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Published: November 16th 2009
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Barcelona was crazy! You definitely need to have a lot of energy for that city! Our entire visit it was in the 70’s and sunny, so we completely lucked out weather wise. We hiked up a lot of hills (sadly we weren’t able to hike through the foothills of Mount Tibidabo and see a woman…. and she was crying…) and we were completely exhausted at the end of each day, but we still experienced the nightlife Barcelona-style!
Our first day we climbed Montjuic (part of the way!) where we then took a funicular to the top of the mountain to explore the ruins of a medieval castle. There were some great views of the city along the way as well. We then headed out to explore the city and grabbed some delicious falafel pitas for lunch and headed over and up another huge hill to the Parc Guell, Guidi’s famous architectural landscape masterpiece. It was AWESOME! It reminded me of a Candy land (without the candy, so maybe that’s a bad comparison) or a some kind of fantasy world. The park was built along the side of a hill and there was live music playing the entire time…we loved it!
After Parc Guell we walked forever to see the Sagrada Famila (it was worth it!) Elyse’s guidebook described Gaudi’s masterpiece as a “spiraling drippy sand castle in the sky” and it completely lived up to its description. Barcelona was all about Gaudi and I completely loved looking at all his works and wish I could have been able to make it over to the Casa Mila and see more of his stuff! We ended our day with a visit back to our favorite local restaurant (we had eaten there after arriving in Barcelona the night before). It was near our hostel away from the center of town and was this little hole-in-the-wall place with all locals and nobody who spoke English, so we just kind of ordered and hope we got something decent! It was delicious though…a meat, entrée and side for only 3.50 euro! And to top it off, a beer for only 1 euro! It was definitely an authentic Spanish restaurant completely void of tourists (except us!) The restaurant was a haze of loud Spaniards, crazy Spanish shows playing on the televisions and a general smoky haze. The official statistic is that 70% of Barcelona smokes, and it
was definitely the smokiest country we’ve been to! It was so weird to see people smoking in restaurants, bars, everywhere with nothing actually designated as smoking or non…its just what they do! We ended the night with lots of pitchers of sangrias at our hostel bar and met tons of new people. We became best friends with our legit bartender who hooked us up the entire weekend with everything we needed….late night pizza, things to see and do, great local restaurants, advice about life, etc! Naturally, we met tons of Australians and officially decided that there is nobody between the ages of 20 and 30 in Australia right now because they are all traveling in Europe.
Our second day we visited Museu Picasso which was a chronological collection of his works, minus a lot of the super famous ones. It was so cool to see how he evolved as an artist and pretty much everything was donated by his wife or friends, so it had random pieces of paper he had doodled on along with some huge masterpieces. I definitely recommend it to anyone traveling to Barcelona…it was one of my favorite museums so far! Later we walked around
Born, which is a neighborhood recommended by our bartender/new best friend James. It was a really upper class part of Barcelona and we saw a beautiful church and ate dinner at a delicious tapas bar! We then headed back to our hostel to get ready for our pub crawl, only to find out from James (who actually called our bar that it was supposed to start at) that our pub crawl doesn’t even exist anymore!! We were bummed, considering we already put a deposit on it (we got our money back, don’t worry!) It had randomly stopped running in the last week, so we decided to do another night at the hostel with some sangria and our new friends, then head out with everyone later to what has been dubbed the craziest club in Barcelona and one of best clubs in Europe, Razzmatazz! Our hostel had organized a trip out to a bar and then the club so we went with everyone from our hostel to experience the Spanish nightlife! We hit up a huge bar near the club first that reminded me so much of the Bronze from “Buffy” only with everybody speaking Spanish and no Dingoes Ate My
Baby playing! Razzmatazz doesn’t even get hopping until 2:30 am, so were pretty much wiped by the time we even got there (we pretty much needed to sleep all day to handle it!) It’s a mega warehouse club with 5 clubs in one, multiple stories and can house up to 5,000 clubbers……it was definitely an experience!
So, highlights of BCN:
1) Our awesome hostel bar with jugs of sangria and our awesome bartender James! Along with our secret sign with him to hook us up with another jug! Indian tribal call!
2) Meeting 3 other people in our hostel from Purdue, 2 guys also studying in Venice from the States, and another guy actually taking classes at Venice International University where we are living! Crazy!
3) Not getting robbed in the city with a high petty crime rate…basically everybody told us to be careful in Barcelona! I did see some pickpocketers (I like to think I’m very street savvy!) but they didn’t get anywhere near me…probably because I was clinging to my clutch like a madwomen the entire time!
4) Parc Guell…I loved it!
5) Having a nice waiter at our favorite restaurant call his friend on the phone
who spoke English to help us out with ordering...he definitely got a big tip!
And, what I learned about Barcelona (none of which were highlights)
1) If you are drunk and acting rowdy, the Spanish police will put you in a chokehold until you pass out and then throw you in the back of their police car. Totally saw this happen at 5 am in the middle of the street outside the club.
2) We definitely got a lot of attention more than anywhere else for being American girls. Oh Spanish men….
3) Most people don’t really speak English or don’t want to speak English with Americans, so we rattled off some form of Italio-Spanglish that seemed to work.
4) Picasso was a lot more explicit than I ever knew! Naughty Pablo.
5) The Spanish love Twilight too! I saw so many Luna Nueva posters and it only made me sad that I have to wait to see it back at home where I can actually understand it!
This next weekend I'll be rocking Roma! More to come 😊
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Mom
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Parc Guell - Wow!
Hi Steph! I loved all your pix...especially the ones of Parc Guell. What a facinating and unique place! It sounds like you saw some wonderful works of art in Barcelona. Can't believe you met other students from Purdue and Venice there. It's a small world after all! Love, Mom