Oh Barcelona… part one of our four part trip. It’s hard to say now, but it may be the most memorable city on our Eurotrip. We arrived late on Saturday, starving, and had to carry our packs halfway across the city to Centric Point Hostel. We checked in, threw our bags in our 8-bed female room, and went out to find food. After wolfing down a chicken sandwich, we went back to our room and slept. Breakfast was from 8am until 10am so we had to get up at a reasonable time if we wanted to take advantage of free food, which we did. After breakfast we dolled ourselves up and left to venture Barcelona.
As we were walking down La Rambla, we found a Starbucks and went crazy. In the past 5 months I’ve only had one coffee that took me more than 4 gulps to finish and that was at the Starbucks in Frankfurt. So we got our grande cappuccinos, latttes, and mocchiatos and sat down to plan our day. We saw quite a bit, too. We walked through Royal Court, saw the famous column at the end of La Rambla, walked through markets, went to the marina, and did a little shopping all before lunch. In the mall by the Aquarium (where I bought a couple pairs of pants) I was waiting in line for the ATM when I saw three cute surfer looking boys walk by. One with dark curly hair especially caught my eye and I went over to Nikki and Emily to point them out… but they had already disappeared somewhere. We got lunch at a fast food sandwich place called Pans. We were going to go to the Aquarium after, but we read the sign wrong and thought that the admission was 35 euro each. Instead we went to the city park, which turned out to be absolutely incredible. I actually liked it better than Villa Borghese. There was a lake with row boats just like Villa Borghese, but there was also the most beautiful fountain complex that I have ever seen. I was kind of obsessed with it. We sat in the sun for quite awhile after wandering the park and talked about boys… and watched a few cute Spainard boys play soccer nearby. Once we left the park we saw the Arch of Triumph, which was bigger than all of the aches in Rome.
We were supposed to meet up with Jaci for dinner, but we couldn’t get a hold of her so we assumed she had ditched us for a boy and went back to our hostel to get ready. We talked for awhile with a girl staying in our room named Polly. She was from England but had been traveling around for the past 6 months. We invited her along to dinner with us and we went to La Rambla to find a restaurant. We were going to order a bunch of tapaps, but the restaurant that we settled on didn’t have very many. Instead, I shared a pinapple and shrimp pizza with Emily. We also ordered a pitcher of sangria. Polly was an interesting girl… she told us about her attraction to girls even though she apparently had a boyfriend back home. (more…)
