Hola Barcelona!

As promised, I will now flood your screen with text and pictures about my weekend in Barcelona to make up for the fact that I was not able to blog for 3 days while there. I hope you will all accept this as an even trade-off, and if you do not, well then too bad for you, because I plan to type until my fingers hurt. If you aren't up for a marathon of reading, skip to topics that you find interesting, I will bold all the different topics and sections.


The Beginning:




Barcelona, Barcelona, where to start. How about a 7am flight out of Rome, which means waking up at 4am to get a taxi to the airport to go through security. To make this easy I will now introduce the 3 other people with whom I traveled: Nathan, my roommate and the one other guy from Villanova on this trip, Meghann, a St. Mary's student who is roommates with Joey (one of the girls from Villanova) and Alex, another St. Mary's student who also rooms with Joey and Meghann. Blog readers, meet Nathan, Alex and Meghann; You three, welcome to the blog. There were also about a dozen other St. Mary's Rome program girls who traveled to Barcelona, but we did not travel or stay with them the entire time so introductions would take up an entire page.

Airport security went without a hitch, except that I was pulled yet again for a random explosives swab down of my bag. I guess I travel with too much electronic equipment and they must not like that. Once through, I had a donut which looked and tasted just like a donut from Miss Ob Co's donuts down at the Jersey shore, which was awesome (for those of you farmiliar with the donuts I speak of, I know you are jealous I had one in January, for those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, just ignore this but know I had a really good donut). Enough about donuts, we boarded the flight and had a nice 90 minute flight to Barcelona. We flew into Girona, a small airport an hour or so outside Barcelona, which means we had to take a bus to Barcelona from there. Once inside Barcelona, we took the subway to our hostel.

So lets recap, taxi to airport, airplane to Girona, Bus to barcelona, subway to Badalona (where the hostel is), and all this before noon.

The Metro:
My first topic for this post: the Barcelona metro system: In a nutshell, the metro system is easy to use and understand, quick, efficient, simple yet very comprehensive, and on top of that very clean. There are several lines that run through Barcelona, labeled L1-L8(the major lines, though there are others). They are all color coded. Reading the metro map is incredibly simple, and there are plenty of connections so that you can switch lines to get to where you need to go. Trains during normal hours come every 5 minutes, at the most, and sometimes come every 3 minutes. At each station there are displays that count down until the next train. These timers are extremely precise, when the clock hits 15 seconds the train is pulling into the station, and by zero it is leaving. The trains themselves have electronic maps that show all the stations, which shows the direction you are going and which stops are coming up, with the connections listed below them. As you move it blinks on the next station, and announces its name. The trains are very clean, something that really surprised me.

This leads me to my next topic, our hostel, which was a 10 - 15 minute metro ride from the center of barcelona.

Hostel:
This was my first experience with a hostel, and for our group I was given the task of booking it. So naturally I was nervous about getting it right. When I booked it, I didn't really know it was outside of Barcelona, in a town called Badalona, but that turned out to be a great selling point for us once we realized the potential. Being in Badalona made the hostel cheaper, and actually much nicer. We booked a 4 bed private room, with our own bathroom. This is a rarity in hostels, which normally have 6-20 people in a barrack-like room, with a shared bathroom. We were able to book a private room with a bathroom for less than those who stayed in the center of Barcelona in a typical hostel.

The Barcelona Dream Hostel in Badalona was where we stayed. The room was very nice and clean, and the hostel was awesome. They had several common rooms with tv, computers, internet, board games, and even a common guitar for people to play. They had an outside patio with couches and hammocks to hang out in which was very cool. There was also a full kitchen for us to use, which we made lunch in after going to the grocery store (nothing special, ham sandwiches).

The Beach:



After our lunch, we headed down to the beach which was 5 minutes away from the hostel. It was very warm outside and I was able to wear just a t shirt and jeans to the beach. The water however was extremely cold(no brainer), but I was able to put my feet in for a few minutes. The sand was more like pebbles, which was very interesting. It wasn't as messy as normal sand, and you could brush it off easily. We soon noticed that there was a lot of sea glass mixed in. Alex and Meghann didn't know what it was, them being from Michigan and Chicago respectively, so we soon found ourselves digging through the sand. I came back with a good little collection of sea glass, mostly very tiny pieces but fun nonetheless. We spent a couple hours at the beach which was nice to relax after all the traveling.

Park Güell:




By 2pm we were off to Barcelona to see what we could find. We headed to the Park Guell, a large park in the center of town which was designed by Antoni Gaudi, a famous architect. To get there, we had to climb a huge hill from the metro stop. So big in fact that they have escalators running up the center of it. We chose to be adventerous and climb the stairs. The park offers great views of the city and hosts lots of artwork from Gaudi. We made our way up the trails enjoying the scenery and view. There is a square about halfway up that hosts vendors and musicians, so we stopped there for a bit and then continued climbing. When we reached what seemed to be the end of the trails, we saw that the top of the hill (felt more like a mountain) had no trail leading to it. So we made our own path and hiked up the rest of the way to discover the best view of Barcelona, an unobstructed 360 degree view of the entire city. We then made our way down, saw more of the park, and walked the streets once at the bottom to find a metro station back to the hostel.

