Italy

This week Cormac and I are traveling around Italy. We took the wrong train on our second day and ended up getting way of schedule but we are finally back on track. I have a lot to post but little time for internet. Just letting all those who wanted to know that I am safe and with Cormac. More to come!

Barcelona Part 2

Well at this point I have left Spain and am in Sweden visiting Cormac before making my journey back to the States.  I finally have a good internet connection and free time (Cormac has class this week) so I'll try my best to get all of my blogs up before I cross the Atlantic.

Here goes the rest of Barcelona:

On Saturday morning the group woke up around 9AM, again to eat our free breakfast in the hostel.  I only had toast with Nutella and hot chocolate this time.  When we were all done eating and properly groomed, we headed out.  Nate, Sabrina, and I went out in search of more skate spots in the city.  I was glad to have Sabrina along to talk to while Nate did his thing since I was getting a little tired of taking pictures by this point.  Our first stop was the bus station where there are a lot of benches and skate worthy objects.  There were a ton of people skating so Sabrina and I were content to sit in the sun and watch for a little while.  When our attention span ran out, we wandered over to a huge metal sculpture to try to figure out what exactly it was.  Up on arriving we were still stumped, it appeared to be a large dragon with a set of stairs up its snout.  Sabrina and I climbed the stairs and were really excited to find a slide!!  We each took a turn going down, laughing the whole way.

Crazy sculpture slide (front view)

Sabrina on the slide (tail of the dragon)

Slide (tail of the dragon) on back side of sculpture

My first trip down the tail

After sliding down, we went back to get Nate to make him try out the slide.  One of the guys at the skate place told Nate he could skate the Dragon (probably the only reason Nate came with us).  When we got back to the dragon we located another slide we had missed the first time, wide enough for all three of us to go down at the same time.  After a lot of waiting for small children to move and having to teach a young mother how to use my camera, we snapped a group shot of us coming down one of the wings.

Me, Nate, and Sabrina sliding down a dragon wing

The dragon was located next to a huge concrete field.  After walking through the large concrete field for several minutes we determined it was in fact a drained fountain.  Nate of course skated through the whole thing, with great glee.  We wandered around until we ended up where we had started our day.  From there, we decided to take a Metro to Parc Guell, a park designed by Gaudi.  I looked up the appropriate stop in my guide book and off we went!

When we resurfaced we found no trace of Parc Guell, just a large square with some cool street performers.  We also spotted a McDonalds which we shamefully visited.  We had to try out the Euro menu at least once while in Spain!  Sabrina and I had Kit-Kate flavored flurries-- amazing flavor McDs should probably introduce back home.

We finally asked a really nice Spanish girl with a very nice American accent for directions.  She had studied in Pennslyvania for a year and spoke very clear English.  We thanked her and then got back on the metro in search of the Parc.  When we got off the metro we had to walk quite a ways and ride several escalators (the park is located on one of the peaks overlooking the city) up to the entrance.  Due to some really bad storms several weeks before we arrived, a lot of the park was closed for reconstruction.  The main entrance was gated off so we had to follow some crowds to the side entrance.  Parc Guell is really beautiful and had amazing views of the city.  We wandered aimlessly for an hour or so, looking at the people, art vendors, and landscape.  Guadi's design blended ornate stone arch walks right into the side of the mountain.  I could have easily spent the whole day and part of the next just exploring the park.  Sadly, we had to leave to go eat dinner.

Palms and main hang out of Parc Guell

Parrot in Parc Guell

Arches (and Nate) in Parc Guell

Walk way in Parc Guell

Sabrina leaving her mark in Parc Guell

Our group in front of a great view (blocked by bushes) of Barcelona

On our way home, we stopped into a grocery store to buy frozen pizzas and drinks.  We all took showers and then devoured our pizzas.  We had one cheese and one barbeque chicken that was amazingly good (though this may have just been sheer hunger talking).  We then adorned our appropriately colored attire and headed out to see a Barcelona futbol game in Nou Camp stadium.

