palm trees errrrrwhere!
We booked Spain literally the FIRST week of school. We’re talking the flights were booked by January 21st people. It’s crazy because these flight tickets were the most expensive for us buuuut they were also the earliest booked. Can you imagine how expensive it would’ve been if we had waited? Yea. Just yea. Worth every penny though! Alli, Jeff, Martin, Chelsey, Teaghan, & I left for Barcelona on Wednesday after class. I don’t think any of us really knew what to expect for this trip so when we stepped off the plane and immediately saw palm trees, we were stoked. (Or at least I was!). We caught the Aerobus from the airport into downtown Barcelona and pretty quickly found our hostel. It’s amazing how easily we adapt to huge cities now- between the metro system, buses, hostels, airports, train stations...everything is so simple now. Once checking into our hostel, we went to go eat at a traditional spanish restaurant. Just keeping it real, but it wasn’t that great. Didn’t matter though cause we were starving and anything and everything tastes good when your stomach hates you.
That night, we went on a pub crawl with our hostel. We ended up going to this bar with 600 different shots! It was crazy because you would pick a random shot, such as the “Harry Potter” and they’d do crazy stuff to it. For example, the Harry Potter involved lighting the shot on fire and then exploding these sparks out of it.
Morgan Willett, this would be your happy place. (Sorry, Mom). The nightlife in Spain is awesome. All the clubs stay open until 6am, a lot of things are on the beach,and you end up meeting so many people from different countries. I <3 Europe.
The next day, we woke up and submitted some finalized things for our comic book project. We had to leave the day before our main project for studio was due(unfortunately when we booked these flights, we had not even been assigned a studio project yet!), so we all went through a couple of hours of panic when we realized the wifi in spain is pretty terrible. Eventually some of us made our way to Starbucks and we (slowly) got everything submitted. After that....it was a beach dayyyyyyy! We caught the closest metro to Barceloneta Beach and headed that way. The beaches in Barcelona are gorgeous! The Mediterranean Sea is this deep turquoise color and the sand is super soft and light brown. When you walk up to the beach, there is a giant street right by it where everyone is long boarding/roller skating/bike riding down it. It reminded me so much of Venice Beach in California! It was super chill- we all luuuurved it. It was so refreshing to just go lay on the beach and hang out instead of walking around and trying to sightsee. Barcelona, you da shiiiiiz.
On Friday, we all caught the train to Montserrat! For those who have never heard of it, Montserrat is about an hour away from Barcelona. It’s a convent that is situated on top of these huge cliffs overlooking Spain. The views here almost rivaled Switzerland. It was truly so so gorgeous.
The best thing about Spain is that EVERYTHING is green! It kind of has this beach meets vintage meets western desert meets green blooming gorgeous vibe....which probably makes no sense to anyone reading this. If I had to describe this country in 3 words though, I’d say: color, life, fajitas...hahah.
When we got to Montserrat, we took a cable car up to the top of the mountain. There were a bunch of trails you could hike up, and we ended up choosing one that lead us to this giant cross on top of the mountain. I can’t verbally describe the experience of being there- it was just stunning. That’s all I can really say. Pure beauty.
It ended up getting pretty cold around the middle of the afternoon, so we all caught the train heading back to Barcelona. For dinner that night, we wandered around Catalunya Plaza until we found a restaurant that offered fajitaaaaaas. I was so happy!:)<33333
That night, we stayed in our hostel and all just played cards and hung out. Our hostel was pretty cool- they had two rooms full of bean bags so it made it easy to just lounge around and meet new people. They had one room with a tv in it and it was packed full of travelers watching the news of what was happening in Boston. It’s crazy how out of touch we are from whats happening in America. I was grateful to be able to catch up that day!
On Saturday, we woke up early and went to see the Sagrada Familia. This is a “modern” cathedral designed by Gaudi. Gaudi was a prominent architect in Barcelona- he also designed some crazy looking apartments that I’ll post a picture of in a bit. This cathedral was started in the early 1900’s and is still being built today! I plan on coming back to Spain when I’m way older to see the finished product(if it’s even completed by then!). The best way to describe this building is quirky. Like, it straight up looks like something about of a Dr. Suess book. The exterior has snake carvings on it and weird pink bulbs. When you walk inside, you see that Gaudi designed this entire cathedral around the concept of light. The ceilings are insane and the stained glass windows cast light onto the pillars in a really unusual way. The Sagrada Familia even had some modern day graphic design going on in it! Also, the stone carving of Jesus was really abstract looking. All around, this was THE coolest cathedral I’ve been in. It’s unlike anything else. Gaudi had an amazing mind.
We ended up walking down the main shopping street in Barcelona and went and got tapas for lunch. Tapas are extremely small portions of meals that typically cost between 1.95-3 euros each. You ended up needed to eat about 5 different types of tapas to get full though! It was fun picking different things to try-chalking it up to experiencing spain in its fullest. After that, we ended up splitting up for a bit. Some of us went back to the hostel and some of us walked down La Rambla(the most famous street in Barcelona). La Rambla is jam packed full of tourist shops, restaurants, flea markets, and street performers. I loved walking around and seeing everything! Barcelona has such a fun vibe. We all eventually met up at the beach and chilled there until heading back to the hostel. There was a supermarket right across the street so we decided to all cook dinner for ourselves that night. Guess what we had? Fajitaaaaas! I was, once again, extremely happy.
Here's some more of Gaudi's architecture!
pretty crazy apartments, right?
Sunday was our last day in Spain :( I had to go to Starbucks that morning and submit some last minute internship things and then we all went back to the beach! As if you couldn’t tell, we went there a lot. Blame it on surviving in 30 degree weather for 3 months up to this! We only got to lay out for an hour or two, but it was still nice. You always hear how pickpocketing is prominent in Spain, right? I have always known it but never really felt threatened by it. However, we were laying on the beach and the lady right next to us had fallen asleep. A guy had been walking all over the beach since we had gotten there and he ended up sneaking up to the sleeping women, stealing her iphone from her purse and running off. (Why anyone would fall asleep on the beach with a purse right beside them is besides me...) But anyways, Jeff saw and got up and chases the man down. The man whole stole it tried to pretend that he just “found it.” His story eventually changed to how he was so poor and really needed the money. The lady got her iphone back, thanks to jeff! Hero of the day.
Here's some more pictures of Barcelona!
We caught the metro back to the hostel, grabbed our luggage, and caught the aerobus back to the airport. We got to Cologne, Germany around 1030 that night and made it back to Bonn around midnight. It was one of my favorite trips this semester! Oh & I've realized that on every blog post I say something like "I love this place so much!" So for clarification, I<3everything. No but seriously, top 3 places I've been(in my opinion) are:
1) Edinburgh, Scotland
2) Barcelona, Spain
3) Switzerland in general(although I love Italy as well!)
annnnd my least favorite places I've been are:
1) Paris, France
2) Vienna, Austria
3) Prague, Czech Republic
kkkk that's all. goodnight!
edit: just teaghan needed to go to starbucks and we all went to a lightshow. happy now?:)
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