Fall Break Phase I - Viva La Barcelona!

Hola! Ciao! And Hello from Jolly Ol’ London town!

I just touched down two days ago back in the great cloudy city of London, England, after a 7 day fall break adventure that took me through Barcelona, Spain, Florence and Rome in Italy, and kicked me back home here. I have so many stories and experience to share in the next blog, so what I decided to do was explain my experiences in a number of installments, broken down, so hopefully it’s easier to read and understand my rambling of the crazy time that I had the past week of my life.

BARCELONA SPAIN – FALL BREAK DAYS 1 – 3

Take off from London was around 5:30pm London-Time or so, and we were airborne out of Heathrow airport soon after. To give you an idea of my trip, basically my friend Brett Scuiletti and I were a dynamic duo of adventurers for 7 days and we started our trip off right. Right after we hit probably 20,000-30,000 feet, we were far above the cloud lines, and watching an immensely amazing sunset over Europe, as the sun traveled quickly over the horizon over the northern hemisphere for a good 30 minutes. I took my first pictures of the trip from the window-seat of the plane, because the view was absolutely incredible. I think you’ll find that many times, I’m going to run out of adjectives to describe the sites I’ve seen in the past 7 days, but the opening view of my trip over the European skyline was more than majestic for sure.

We arrived in Barcelona fairly late, probably around 7 or 8, and after we picked up Brett’s baggage, we went through immigration and took a train and then a quick metro ride to our hostel location, in the heart of the city. Our hostel, “The Sound” was about a 10 minute walk from the beach, and we had rooms that each had small Spanish balconies overlooking the busy streets of Barca. We met up with another Elon mate of ours, Scott Van Dorn, down in the basement lounge of the Sound, who introduced us to the friends he met during the day there since he arrived earlier than us. Brett and I got acquainted with a trio of Australians, two brothers – Eugene and Raoul Renard, and Chris, who were all on the “stereotypical” Aussie traveling experience throughout Europe. We also met a group of guys that live out in Seattle, Washington who had graduated and now work for Amazon.com, and who wanted to take a three week vacation in Europe. Additionally, a few girls that originally were studying in London also were at the table of travelers that Brett and I joined, so we all shared stories, played cards, and decided to go out for an official Barcelona fiesta experience. Our night started at about 12:00am, which is typical of Barcelona time, because everything there is about 4 hours later than other parts around the world, from lunch at 2-5pm, to dinner at 9-10, they’re on their own time: Barcelona-time.

So we went to a number of local pubs, met some more travelers along the way, and kept traveling until we finally reached the beach. Barcelona has many different night time clubs and bars, and because there were no cover charges for any of us, we decided to try as many as possible on Saturday night. So we covered I’d say somewhere between 10-15 clubs before we got tired of dancing (we went to clubs with old rock, techno, new school music, alternative, everything!) and decided to go sit on the beach for a while. So the 10 of us sat on the beach, continued our life talks, and figured it must have been something like 3am by now, when I looked at my watch though, turns out it was actually 6:00AM in the morning! Well, regardless, of the time, we were having such a great time getting to know all of our new friends, that we decided it was early, we hadn’t showered in a while, so we all decided to go swimming in the Mediterranean, right on the beach! It was hilarious, but a great closing moment of the evening for sure, and a nice kick off to our trip. I must say, I’ve never swam in the Mediterranean before, so I can now successfully check that off of things to do on my bucket list.

Anyways, we got back to our hostel at 7:30am, and all crashed, and woke up around 1:30 in the afternoon, this may seem crazy, but in Barcelona, this of course is nothing because the normal wake up time is about that early in the afternoon anyhow! So Brett, Scott, and myself all decided to get ready and we headed down to a local restaurant to try the authentic Spanish cuisine of Barcelona. I shared a giant plate of mixed seafood Paella with Scott, and Brett tried a huge dish of pork, sausage, and beans. The food was so good! It was a lot though for sure, so we had to take some back with us, but I got to also use some of my Spanish skills to converse with the waitress, so I felt good to be able to communicate effectively, especially since I haven’t taken a formal class in a foreign language in a number of semesters.

