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Published: October 27th 2009
For the first 3 days of our fall break we spent it in Barcelona Spain. We flew Ryanair from Pisa to Girona, I suggest not taking Ryanair. They offer extremely cheap flights but for a reason. You have to print out your boarding passes ahead of time, if you don't it is a 50 euro fee so make sure to do that if you book through them. Also, there are no assigned seats which would be fine if it was in an organized way to get to the plane. However, about an hour before the actual flight and boarding time people form a huge group in front of the gate to wait and then people seriously run to the plane to get a seat which I don't understand. The flight itself wasn't bad but it was all young people so it was kind of rowdy and the stewardesses are trying to sell you stuff the entire time.
Our hostel in Barcelona was ok, the first night we had to stay with a random girl who was in her mid 20s who was just backpacking through Europe by herself. The rooms were extremely small but the actual hostel was a good
location and it was definitely safe. We stayed at hello BCN, breakfast was included but it was just little pastries and cheap coffee. The first thing we saw was Sagrada Familia which was designed by Antoni Gaudi and was started in 1882 and is still being built and won't be done until 2030. We went inside but couldn't figure out where to go from there, I think you are supposed to take the lift to another floor to see everything else but there was a long line and it was just very confusing. We just basically looked a lot at the outside because that was where the major parts were to see. I bought a couple cards at the giftshop but wish I would have bought more things from there because they had very unique coffee mugs with Barcelona written on it and an outline of the city and different and unique things. We then went to Casa Battlo, another building designed by Gaudi. This building was one of the most unique buildings I've ever seen. It looked like something straight out of Willy Wonka, like it should be a candy shop. We didn't go inside because we were all
tired and wanted to eat, but the outside is the part to see. When I get back home over Christmas break I hope to get some books on Gaudi and Spain and everything I have seen while in Europe. I have realized I don't really know anything about important architecture or art history. After all of that, we decided to find the part along the water. It was gorgeous and it was such a nice and sunny day so it made it that much better. There were all of these little tents set up to sell stuff, some of it was actually really unique. There was this restaurant on a boat in the water that looked really cool, but we didn't eat there because it closed at like 10 and it would've taken us too long to get back there, but we hung out there for a couple hours and relaxed. We also went to the Picasso museum which was really cool because they went through his life in order and listed important events and had other people's work included that were involved in Picasso's life. I would go back there and take more time in this museum.
After
all of that sight seeing, we walked along Las Rambas, one of the most famous streets in Barcelona. It had a lot of shopping and touristy places along the way, but the middle of this street was the place to be. Las Rambas was actually kind of scary though because it's one of the most if not the most pick-pocketed place in the world. There are these people who dress up in these really weird costumes and just sit there or scare people. I thought it was just for Halloween but apparently that happens all the time, these people will get your attention by doing something weird or funny and then someone else will steal your stuff. I had a death grip on my purse the entire time so luckily nothing was stolen but I did get a lot of pictures of these people. It was funny to walk along this road though. Of course we ended up finding a Starbucks, but this time we did not spend 3 hours sitting inside.
For dinner we just picked this place along Las Rambas because we didn't want to have to search around. Of course what we picked was a tourist
trap and tapas were about $32, the drinks were cheaper than the food. The 4 of us shared 2 Paellas, a vegetable one and seafood one. The seafood one was delicious and the sangria was as well. At night we went to this bar called Pippermint with one of my roommates and her boyfriend. It was a cute little bar, but they didn't have regular drinks. They had 1 liter beers, mixed drinks, or sangria. They also had 2 liter, 6 liter, or 13 liters of these. We ordered a 2 liter of beer and split it between 5 people. We had 2 of our friends from Florence meet up with us later and ended up ordered the 6 liter beer, it was unbelievable. After that, 3 of us just went back to the hostel while our other friend went with her boyfriend to this 5 story club called razmataz.
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