Food:



I am going to cover all of our food experiences in one section, just to make it easier to talk about. Barcelona has a large Catalan influence, which is a region of Spain with its own dialect and culture. The food uses seafood heavily, but not your typical fish. Squid, anchovies, shrimp, and shellfish are the common seafoods here. The first meal I had was an omlette sandwich. Not typical Catalan food, but the Italians don't eat eggs so I saw this as an opportunity to get some eggs. It was very good.

Tapas, meaning appetizers or snacks, are also big here. Many of them are made with the seafood common to the area. Nathan and I tried some crab-ball tapas, basically crab meat fried, with the claw as the handle to eat it with. Definitely right up my alley. We also had paella, ours being a mix of chicken and seafood. I liked it, but after a while the pretty much raw squid and anchovies taste started getting to me.

On Saturday morning we arrived at a metro station to an unlikely surprise, a Dunkin Donuts. Though it was not called Dunkin Donuts, but Dunkin Coffee instead. I guess coffee sells better than donuts. I got a coffee and two donuts, which hit the spot for breakfast. The coffee though was not brewed like an American dunkin donuts, but was instead expresso with enough milk to make it "coffee".

Churros, I had several while in Barcelona. I've always loved churros, but these were by far the best I've had. Besides being good by themselves, they are often filled with chocolate, a perfect combination. They were a great energy boost while walking all around the city.

Saturday:





Saturday was our major sightseeing day since we had the entire day to explore. Our first stop was Sangrada Familia, the famous Gaudi(again) church which is unfnished. It is enormous and the architectural work on it is incredibly detailed. Next we went to la Ramblas, which is the main stretch in Barcelona, full of shops, stores and restaurants. We walked down it for several hours stopping in different stores and eventually made our way to another church, Santa Maria del Pi. The church was beautiful inside, but had some very interesting features, such as an outside courtyard with geese and roosters.

From there we went to the Picaso museum, which I found much more interesting than I originally anticipated. We quickly jumped back on the Metro to head to the magic fountains which have light/music/water shows every half hour from 7pm to 8:30pm, only to find out when we got there that they are shut down until February. We then found a carnival down the street, got some churros and then headed to a restaurant to get dinner.

Sunday:



Sunday brought more walking up stairs, which seemed to be a central theme the entire weekend. We saw the Olympic stadium and park that surrounds it. The art museum is also located there, so we walked around inside the building which is in itself pretty spectacular. We then headed back to the bus station to get a 4pm bus for our 7:30 flight back to Rome. A very busy weekend indeed.

Last Thoughts:

Smoking:
People in Europe in general smoke a lot. People in Barcelona smoke like chimneys. This is probably my biggest if not only complaint about Barcelona. It is not only that they smoke a lot, but smoking inside is still permitted. When you walk into a restaurant you enter a haze of cigarette smoke. Whether it be 8pm for dinner or 9am for breakfast, people are smoking non-stop. I'm not sure what it is about the culture that they haven't realized it's killing them, but I would be interested to see the statistics of lung cancer compared to the rest of the world for that area.

Pickpockets:
Luckily we were able to avoid Pickpockets this weekend. We've been told by many that pick pockets in Barcelona are the worst. At one point though we did find that one of the compartments of Nate's backpack had been unzipped, but we're unsure if it had just been open the entire time or was opened by a pickpocket because there was nothing in it to begin with.

The Language Barrier (Again):
Just as I was getting comfortable used to hearing only Italian and speaking some, I am thrust into yet another foreign language. I do not know spanish, at all, but fortunately Nate had some Spanish background and I believe Meghann has a little too (correct me if I'm wrong!). So to some extent we were able to communicate simple ideas through Nate, except for the fact that most of the people in Barcelona do not speak regular Spanish but the Catalan dialect, which in some cases is extremely different (from what I could tell by looking at signs that had both Spanish and Catalan on them). This and that when I tried to order something or ask a question I asked it in Italian for the first two days before giving up trying to communicate at all. When we arrived back in Rome I thanked the taxi driver with "Gracias", clearly not Italian.

What's next?

This week the Villanova Professors are here to do some presentations, meetings, and oh yeah, to run the project of photographing St. Mary Major (tomorrow) and St. Peter's Basilica (wednesday and thursday). Even Father Peter, the President of the University has made the trip to present the Vatican Museum with the finished virtual reality tour of the Sistine Chapel. Exciting stuff. That also means probably no traveling this weekend, at least not out of Italy, but maybe a day trip somewhere?

The first weekend in February will see me going to Paris. ah Paris, where I'll further get more confused in the foreign language side of my brain as I struggle to remember 7 years of French all while not confusing it with my (at that point) 5 weeks of Italian.

Also, see all the pictures with this link, and of course leave your comments below for me!

http://picasaweb.google.com/ramlax13/Barcelona?feat=directlink