Just hanging out like Monkies (Barcelona)

February 20-23, 2010 1:03 p.m.
Hey everyone! Despite some bumps we made it back into Dublin safely this morning at 2:00 a.m. We were supposed to make it home by 11:30, but France deemed it neccessary to go on air strike, therefore cancelling many flights (including my friends who were going to Morocco) and delaying many others. Ours thankfully was only delayed 2 hours and then we were on our way home!
Barcelona was absolutely amazing! Saturday morning the ten of us got up, packed our bags, and at 1:45 went to go meet the taxis that were bringing us to the airport. My roomates and I got in one taxi and then realized that it wasn't the taxi that we had ordered, he had just been trying to pick us up! We eventually figured it out and 3 taxis later we made it to the airport to head out! As many can probably guess we were all giddy with excitement, even the boys! The two hour 15 minute flight went by quickly thank goodness due to sleeping most of the way. We all figured we would sleep then because we knew we probably were not going to get a lot of sleep there! After exiting the plane, we realized we had the wrong directions to get to our hostel. But we found a bus, hopped on it, and thankfully there were some American students studying in Barcelona on that bus. Therefore, they helped us A LOT. They knew the general area of our hostel so they showed us how to use the metro to get there. One of the girls lived near where we were going so she rode with us the majority of the way. She also warned us against the pickpocketers. Barcelona recently got named the number one place to be pickpocketed...great. She said one time on her way to school, she got to school and realized someone had taken all of the pencils out of the first zipper of her bag. Can you believe people actually do that?
After we found our stop we literally stumbled upon our hostel because we really didn't know where we were going. We checked in, and headed up the 6 flights of spirling stairs to our rooms. Each flight had a net between the gap between the stairs, do people really try jumping? I'm sure thats probably what it was for though! Our room was a ten person room which is exactly the number of people we had so that was awesome..BUT...when we were sitting there figuring out the money situation we realized we payed 20 euro less than what we were planning on. After close inspection of our ticket, we realized they only checked us in for 2 days instead of 3, and Corinne didn't have the confirmation e-mail with her. Thankfully, after explaining the situation they had room for ten for that one night in a bedroom of 12.
That first night we were all exhausted after traveling for 10 hours straight so we headed upstairs. All of us were in giggly weird moods after eating McDonalds so we had the strangest but most funny conversations. At one point my roomate Meghan D. started saying something, then quickly said never mind. We all forced out of her what she was thinking. Which was..."Guys, we are all just kind of hanging out here like monkies," It was hilarious, but the funny thing was was that we all understood exactly what she meant! We all were being kind of crazy and some of us were up in the top barred bunks, and some in the bottom.
The next morning we got up and ate the complementary breakfast from the hostel then headed out to see the Sangrada Familia Church that Gaudi made. Gaudi was a famous architect in Barcelona...he is famous for his abstract crazy things that he did. I would say the church was beautiful, but it wasn't. It looked like it was melting, it was crazy. It has been under construction for a long long time and is supposed to be under construction for many many more years. It's the most famous church in Spain. After checking that out some of us headed to the Picasso museum, and some went to the chocolate museum. I opted for Picasso. On the walk there, we walked through little ally ways with apartments with clothes hanging to dry off of the railings. It was so spanish looking and beautiful in it's own way. Everything was so full of color here!! The museum was really neat. It was his amateur work up until a few years before he died. It was 14 rooms filled with his paintings and scribblings and "messups." It was really cool to see how different places and people affected his artwork. I literally saw how Picasso came to be how he ended up being in the end through his artwork. It was amazing. He is a person that you read about and there his artwork was, right in front of my eyes. After a few hours in there the 7 of us that went to the Picasso museum headed out to get some lunch. By the time we got out of there it was around 4, so we decided to go back to the hostel, nap, and then head out to supper. We ended up not napping, but laughing and giggling like little children again before heading out to supper that night. We asked the guys at the front desk where they suggested to go, and we ended up not ever finding that place but found an even better place instead!!! It was a little tiny spanish cafe that had exactly what we needed. I had paella, a traditional spanish dish. It was rice with mussels, tomatoes, and shrimp with a spicy sauce over it. AMAZING!! I'm craving some now just writing about it! Thank goodness Maral speaks a little Spanish otherwise none of us would have known what we were ordering or been able to communicate with any of our waiters or waitresses!