After lunch, our trio decided to get some serious site seeing done. We traveled up and down “La Rambla” which is the main street through Barcelona that has all of the main shops, stores, restaurants etc on it. Since it was a Sunday, there was a huge mass of people in the open market areas (much of Spain is Roman Catholic, so a lot of the smaller shops were closed for religious reasons). Of course, this also meant that there were hundreds of street performers everywhere, trying to make a living and entertain all the tourists and locals. Everything from living statues (I’ve never seen so many!), to artists, to musicians (we saw an Indian group playing native American music, a Spanish trio jamming, and a group of Australians playing didgeridoos too!), to guys juggling soccer balls on their heads for hours on end. I got plenty of pictures, video, and snapshots of these people, but also some of the major sites along La Rambla. We went to la Placa de Reial which is a major square in Barca, and we also saw one of the large open parks at the top of La Rambla as well. We walked up the streets more and saw a lot of the Gaudi architecture that is very prevalent in the city of Barcelona, and also very unique and crazy too! (I’m sure he was on a lot of drugs when he created his masterpieces, but the actual structures are pretty wild though)

After that, we continued to follow our map around the city. I was of course dubbed the map-holder/guide wherever we went somewhere, so that I guess I could be blamed if we got lost, but I didn’t mind, I spoke Spanish, which helped a lot. Additionally, (for my sister mainly), our map of Barcelona, was sponsored and made by McDonalds, so it noted every single Micky-D’s in the entire city of Barca, which was not only helpful, but whenever we got lost, it’s because we weren’t seeing a McD’s and too far out of reach for McFlurries.

Anyways, we saw La Temple de la Sangrada Familia, which is a huge unfinished temple/cathedral in the center of Barca, as well as the Cathedral of Barcelona itself too, which of course, is also unfinished. They really don’t like to finish many of their large religious structures I guess, but either way they were pretty darn impressive. Later we walked down to the marina overlooking Barcelona and Brett, Scott and I recapped our break so far. We got back to our hostel, and we went a picked up kebabs at a local kebab shop (they’re delicious in Europe) with the Aussies, and went to a local pub to talk to some more locals. I ended up talking with two of the guys from Seattle (Dave and Kinsley) about politics, the youth generation, and the election. Lol, I know very dull stuff I thought too, but it was a conversation nonetheless. Then for the most part we called it an early night in the city and got some shut eye for the next day.

The next morning, (Monday) I got up early, and decided to explore parts of the city I hadn’t yet on my own. I first traveled up La Rambla a bit more, and took a metro to the far north of the city to a park called “Parc Guell” which is a park that has tons of Gaudi architecture everywhere. I also climbed to the top of the peak here, to overlook the city toward the sea and saw all of the previous monuments I saw the day before towering above the city. There are pictures posted of the Gaudi works though which look kinda like ginger bread houses and very far out curvy and crazy buildings, those are all Guadi-style. It looks a lot like mosaics, but entire buildings made out of miniature pieces of ceramic tiles. There’s a picture of me as well with the famous salamander animal that is outside part of the park, which is a fountain, and also pretty cool.

After Parc Guell, I caught another metro south, and got out and walked to the Cathedral Santa Maria by the Sea (la Catedral Santa Maria del Mar), which is the oldest cathedral in Barcelona. It’s a small church in comparison to the other large temples I’d seen previously in the past two days, but it’s absolutely gorgeous inside, and a very humbling place to spend time in. I took some photos, and also realized how important religion is to the Roman Catholics in Spain, due to the many devout people taking time off of their lunch breaks to come and pray at the alters there. After I finished there, I traveled to another park, “Parc de la Ciutadella” which is another main hot spot and beautiful park on the side of the city with a luxurious fountain (also unfinished architecture) and a mammoth, and the local zoo, as well as the natural history museum. I wandered for a while, saw the Catalayan Parliament (because Barcelona is basically an autonomous area that governs itself inside of Spain), and then I headed back toward La Rambla, grabbed a pita to eat, and met up with my friend Kristy to go on a tour of a monastery outside Barcelona, but unfortunately tickets were sold out, so we decided to go on a cable car ride above Port Vell (the port on Barcelona’s ocean front) and we found Brett and Scott, so the four of us took the cable car across the top of Barcelona, overlooking the entire city, and ended up climbing the rest of the way up the mountain to overlook the city from the military museum/fortress at the pinnacle. It was great to have the four of us all together on top of Barcelona overlooking the city and just relaxing and taking in the sites, since it’s such a beautiful place.

After we got down the mountain, and walked back to our hostel, we took showers, got ready, and actually met up with some other Elon kids that visited us earlier in our semester in London. Our Perugia friends! Katherine Merrill, Emily Sanner, and Sharon Rice, were all on their respective Fall Breaks, and happened to be in Barcelona one of the same nights that we were. So we all went to a restaurant by the water, ate actually fairly American food (but it was a great deal), had tapas (Spanish appetizers), and burgers which were wonderful. Afterwards, we all went back to our hostels, met up with our Australian friends and once again went to a few local pubs to catch up and hang out for the evening. Overall, this was my Barcelona experience to the max, and in my next entry (hopefully posted sooner than this one…) I’ll explain my adventures with Brett to Italia, land of the Romans, birthplace of the Renaissance, and a site with exquisite cuisine!