Barcelona again!

Barcelona was awesome!!! I got there last Friday and my parents didn’t show up until Monday. So I spent three nights in a hostel just hanging out by myself in Barcelona. It was pretty cool actually. I walked around a bunch and figured out where everything was so that we would know when my parents showed up.

We did so much cool stuff while we were there too! Though, we took all of the pictures on Dad’s camera. He says he’s gonna email me the pictures, but until he does I can’t put any pictures up of the trip. I have a few pictures on my camera from the weekend I was there before Mom and Dad got there, so I guess I could put those up.

Anyways, we stayed in the neighborhood called Barceloneta, which is a tiny strip of land that juts out into the sea. So our apartment was literally about 100 yards away from the beach. It was way cool! The weather was a bit chilly though, so we didn’t ever end up going to the beach.

We went to Parc Güell though. Parc Güell is this huge park up on top of a mountain that was built by (or at least has tons of stuff built by) Gaudi in it. Gaudi was this architect who had a very weird sense of style, so all of his buildings and things that he built had weird lines in them, or were swoopy, or something like that. So anyways, that entire park was pretty cool. We also saw La Sagrada Familia, which is a church that Gaudi designed. It is still in the process of being built, however, even after Gaudi’s death. The part that has been built so far is very cool!

We also went to Montserrat, which is a monastery on top of a huge mountain about an hour outside of Barcelona. We took a train to the base of the mountain, and then took the Cremallera (another train that had a cog wheel track in the middle of the other two tracks to pull it up the side of the mountain). There are a bunch of hiking trails that lead from around the monastery. So once the cremallera got to the monastery we took a funicular railway up to the start of one of the trails. The funicular was so cool! It was just one smallish car (holds about 40 people) that was completely slanted (the physical car itself) because it went even further up the mountain at about a 45 degree angle! Maybe it was even steeper than that…but anyways, it was crazy steep! Pictures of that to come later. We hiked about 8km that day, and the last kilometer was all stairs going down. My legs are still aching from that!

We also did a lot of walking around Barcelona itself. We walked up and down La Rambla (the main street) a bunch of times. We went to one of the “marketplaces” and bought some fruit. We ate a bunch of different restaurants all over the city. On the weekend we walked around past all of the street vendors and did some shopping. We walked over La Rambla de Mar which is a long wooden bridge over the water to a sort of peninsula of land on the other side of the harbor. On that piece of land we went to the mall, and the aquarium, and just sat around a bit in the sun. We took the metro all over the place, and it was very easy and awesome.

All in all we just had a lot of fun. We woke up at about 11 or noon every day, which was a nice treat. The last day (Monday) we woke up at 4am because my parents had a flight at 7am and it was raining! After I got my parents set up in a taxi to the airport I went back into the apartment to wait for the landlord to come check us out because my train back to Alicante wasn’t until later that day. By the time I left Barcelona at 11am the rain had completely stopped and the weather was gorgeous again. So apparently we weren’t really missing anything by sleeping in until noon every day!

And now I’m back in Alicante. I had one class today, and one class tomorrow. But other than that, this week is also a week of vacation for me. So that’s pretty cool!

I asked my “mom” about April Fool’s Day, but they don’t celebrate that here in Spain. They have something similar though, on December 28^th, called Dia de los Inocentes. It’s the same idea, though they seem to take it pretty far. She said even the news stations on TV and the radio take part, telling fake stories about crazy stuff happening! Pretty cool.