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.