Dos Dias en Barcelona

So there we were, in a train station in Barcelona at 6 am with nothing to do, nowhere to go, and 8 hours of crappy sleep on a cramped, cold bus; the obvious thing to do? Have naptime in a corner of the station! Fortunately no one told us we had to leave (not like I would have understood what they were saying had someone told us that); this brings me to another important point: I speak about as much Spanish as we learned in a semester of high school, which I took 3 years ago. We made it through pretty well with what Spanish we did know, but unfortunately, we had been speaking French not 12 hours ago, so it was really easy to respond with a “merci” instead of a “gracias.” I’m pretty sure everyone we encountered in Spain thought we were loco. Anyway, we ate breakfast at the McDonald’s in the train station because it was the only place open (and had the “American breakfast combo”) and had managed to waste enough time to lock up our luggage at the train station and head to the Sagrada Familia. We were pretty close to the front of the line to get in and going that early ended up being a great decision, since it was pretty packed by the time we left, just an hour or so later. The cathedral itself is certainly impressive and amazingly detailed, though I do now understand why the world “gaudy” was influenced by “Gaudi.” We took the elevator up to the top, and since the sun had come out, the views of Barcelona were amazing. After the cathedral, we walked around in search of much-needed coffee. We found a place where we got coffee and ate lunch (tortilla for me and paella for my mom); we were near the beach, so we spent some time enjoying the sunshine and the Mediterranean for a while, which was absolutely glorious, especially since that’s the last time we saw the sun in Barcelona. There was a metro near our hotel, but from the train station it would have required multiple line changes, and we figured that walking with our bags would be easier than trying to maneuver them onto and off of trains; although that may have been true, I don’t think we realized quite how far it was to the hotel, so we were pretty tired (and tired of our luggage) by the time we got there. We took naps and recharged for a while in the hotel; by the time we had eaten dinner, the rain had started, and we got caught in a torrential downpour. We turned in pretty early after that, with plans to start anew the next morning. Unfortunately, the rain hadn’t left by morning, and it was way colder than expected, which always puts me in a bad mood. Our first plan of the day was Park Guell, so we took the metro near there and found a local diner-like place to eat breakfast (bocadillas con queso y café con leche). We eventually found the Park, after a little wandering/direction-asking (in Spanish), and even though I was still pretty grumpy for the first bit of it, it ended up being fun despite the rain and cold. The park was really cool (it would have been more so in the sunshine, but I’ll just have to go back I guess :D); again, some of Gaudi’s things would have been a little too much somewhere else or in larger quantities, but for the park they worked. After some more coffee, we headed back to the area where we had eaten lunch to find “the elephant” and see their Arch of Triumph (Arc de Triomf). We wandered around the park a little, and when we couldn’t find the elephant (I knew about it because 2 friends of mine have taken pictures with it when they were in Barca), decided to ask a passer-by. Which ended up being the highlight of my day. We said, in Spanish, excuse me. The guy replied, in French, that he wasn’t familiar with the area. So I asked, in French, if he had seen an elephant (It sounds way dumber now in English than it did in other languages haha). He then told us that he was Canadian (causing Stephanie to do an internal happy dance) so we concluded our conversation in English; it was just really cool to be able to speak, albeit not perfectly, in 3 different languages. We found the elephant, took our pictures, and wandered around the rest of the park before heading more into the city center; once there, we attempted to find the cathedral (talk about anticlimactic) and went to the FC Barcelona store to buy my brother a Thierry Henry jersey because we are an awesome mother/sister like that. We wandered down some small, residential streets off the main road, which made me think that maybe living in Barcelona for some time could be really cool. Guess we’ll see…we ate dinner at a café (owned by a Spanish-speaking Chinese lady) across the street from our hotel before heading to Chupitos, which came highly recommended from multiple people. All I’m going to say is that if there were a Chupitos near me and the drinking age weren’t retarded, I would spend so much time and money trying all of the 200 shots, and I would have every birthday party there for the rest of forever. However, since our time was limited to one night, my mom and I only tried 3 each; I had the Bob Marley, the Furby, and the Barça while my mom had the Carolina, the Boy Scout, and the Cherokee. Our flight to Milan was pretty early the next morning, so we couldn’t spend too much time out and had to turn in just as Chupitos was starting to get a crowd. Overall, Barcelona would have been a lot more enjoyable had it been warm and sunny and had we had more time there, but it was still a beautiful and fun city that I definitely want to go back to and spend more time in.

