Barcelona: October 30-November 1

I wrote the next few entries in a notebook while on location.

Jamie and I, of course, had an extremely early flight out of Newcastle on Friday, October 30. First stop on our 2 week break: Barcelona. Jamie has been to the city and loved it so I was so excited and knew we’d have a great time, even for just 2 days. I’ve finally gotten used to figuring out public transportation on site when arriving somewhere new so it wasn’t too difficult finding our hostel after arriving in the Barcelona airport. We were lucky and flew in with EasyJet which flies right into Barcelona.

Our hostel was really nice and very secure. Although we’d been up almost all night and traveling part of the day, we immediately left the hostel to go explore. Our hostel was located right on La Rambla Street in Barcelona (a main street) and only a 5 minute walk from the ocean. Honestly, I can’t remember being so excited about traveling. Jamie and I walked around the markets and ocean for about an hour and enjoyed really good conversation. It was quite obvious to me at that point that I’ll be close with Jamie for an extremely long time.

After meeting up with a few other girls from the program we decided on a boat ride around the Barcelona port. It wasn’t a long ride but the breeze was nice and the sun was setting so looking into the city was beautiful. When the ride ended we grabbed some sangria on the beach and I entered the ocean for the FIRST TIME EVER (it wasn’t that exciting because the water was cold so I only put my feet in). Jamie and I parted from the group and decided to look for Halloween costumes. This turned into a 2 hour escapade of running around Barcelona asking people on the street if they could direct us to a costume store. We really tried to follow directions but neither of us speak Spanish and ended up giving up around 10 and heading back to the hostel.

For the record, hostels really need more plug-ins.

The next morning we headed to Barcelona’s famous park: …. It was massive and the sun was extremely hot but it also had something to overcome the head: an amazing view of the city. The heat was soon forgotten as we were able to walk around the enormous grounds of the park. Jamie was set on finding this famous lizard statue in the park which turned out to be an amazing display of architecture. After returning to the hostel to grab our bags, we headed to Girona for the night where Ryan Air would fly us to Morocco.

Girona that night was somewhat uneventful. We, again, completely failed at the directions from hostelworld.com and ended up roaming around for an extra hour looking for our hostel. Somehow, however, we found it. Anyway, that night was the “Girona Festival” which was a huge display of food and rides. It was identical to state fairs in the U.S.- stands full of hotdogs and popcorn, rides for kids and games to win prizes. The interesting thing was the theme of the rides. I never knew the Spanish had such an obsession with American Indians. There were numerous rides themed with “cowboys and Indians” and one particular ride even gave the children fake feathers to represent American Indians afterwards.
After walking around the incredible display, we headed to sleep because we were up at 4:00 to grab the bus to the airport.