Long day today… we woke up semi early and walked around Barcelona. We went to see the Parque Guell – it’s a famous park designed by Gaudi and has some AWESOME architecture. Emily and I ended up getting kind of lost and walking around in the park while the boys stopped at a café, and we found this long set of trails. Had the boys been with us we probably would have been in the park for hours, but we had to go pick them up. We walked to the beach and sat around for a while until it started getting really windy and we almost got hit by the contents of a homeless man’s grocery cart. We were all pretty tired and cranky and picked at each other a lot, but I’m pretty used to that because our family does the same thing when we travel together (no offense :] ).
After spending the day covering the entire city on foot, we decided we needed a break. We found a nice restaurant (it reminded me of FIGO) in the Plaza de Espana and the food was incredible. For dessert we went on the hunt for churros (and after walking about another mile we found a place 10 meters from where we ate dinner. I just gave a distance in meters… Spain is having its effect on me). The churros were good, but we had a ton of left over chocolate, so I ran to a fruteria across the street and got an entire carton of strawberries and 3 bananas, and we finished off our chocolate with the fruit (we looked like classy Americans). So we left full and happy and went to a light show in front of some big important building (I think it was a government building?). It was SO FUN because it kind of reminded me of Stone Mountain. To continue with feeling American, we went to the Hard Rock Barcelona after the show. I ran into 4 girls from UGA in the bathroom – turns out one of them went to Kenya with one of my best friends. Small world.
We left the Hard Rock in search of the Gato Negro (we heard it was a really fun bar that we had to go to). We spent about 30 minutes asking people if they had heard of the Gato Negro (I WOULD spend 30 minutes looking for a place that’s called the Black Cat) and we finally ran into some natives that told us they knew of a better place. They were really nice and welcoming and brought us to a bar with a bunch of Barcelonians and no tourists and it was AWESOME. But the boys don’t like when we can’t speak English (so much for a study abroad) so we only stayed for 5 minutes. Overall it was an exhausting day but a ton of fun. We got to see a completely different culture of Spain – the weirdest part was that all the signs were in Catalan (the dialect in Barcelona) instead of Castellano (regular Spanish). We talked to our Pepa y Papi (Spanish parents) about what they thought about the Catalans later, and they said they were very stuck up and thought they were better than everything else. It’s pretty evident in the fact that some of them refuse to speak Spanish and insist on speaking catalan, but if I lived in Barcelona I’d have a hard time pretending like I was a normal citizen too.
WT Tip #11: Public bathrooms are nonexistent in Spain. Sometimes you have to improvise.
WT Tip # 11 ½: In the rare occasion that you find a public restroom, there’s a 99.9% chance that it doesn’t have toilet paper. So taking some extra napkins or tissues in your bag is highly recommended.
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