After hanging out there for awhile we headed back to our hostel where we hung out in the main lobbey, we played a game and ended up bringing 9 more people into the game that were in our hostel. 2 were from Denmark, 2 from Argentinia, 1 from Ireland, 2 from Scotland, and 2 from Austria. It was really fun. One of the guys from Argentinia told me I had a typical Argentinian face, whatever the heck that means! He said I looked exactly like one of his friends which is a bad thing. So I still don't know if he was calling me ugly in his own twisted way or what.....oh well! I'm ok with not looking attractive to Argentinian men! After that all of us headed out and went to a club called City Hall. It played Techno music which was weird, but it was really fun. Some of us headed back around 3:30 in the morning and talked until 5:00 a.m. That unfortunately was the night in which the next morning we had to be up and awake by 10:00 to check out of our room and check into the next room. Meghan D. and I got up and no one else would so we checked ourselves out and went and had breakfast. The rest just got up and went into the room. We ended up being in the same room as the Argentinians and Austrians. One of the Austrians looks EXACTLY like Taylor Lautner, it was the weirdest/coolest thing ever!
That day, some of us left and walked around for a little while, while the others got ready. We all met up for lunch. After that Maral and Meghan M. went to the aquarium, Kate and Corinne went shopping and the rest of us decided to walk down to the port. We walked down the main road, Las Ramblas, and that is fun in itself. At some points there are people selling flowers, and even people selling animals. That was really sad. There were bunnies, birds, hamsters, chickens, ferrets, and many more, all locked up in tiny little cages where they could hardly move. It was so sad! There were also at least ten people dressed up in strange outfits, just posing, and wanted money for it. One was dressed up like a fruit stand, one was a really scary looking gargoyle thing, one was a baby, and one was a golden angel. That one was neat, but the rest really freaked me out. I really don't know why people do that and expect money for it...After passing by these colorful characters we saw the 200 ft statue of Christopher Columbus in the distance and knew we had to be close! When we got up to him, it was really cool to look at. It was Christopher Columbus raised up on a platform pointing out over the ocean. On the bottom it was decorated in lions, it's a neat statue! After passing by Chris, I had my breath taken away by the beauty of the ocean. The sky was the perfect shade of light blue, the ocean was dotted with white yahts sailing around it. Seagulls were soaring in the air, and the Spanish in their colorful outfits were out walking, enjoying the 50 beautiful degree day! We walked around the port for awhile taking it all in, then walked back to the hostel where we took a nap again for a couple of hours.
That night we went out to a tapa bar. I wish we had these in Iowa! It's a menu full of anything you could want, and you pick out however many you want and they bring you a small portion of all of them. I only got 2 and was stuffed but it was amazing! I had 4 cheese riscotto and codfish. So delicious! After hanging out there, the ten of us headed back to the hostel where we were informed about a nightclub that the hostel was going to pay for anyone to go to. All of us planned on it, but by the end of the night only 5 went out because the rest of us were exhausted/sick with our sinuses. We went to bed around 12 but still didn't get much sleep due to 7 people coming in and out of our room all night. That's ok..that's what hostels are known for! 4 of us the next morning got up at 8:00, ate breakfast, then walked down to the beach. That might have been my favorite part of the trip. The beach was so beautiful, and it was 65 degrees! Maral, Meghan D., Kate, and I walked around on the beach for a few hours, picking up seashells and sea glass, staring into the ocean, talking, and just having a great time! It was beautiful, the sky was still kind of pink and the crystal clear water was lapping gently up onto the rocky sand of the beach. We realized after a little while that there was a naked man standing sort of near us. It was hysterical, oh Europe.