We left for the stadium two hours prior to kick off since we still had to pick up our tickets at will call and find our seats.  Nou Camp has a capacity of 98,800.  It took nearly thirty minutes to walk around half of the stadium.  We weren't able to get seats all together so we split up into smaller groups and climbed up into the serious nose bleed sections.  Sabrina and I had seats together in a fairly quiet section of the stadium.  A little before half time, we went down a level and sat with Steven.  It was a fun and chilly game.  Barca beat Bilbao but I don't remember the exact score anymore.

After the game we all met back at the hostel and got ready to go out for a bit.   We met my friend Andrew at La Rambla and he took us to a really cool bar called Black Sheep.  It was in the basement of a building and had a good atmosphere.  When we all finished our first round most of the group headed home to catch up on sleep.  Seth and I went with Andrew to a club called Raz-A-Mataz to finish out our night.

Raz-A-Mataz is a five story night club in Barcelona.  We waited in a long but fast moving line to get in the door.  We got a free drink ticket and then headed in to explore the five levels.  On the top level we each got our drink and then headed down to the second level where you could sit on a catwalk and watch the dance floor on the first level.  When we had finished our drinks we joined the dance party on the first floor.  Andrew wanted to dance on these raised platform/blocks so we squeezed our way up onto one and danced until they turned the lights on at some ungodly hour.  When we were getting on the metro to go home the sun was starting to rise.  By the time we got off of the metro and back to Andrew's apartment, daylight had set in.  I had truly lived the night life of Spain!!

Since it's still not overly safe to take the metro at 7AM (especially to the part of town where my hostel was) I crashed on Andrew's couch for an hour before getting up and heading home.  I made it back to my hostel by 9AM, just in time for breakfast!

Check out at our hostel was at 10AM, so I ate, showered, and threw all of my stuff back into my backpack.  Our hostel had free luggage storage so we put our stuff into the storage room and then headed out for our last day of exploring.

Nate, Sabrina, and I began our day at the bus station, again.  I was pretty exhausted so I was content to sit on a bench and observe for a pretty long period of time.  Eventually Nate got directions from a local skater kid to a new skate spot.  We also met a really nice and really good skate from Germany named Conny.  Nate said he thinks he may be sponsored.

Following Roger's, the local kid, advice, we took a metro out to the middle of nowhere.  We had officially found the suburbs of Barcelona.  We wandered around the deserted streets of the small town for almost an hour looking for the skate park Roger assured us we would easily find.  When Sabrina and I finally had had enough, we hopped back on the subway and headed for the beach.

Half way through our "direct and easy" metro ride to the beach we were kicked off the metro and told that the line was out.  Confused, hungry, and a little annoyed, we wandered down the streets of Barcelona looking for a new metro outside of the outage area.  We finally were able to get back on the metro and made it to La Rambla.  We power walked down to the harbor and gave in to the hunger pains stabbing at all of us.  There was an amazing gelato shop where I got strawberry cheesecake gelato to hold me over until we found lunch.  AWESOME choice.  I could have eaten twelve more cones.  

About ten minutes later we found a fairly inexpensive pizza and pasta place right on the beach.  We grabbed our food and headed outside to the sunny tables to eat.  We were very well entertained by a second group of crazy and obnoxious Canadians who were recanting their drunken excursion from the night before.  

When our bellies were sufficiently stuffed we walked out onto the sand to relax for a while.  We were still surprised by the topless Spaniards at this point in the trip and even more surprised by the one legged naked man on crutches soaking up some sun.  When our giggle fit subsided and we were duly tired, we walked back to the metro station to head back to the hostel to pick up our bags.

We grabbed our bags and then ran to the bus station to catch an airport transfer.  We made it to the station just in time to grab seats on the bus, several members of our group ended up sitting on the floor for the two hour bus ride to the airport.  The flight home was (thankfully) uneventful.  I slept really well the next several nights while trying to recuperate from my adventures in Barcelona.