Ma Mère et Moi à Grenoble

My last week in Grenoble was pretty standard as far as move out weeks go; I said goodbye to some amazing people, which was tough, but it’s easier when we’ve already made plans to see each other again :) It was weird being the last one from API Intensive (at least not in the extended program) to leave, but luckily Maguy and Darrel and Zainab were still around so I didn’t go completely insane with boredom and loneliness haha I packed up everything and was all ready to move out Friday morning before meeting my mom at the train station in Grenoble. Marie came to help me move out and even dropped me off at a tram stop so I could get into town; unfortunately, France was still France, and the public transportation workers had gone on strike for the 4th or 5th time this semester. Normally, there were reduced trams/buses, but there was always something running; of course, they would go on a complete, debilitating strike the day I was carrying 3 months’ worth of belongings through town. I called Marie, and Sarah came and drove me into town; it ended up being a good thing though because I got to tell Sarah goodbye too. The person who got the shortest end of the stick with the strike was my mom; for the 2 days she was in Grenoble there was a strike and then a national holiday and therefore not a single bus or tram running while she was there, so she couldn’t see any of the things outside of city center that were out of walking distance (i.e my residence and school). Luckily we were staying in city center and could walk most places, even if it took a little longer than expected. I dropped my bags off at the hotel and ran some errands until close to time for my mom’s train to arrive. It was so good to see her again; I was so excited that she had finally gotten to Europe and couldn't wait to share my “home” with her. We got checked into the hotel and set out to wander around Grenoble; there aren’t a ton of touristy things to do in Grenoble, so 2 days was an adequate amount of time. I gave her a tour of what I knew to see, and we did the téléphérique up to the Bastille both days (it was cloudy the first, so we went the second in hopes that it would be sunnier. It wasn’t, but it was still amazing).

Overall, it was really nice to be able to let my mom experience at least a little bit of what I had for 3 months; my mom tried different French foods (croque monsieur, crêpes, Nutella coffees, paninis) and saw some of the cultural things I had talked about first-hand. It was also cool for me to keep using my French in regular conversation with people and to show my mom how much French I had learned. We got a lot done in such a short amount of time (even though, like I said, there isn’t that much to do in Grenoble), partly because my mom is a champion of jet lag; seriously, I don’t know how she did it, but I think it definitely made things easier for her not having to sleep instead of sight-seeing. Our bus left at 10 pm, but we weren’t sure what time our train to Lyon would be, so we got up to the train station with our bags around 5 (and so began the battle with our luggage). We bought our tickets (after a little confusion and some less-than-friendly workers) and ate dinner before our train left around 6:30. We got to Lyon about 30 minutes before our train was to leave, and even though we were really stressed about whether or not we would find the bus depot, we got work done and found it in no time. We got as settled as you can on a bus and slept on and off through the night (I think I slept better than my mom did) despite the bus driver’s decision to put The Wolfman on – loudly and in Spanish. We were awakened when we got to the Spanish border and had to get our passports checked by France and then Spain; we were about the only people who didn’t get questioned (ah, the power of a United States passport), which was just as well because we didn’t speak enough French to discuss border crossings and such and didn’t speak enough Spanish to do much of anything besides order in a restaurant. We made it to the Barcelona Nord train station around 6 am, but I'll continue with Barcelona in the next post :)