Barcelona: "Ma-ma-ma-myyyy Girona!"

03 marzo 2009

Officially, I am in love with the city of Barcelona. One full day there on Saturday with a flight on Friday afternoon and another back on Sunday afternoon was not nearly enough time to soak in that place. It was gorgeous, it was incredible, it had architecture unlike any of the square (literally and figuratively) buildings in America, it had windy gothic street and some of the coolest stores I've ever seen. If I ever get back to Europe, I'm going back to Barcelona for sure.

******Friday*******
For the first time since I arrived in Viterbo, I woke up when it was still dark outside. At 06:01 a.m., just as I had set it, my alarm went off and began ringing with a sound that's not hard to hate, even if on its own it's not that unpleasant. I had packed the night before, so it was just last minute things; Hailey came to my door at 6:30 and we peaced for the train.

RyanAir has its perks. It's got ridiculously cheap flights that get you relatively close to where you want to go. The problem is in the word "relatively." From Roma, RyanAir only flies out of Ciampino airport. Ciampino is in Roma like Dulles is in DC. Basically, it's not. The same goes for the airport "in" Barcelona, which is actually an hour-and-a-half busride from the city.

So, we took the hour-and-a-half train ride to Rome, rode the metro from three stops away from one end to the last stop at the other (another 40ish minutes), caught a bus from the metro for a 20-minute ride to airport, flew for about an hour 15 minutes, paid 21 euro for a roundtrip ride on the bus from the Girona airport in Spain to Barcelona (1.5 hours each way) and took the metro to our hostel. So what you make up for in cost, you pay for in convenience. Serious lack of convenience.

The hostel was really friendly and lively, but our room consisted of 10 beds, us, one guy who didn't say two words to anyone, a british couple, a german girl, a canadian girl, a really tall blonde girl, two older women probably in their 60s that must've just been bored and traveling, and one bed that never had the same person in it.

We weren't in Barcelona for half an hour when Hailey's everything that can go wrong will go wrong weekend began. Looking for money to pay our tab for the hostel, Hailey realized her wallet was gone. Luckily, all her money hadn't been inside her wallet, so she still had cash for the weekend. Still, she lost her credit card and IDs and we had a fun time trying to cancel her cards and getting through to her parents back home. I have to say though, through it all she kept a really cool head and didn't let it get to her too much.

There was not much else we could do, so we went to walk around and try to keep her mind off it. We walked down a nearby street to a market we'd heard about, which, much like two more markets we saw later, was complete with all kinds of clothes, shoes, accessories and linens lining the outer ring and an insane assortment of fresh foods in the inner part. Viterbo hasn't had grapes (that I've seen, at least) since I've been here. I spotted these enormous purple grapes at one of the stands in the center, so I had to buy them. Soooo worth it.

We walked around a bit more and eventually got back to the hostel. We figured, for dinner we'd just walk around and find one of the places we'd passed that had all looked phenomenal. Meanwhile, we also deduced that the part of the gothic quarter where our hostel was must've also been the middle eastern area, because every other shop was either a fast food place selling donor kebabs or a barber.

We were in Barcelona, after all, so I was hungering for some paella and sangria for dinner. It certainly wasn't difficult. We walked about five minutes before we found a couple that looked good and picked one. Somehow, we ordered ourselves a seafood paella (for me), a paella con carne (for Hailey) and a liter of sangria. For the two of us.

Here's the thing about Barcelona. It's in Spain, but in the Catalan part. As a direct result, they speak mostly Catalan there. I had naively gone to the city excited to use my mediocre at best Spanish from high school. Not only was it way more difficult than I expected to switch my brain off of italian, but then we got to Barcelona to find out nothing was in Spanish anyway. And Catalan, though it has a few words that cross over, is nothing like Spanish. Catalan has words with t's and x's right next to eachother. It has c's with little squiggly lines on the bottom like they have in French. It has nothing that I knew how to pronounce.

So, probably because of the Catalan majority, we ordered quite a bit of sangria. Luckily, our plates also had quite a bit of paella so it evened out. And my stomach was satisfied, because I got my Spanish paella like I'd wanted and some seriously delicious sangria.

We figured, at this point, we'd go check out the nightlife. At the hostel they told us there were quite a few good bars and clubs in Barceloneta, by the beach area. And they were probably right, but not in the area we took the metro to. The stop was pretty dead and we walked around for quite a bit without finding anything that looked promising. Hailey was exhausted anyway, so we headed back to the hostel to sleep in our room that by this point, unfortunately, smelled like feet.