Blog Day 3

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Looking Inward

To finish out the week in Barcelona, we travelled to the city of Tarragona and had a free day on Friday to finish up exploring what we wanted to do as smaller groups. For our free day, my group decided we would go visit the Basilica of Santa Maria del Mar in Barcelona (another famous church) and shop around followed by a lunch on the Mediterranean Sea and more wandering until we were tired. The majority of this day involved wandering into random coffee shops and cafés and trying pastries or different coffees. Being not a huge fan of pastries, I decided to try a different coffee at every place we stopped. Luckily the European sizes are small so if I didn’t like any, it wouldn’t be too much to finish. Surprisingly, however, I really liked all of the different flavors I tried. This really showed me how much I like not only different coffees but also trying new foods and especially variations of things I currently like. It is fun to take something you know you like and try a new twist on it to see what new versions of that thing you can experience and try out.

The Relational Level

One of the highlights of our day off was the very nice lunch we had at a restaurant on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea. Before going in, a very nice hostess from the restaurant came out and was friendly to us talking to us about why we were in Spain, whether we could speak Spanish, and even spoke Spanish to us slowly to help us practice. Coming to Spain, I was excited to see the hospitality and friendliness talked about all throughout the Culture Smart book on Spain and I feel like this interaction was the first that really stuck out to me and showed me that.

The Social Side

While our trip to the Santa Maria del Mar was very beautiful and breathtaking, I found it very sad that this beautiful place along with others such as La Sagrada Familia were turned into museums and tourist attractions rather than be used for their intended purpose, worship. These amazing places were designed to honor the Lord and put the focus on him but instead, they turn into places of profit and pictures. In a way it reminds me of the scene in the Bible where Jesus went into the church and flipped the tables in anger. In the Culture Smart book, there is an interesting point about the changing times in regard to many cultural pieces, one of which being religion. Catholicism’s popularity is dwindling while tourism is rising so it would make sense that this occurs but coming from a Christian college and background, it just seems a little sad.

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