I got a text on the beach asking where we were, so we decided to meet up with the rest of our people at the Parc de Guell, another of Gaudi's creations. He had made it to be a walled in housing development, but it became a park instead. We took the metro and when we got to one of our changing stops, we saw Kristen and the boys on the other side of the metro, we yelled that they were going the wrong way so Kevin took off running up the stairs while the subway was pulling up and then ran into the subway, we were going to wait on the rest of them but we couldnt leave Kevin by himself, so we jumped on, only to be greated by Kristen, Brian, Kevin, and one of the Austrian guys shaking their heads and signaling we were going the wrong way. We of course didn't believe them until we were several stops along and looked at the map. We were heading to a different Guell. So we got off and got back on the right way. After a long long walk up hill we finally made it to the parc. But man was it worth it! It was so beautiful. It had columns of plaster and marble rising up on several platforms, all of which you could go up on and take in the most beautiful view of Barcelona. You could see all the way to the ocean. By this point all of us were just in our long sleever t-shirts, and doing great! The sun was shining just right where everything was breath taking to behold. Trees and shrubs were placed perfectly as to where you could see over them onto the city below but they added just the perfect amount of color and beauty to make it more than a picturesque scene. We walked up onto a stone area that rose up the highest out of all the points and had stone crosses on it. We all just sat there for probably 45 minutes, not talking a lot of it, just taking in the beauty of the moment. Many scenes from my travels will stay with me the rest of my life, but that moment with the wind gently blowing, the cloudless blue sky, and the view from tiny colorful houses all the way to the ocean, will be burned into my memory forever. I wish pictures did this justice, but it just can't. When finally our stomaches started calling, we headed out. By this point, our friends going to Morocco, Kate and Kevin Conlon, Corinne, and Meghan M. had headed to the airport. Therefore Brian, Kevin, Maral, Meghan D., Kristen, our Austrian friend, and I found a nice little cafe that served amazing cheap food. I ordered pizza, and yes I ate all of it! It was so cheap and so amazing! We had checked out of our hostel by this point so we had to kill time until 6:15 which was when we were meeting the bus. We decided to head down to the beach again because Kristen hadn't seen it. We all layed on the beach again taking in the warm warm sun when I heard hysterical laughing. I sat up to see yet another naked man on the beach!! This time he had a fan, she was taking photos of him at every angle you could possibly imagine! The 7 of us just sat with our mouthes hanging open, laughing hysterically!
After laughing for a good long while at that we decided to walk up las ramblas again and head back to our hostel to pick up our bags which we stored there. We walked back, got our bags, got to the bus station, got to the airport, and by this point all of us are exhausted. We bought some McDonalds then headed to our spot only to have announced that our plane was 2 hours delayed. I had gotten a call from Kevin earlier in which he said their plane was 2 hours delayed as well. They called us back a little later and told us their flight to Morocco had been completely cancelled and there was no way they could fly into Morocco for several days. I feel so bad for them, they had their hearts set on going there. Currently, we haven't heard anything but they were still in Spain as of this morning, trying to get a flight to Dublin. Hopefully today we will hear from or see them soon. Our flight left at midnight Spanish time (11:00 Irish time). We tried to sleep on the plane but they refused to turn off the lights and the flight was bumpy which didn't help us already freaked out passengers! When we finally landed at 1:30 all of us were cranky and wanted nothing more than to get to sleep. When we got to where we had to show our passports all of us got through without any troubles, except for Meghan. When she went to register with the garda (police) apparently they didnt put her in the system right, so it looked to the man as if she was trying to sneak into Ireland. He sat and yelled at her for over a half an hour, all of us could hear him threatening to send her back to Spain and then the U.S. Needless to say, we were all really scared by that point, not knowing what to do. Kristen went up and showed him her passport and card and he continued yelling at Meghan because he thought she didn't go register. It was ridiculous. Thankfully he let her through with the promise that she would get up early this morning, go to the garda, and get stuff figured out. The poor girl, I don't know how she wasn't balling. She left at 8:00 this morning and she still isn't back yet.
We went from beach to snow in less than 12 hours, so sad! But Spain was absolutely amazing, i wish to go back and travel more around it someday!