THURSDAY
After class, I packed for Barca and mailed a letter to the hostel in Lisbon with 10 euros and the address of my casa (I’m trying to get them to send me a package with the stuff I left). We’ll see if that ends up coming through… I highly doubt it though. We had COUS COUS for lunch (yummmmyyyyy) and then we left for Barcelona! We took the bus to Sevilla (it was a much nicer ride when we didn’t spend the last 30 minutes constantly checking our watches and being on the lookout for the bus station). There was a big festival going on with Sevilla, and one of the guys we were traveling with ordered some food from the bar. I figured since I was with someone in the group that had paid I could just take the nuts that were sitting on the counter (in a big bowl. It looks like something you could snack on). So I walked up and took a handful and I got one of the dirtiest looks in the world from the guy standing next to them. So much for trying not to look like an extranjero….
We flew Ryanair to get to Barcelona (and unless I have to, I’m not flying Ryanair again). They literally tried to sell us things the ENTIRE flight, whether it was a lottery ticket or snacks or drinks. I finally just put my sweatshirt over my head and fell asleep – I felt like that would help them get the picture. We were only supposed to have one carry-on bag, but Emily and I had our backpacks and our Kavu’s. We didn’t think it would be a big deal, but when we got in line we saw that there was a lady standing right in front of the door calling people out whose bags looked too big or who had two of them. Our traveling luck continued, and the person right before us caused some kind of problem and the lady was distracted by dealing with his bag. So we walked right by and onto the flight :]
We got to Barca around 11:30, and since we didn’t know where we were going or the area our hostel was in we decided to take a taxi. It was probably a good decision, but it ended up being 35 euros (he charged us 10 euros because it was from the airport and we had bags. Even though they were back packs and we would have had them had he picked us up from anywhere….). PLUS he didn’t tell us about the extra charge until we were already driving away. Needless to say, we didn’t tip him. Our hostel was unexpectedly really cool. It was more like an apartment – we had our own room but there was a main area with a living room, kitchen, and two bathrooms. There were two other bedrooms as well, but we didn’t think anyone was in them (which we found out the next morning was not true... whoops). We dropped our stuff off and decided we were going out, and then we realized we were in the quietest part of Barcelona. Somehow we found a local bar called Havana, and it turned out to be the highlight of my day. It was literally exactly what we were looking for – quiet and local and chill. We left eager to see the rest of Barcelona.
WT Tip #9: Explore the area you’re staying. You never know what kind of local places you’ll wind up at.
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