paige and I left on Wednesday night and met up with some other friends from TCU when they got there on Thursday morning. We stayed in a hostel (my first hostel experience! Yay) called Sant Jordi, which was fun but definitely interesting. I know I'm a college kid and I'm supposed to be staying in hostels when I travel, but I'm not sold yet. Reason #1 why hostels don't agree with me: The first night Paige and I walked into our room (6 beds) and found out we were staying with four other guys. They were nice enough. Anyways, we decided to go out for a bit and when we came back I climbed the bunk bed ladder to get in my bed and some Australian guy rolls over (in my bed) and asks me what I’m doing. Yea, well, naturally I screamed, fell off the ladder, woke up everyone else in the room, it was great. He scared me so bad! Come the find out that he slept in that bed the night before and asked if it was open again and the lady he asked at the desk never put it in the computer. Needless to say that was interesting. Ironically, the next morning he asked Paige and I to go to breakfast with him in a café around the corner. He ended up being really nice and told us he was traveling the world for six months.

Thursday was my first full day in Barcelona. Paige and I met up with the rest of the TCU crew and went on a walking tour of Las Ramblas, which is basically the main street in Barcelona. It’s really pretty with lots of little shops, street vendors, and some major chain stores like H&M and Zara. Oh and of course Corte Ingles. Friday was Gaudi day. We decided to cram as many Gaudi works into one day as was possible. That ended up being three. We went to Casa Mila, an apartment building from the early 1900s. One of the apartments is set up like it would have been when it first opened. There was lots of antique furniture and stuff. Very cool. The most awesome part about Casa Mila though, is the roof. The roof is like a stone playground…Guadi style. It’s basically a photographers dream. You can see for miles across the city, including the Sagrada Familia in the distance. After Casa Mila we stopped for lunch at a restaurant called La Bodaguetta. (I think that’s spelled right, but who knows.) I got a really good pasta, and fish for the main course. So, I really like fish, but I haven’t been ordering it here at all because when I looked up different fish dishes on the Internet before I went, all of the photos have the cooked fish with the eyes still in tact. Well, I can’t eat something that’s looking at me….I just can’t do it. I don’t know if it’s cause I feel bad for the fish or if I just can’t get past the limp eyeball. I may never know. So anyways, every restaurant I have been to in Spain thus far has brought out the fish cooked like regular fish- fried or grilled or something, and I am always like dang I should have ordered the fish. So this time, guess what I did. I ordered the fish. Guess what- eyeballs and all. It came out with the skin on, bones in tact, staring at me. I almost cried. Thankfully, one of my friends peeled the skin off and showed me how to eat it, so all was not lost. I had a few bites.
The next place on the agenda was the Sagrada Familia. About half of all the pictures that I took in Barcelona are of the Sagrada Familia. It is the most amazing building I have ever seen in my life. It’s almost surreal standing in front of it. It’s mesmerizing. I can’t even really describe what it feels like to be there. Just look at the pictures. Pictures, however, don’t do it justice. Before going, I was curious, but not really that excited because there are a lot of cathedrals in Europe and one after another gets a little old. But oh how wrong I was. If you only see one Cathedral in your entire life go to the Sagrada Familia. And if you see two, make the other one the Mesquita in Cordoba. Shwell….I need to go watch some Burn Notice before I get some shuteye. Will write more about Barcelona later. (Look forward to my tellings of my first rave haha)