Sunday, November 11, 2012

...9 times out of 10

So, Barcelona!  What an interesting experience.  It is really hard to describe how crazy this part of the trip was, but after this post you might understand why I am not really the biggest fan of Barcelona's.

After an 8 hour long bus ride from Madrid, Rylee and I finally made it to Barcelona at 7 am.  We got off the bus and it was surprising really cold!  We weren't able to check into our hostel until 1:00, so we had a lot of time to kill.  The first thing we decided to do was to find our hostel so that at 1:00 we knew exactly where to go.  We knew our hostel was right near Sagrada Familia, a Church designed by the architect Gaudi, but we had no idea where that was in relation to the bus station so we decided to start walking.  First, we had some trouble getting out of the bus station, but once we finally did we turned right and started walking. Right did not seem right.  We got turned around so many times and after about an hour we finally saw signs for the Sagrada Familia.  It took us about another 45 minutes to find the church, it was one of the most interesting buildings I have ever seen.  It literally looked like it was melting.  Trippy! About 20 minutes or so after that we found our hostel.  But we still had 4 hours until we could check in.  We thought it would be a great idea to walk to the Olympic Port and the beach.  On our way we walked past the bus station--only four blocks from the hostel.  Rough!  Two hours later we got to the port.  This is when we found out the Barcelona is not a walking city.  Things are really far away.  We were super tired so we fell asleep on a bench.  After checking out the port and beach we started walking back to the hostel.  Our feet were really hurting and it was another long walk back, so when we got to the hostel we were ready for a nap.  We got there around 1:15, what we thought was 15 minutes late, but it ended up being 45 minutes early!  They wouldn't let us check in until 2:00.  After waiting for 45 minutes we finally were able to check in, we got our sheets and went up to the room.  We quickly learned there was no heat and we only had a sheet to cover up with--no blanket!  We had a really cold nap, but we decided to go out for a nice dinner in the center of town.  
We walked for about an hour to Las Ramblas, the center part of the city.  Clearly our hostel was pretty far out of the way.  Rylee and I found a good place dinner and had a great time eating, drinking, and chatting.  After dinner we continued to walk around and decided to got some hot chocolate from Dunkin Donuts!  That's right, Spain has Dunkins!  So great.  We hung out in Dunkin's for a while and decided to walk back to the hostel.  When we got back to the Hostel we were getting ready for a cold night!  When we woke up the next morning and went to shower.  Unfortunately the toilet didn't work at all and the shower/tub had an inch of standing water. Gross!  We went to check out, which we were more than happy to do.  The hostel seemed great and kept our bags for the day.  The place they kept our bags had no roof...weird.  It was supposed to rain, but they promised us they would move our bags inside if it started raining.  We were off for the day.  

We decided to start by going to Park Guell, a park designed by Gaudi.  The park looked exactly like Candy Land.  The mosaics and architecture was really cool, but also pretty trippy!  The best was the getting to the top of the park and seeing the view of the whole city!  A redeeming quality to Barcelona.  Then it started to drizzle.  The rain wasn't too bad, but we were not too happy about it!  We started walking back down to Las Ramblas.  ABout a two hour walk there!  On the way we decided to got some lunch!  We stumbled upon a Turkish restaurant and we deemed it "Turkish Delight."  It was so delicious!  After an amazing two and a half hour lunch we headed to see some more Gaudi buildings.  After checking out the Gaudi buildings we were back down to Las Ramblas.  We walked around to MareMagnum, which is basically a mall on the water.  It was a pretty cool site and the sun was also starting to set!  After we went to an outdoor mark on Las Ramblas and got some dried fruit and amazing juice!  
After the market it started to rain a lot!  We were walking back to the hostel to get to the airport, where we were sleeping for the night.  Yes, since we had a 7:00am flight we decided to be cheap and sleep in the airport.  On our hour walk back to the hostel there was a downpour!  We got completely soaked.  It was a mess.  When we finally got back to the hostel we went to get our bags.  We quickly found out that the hostel did not move our bags.  They were drenched outside and in!  Every piece of clothing was soaked! So, our bodies, our bags, and our clothes were cold and wet and we still needed to get to the airport, where we were going to sleep. We again took the cheap way and spent 4 euro to take a metro and a bus to the airport.
At this time we were over Barcelona.  But, Barcelona was not ready to stop messing with us!  at the bus stop a creepy man came up to us and kept assisting that we had something on our backs.  We were really creeped out and were doing whatever we could to get him to go away.  Once he left Rylee and I laughed it off, but we new it was time to get out of Spain!  A few minutes later Rylee turned around and I realized there was stuff all over her back.  She looked at mine and the same stuff was there.  Out backpacks, legs, clothes, and hair were covered in creamy white stuff.  We came to the conclusion that it was lotion, but we had no idea how it got there.  Our best guess are that someone accidentally squirted some lotion, but the more likely scenario was that the creepy guy sprayed the lotion on us so we would take our nags off so that he could grab them.  It was a mess, but we were finally on our way to the airport.  When we got to the airport we spent 45 minutes in the bathroom attempting to dry our clothes with the hand dryers.  We got a terrible night sleep, but 12 hours later it was Adios Barcelona, see you never!
This was the perfect example of the system beating us.  Actually we got our asses kicked by the system in Barcelona!  It was a disaster and we are still a little bitter.  Beating the system 9 times out of 10 is great, but that one time when the system wins sucks!   

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