So after class, me and Sarah were planning on going off to the beach, when the 40 year old woman in our group asked if she would come with us and we were like ohhh, sure… well that was interesting for about half an hour until we found out she wanted to go to a different beach than we did and she (fortunately) went her own way. So most of the rest of the group was off to go tour the empty soccer stadium for a few hours, we headed to the beach. Which required navigating through the Barcelona subways… actually quite easily. I stopped at a pharmacy to get sun tan lotion. The farmacias aqui son arragend very differently. There is nothing but actual chemical health care products and drugs… no magazines, snacks, candy, or even deodorant or toothpaste. I have no idea where to get these things or detergent or anything else like that. Anyway, I couldn’t find the sun lotion until I realized they keep it all behind the counter, so I asked the cashier for it, and he asked me how strong, and I said 30. So he brought me two bottles, one spray on, one lotion, and asked which I would like. Seeking a bargain, I asked how much they were. One was 20 euros and the other 30. I think not. 40 bucks for sun lotion is a little steep. I just borrowed Sarah’s. (Which was 85 spf, fyi.) Next we stopped for lunch, and decided after reading the entire menu in English and halfway through again in Spanish, that we would just get icecream bars. And they were delicious.
La playa itself was extraordinarily crowded, so we decided to just walk along next to it instead of lay down our towels. We saw a bunch of interesting and crazy people.
It was like a self tour at a slow pace, much better than a guided tour. There are no clocks anywhere so everybody looses track of time here, which is just what we did.
My favorite part of the beach was the jungle gym Eiffel tower made of ropes. J That was quite fun to climb on. Even though it was crowded, we took turns cooling off in the water, which was amazingly refreshing. Swimming would have been nice but I guess I’ll wait until I get to Greece.
We passed more cool street performers, this time a band was playing Bob Marley’s “no woman no cry.” Lo me gusta. We also passed a few more markets on the street, and on the way home stopped for a delicious dinner at an Italian restaurant.
We also saw, way on the hilltop and appearing very small, a perfect silhouette of a castle. We are not sure what it is exactly, but on the way home it was lit up and pretty so we will go check it out tomorrow. But by the time I post this, it will be today… since of course the internet is once again not working. Only in Europe…
Well now I am in Paris, but I will finish up talking about Barcelona. It was extremely fun! There was so much to do all of the time; we explored the part of town with the shops and narrow corridors. We went to the Picasso museum, went to a few well-know stores to see what they were like, such as the Corte Ingles, the largest department store here, with 9 stories. At the top was a cafeteria where we took pictures including the panoramic view. On our endless search for free internet access and curiosity about new parts of town, me and Sarah came to a beautiful 5 star hotel not to far from ours, but the location was much nicer. It had dim lights and high ceilings with columns, and everything was red and dark black, and the floors were marble. Even the halls to the rooms were pretty, and had “zen” glass rooms in the middle of each. On the top floor, where we got off in search of the pool, was a small restaurant area on the roof and a pool, and another beautiful view of the city. After we took a few pictures here, pretending that we were guests at the hotel, we went back to the lobby and found… two computers with internet! So we used those for quite a while.
The next day were our first “professional visits” and Sarah’s birthday. The first two visits are not really worth talking about… we toured the stock exchange building and a car factory, which could have potentially been cool but was not. The wine cellar and vineyard we went to, however, was really cool. The vineyard made me feel like I was in Italy even though I have never been there, and deep underground in the enormous cellars we took a “train” ride, which was fun and the architecture of the buildings above ground was amazing.
Later to celebrate Sarah’s birthday, me and her went to a reaaaallly nice Japanese restaurant, that was also reaaaaallly cheap. Which is very hard to find in Europe. The place was fancy and well decorated and had nice waiters and good food.
And on our final full day in Spain, we went to the Gaudi park, which was so pretty and fun to explore. I expected it to be nice and it turned out to be a lot nicer than I expected. The curvy benches were cool and a good photo op, and the Gaudi lizard is awesome up close. Check the Spain pictures link to see!
I guess I should talk about classes? Well, we are supposed to be taking 2, but there is a kind of surprise 3rd class that everyone has to take in order to fill the credit hours, (I don’t know why they couldn’t just have made the 2 longer) on the European Union. Which I’m not too interested in. Marketing is a lot better because the teacher is cool and the subject is interesting, and I have the same teacher (a German named Peter… we call the teachers by their first names, as I have in so many different summer school programs) for Cross Cultural Communications, and that class is my favorite. It is basically a story telling and thinking outside of the box kind of class, and I think I’ve already learned plenty. Me and Sarah have also learned a lot on our own adventures that have nothing to do with the program. Most of the other kids here like to drink every single night, which has led to a few of them missing class more than once already… and its only been a week. But there are a few I really like, such as a few Egyptian girls and a few Americans and Brazilians… actually I like more of them than I dislike, but the ones I dislike are just more fun to talk about. J
So we took a long overnight bus ride from Barcelona to Paris. Most of it was uncomfortable but there were fun parts, such as when Hugo (the director) got on the microphone around midnight and said, in French, now we are in Paris! And we all shouted and cheered and looked out the window at the hills. We had a rest stop at some point during the night where we got off the bus and into the food-bathroom place, and it was really weird to see everything written in French. This was the first language I completely couldnt read: London was English, Norway looked like German, and I could understand most things in Spain. But all French words look different to me and I never thought I would wish that everything were written in Spanish. Le blublu fla fla flee ah hau hau.
We arrived in the morning, over 4 hours before check in time to the hotel. Me and Sarah went out to eat again, and the first place we found was cheap and had a cheese sample platter… one thing on my to do list. I didn’t get it because I wanted to find one with more types of cheese, I like cheese! But I find a good one before I leave.
When we finally checked into the hotel, it was a bit of a disappointment (to the extent that I can be disappointed, because that doesn’t happen too easily) because the rooms are small and old and the refrigerator and a light don’t work, the hairdryer can only be used for 2 minutes at a time, there is no free internet, you cannot log on to websites like facebook or any email or anything that requires a password and username, and (I was told) all the showers in every room change pressure and temperature constantly from scalding hot to freezing cold. So I just left it on bath mode and ducked my head under there to wash my hair, which worked pretty well. Well, today we went on a “professional visit” again, which this time was definitely not a professional visit and we all found to be very sketchy because the two guide leaders were not associated with the businesses we were learning about and were badly dressed and badly groomed while the rest of us were in business casual. But it was over soon enough and we broke off, checking out one of the nicer streets in Paris, with a 4 story Haagen-Dazs café, restaurants on the street with very tasty sounding food, one which we had dinner at, and there were many other nice and enormous stores. I have two complaints though… 1, there is no such thing as free water in Europe. You cannot drink the tap water, so I have become used to stealing water from our free breakfasts and paying for it later in the day, so I thought I would order it with dinner, because it must be the cheapest drink on the menu and I was thirsty. When we got the bill, which was otherwise reasonable, the water was 6 euros! That is even more in dollars, I’m not sure what the conversion rate is now, but I will be sure to steal extra water from breakfast from now on. Also, we have been going food shopping for bread and cheese and fruit which has saved a whole lot of money on food. Anyway, my second complaint is that the drivers are scary and rude to pedestrians; one trucker inched closer and closer to our group as we were finishing crossing the street as if to say he would run us over if we didn’t hurry up. Otherwise, French people are a LOT friendlier than I expected so far. We’ll see if that holds up.
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