Barcelona!
Once again me and my friends managed to find an extremely difficult way to get to another country. You thought Zurich was complicated? oh no no no, try flying on Ryan Air. They pride themselves on cheap flights, which is true…you can get a flight for 3 cents! But then once they tack on the fees associated with it and traveling, it starts adding up. If you are a non-EU citizen there are various fees for checking your passport, checking in at the airport, all sorts of things. We had to pay a 10 Euro check-in fee for each flight, there and back. Not to mention the fact that if you took a bag bigger than a carry-on you had to pay another 30 Euro to put it on the plane…but the big kicker is the airports location! SO here’s how our day started. We met at 8:30 am at the bus stop by my house so we could take a bus over into Germany to the Kehl train station. We hopped on the bus and went over the bridge. We got off at the train station and went in to buy a ticket to Baden-Baden. At 9:34 on the dot we got on the train and were on our way. However after the first stop we knew that we had to switch trains, but there was no indication of where we were. After many confused looks, some guy sitting across from us said, “can I help you?” We gratefully accepted his help and followed him off the train at the next stop. Then went through a series of paths to get to our “connecting” platform that was actually a 5 minute walk away. Then we had a 20 minute wait for our next train. That train finally showed up and we found ourselves in the Baden-Baden train station about 20 minutes later.
From there we knew that there was a bus that would take us to the airport (which is apparently another 20 minutes away) and found that it ran every 45 minutes. Well that was all fine and dandy but if we waited the 1/2 hour until it came back for us, it would put us a little too close to our departure time for our liking. After consulting with the people in the train station we decided to take a taxi. So we found a taxi, hopped in, and went to the airport. It was relatively uneventful once we got to the airport. We just checked in like any normal flight, got to our gate, hopped on a plane, and flew to Spain. Once in Spain we had to take another bus into Barcelona. This one was an hour long! Finally after several hours of traveling we got to Barcelona.
Let’s recap our modes of transportation: bus to train, to next train, to taxi, to airplane, to bus. Hola Barcelona!
Once in Barcelona, we decided to walk our way to the center of town. We passed by the Arc of Triumph, went through a park and saw all of the beautiful palm trees which reminded me of school and then went to the chocolate museum. It was only 3 Euro and we got a chocolate bar with it so we went for it. There were lots of statues made of chocolate and some informative films…it was fun and yummy!
We wandered around the city, saw a church, saw a pet store on the street, and then noticed that the sky was turning a nasty shade of black. So we decided we had 2 choices, we could either wait out the rain we knew was coming, or try and make it to our hostel before it hit. We decided to wait it out in a bar which was the best idea we could have had because 5 minutes later it was pouring outside. So we just had a beer until the rain stopped and then went to our hostel to clean up before dinner.
Dinner was INCREDIBLE! We all fell in love with the Spanish food. We ate outside because it was nice and warm compared to the weather we have been having in Strasbourg. We each had the special menu which included a glass of Sangria, 2 tapas each, and a big plate of paella. Being a vegetarian and all, my tapas were pretty mild compared to what Kristen and Jenna had. They had some sausages and meatballs made of some unknown meat and something that looked like a tiny fried squid. (Kristen was the only brave one to try it)
After a delicious dinner we headed back to our noisy noisy hostel for bed. Our wonderful roomates that were sharing our hostel with us came in a approximately 4:00 in the morning and woke us all up but we got to return the favor when we got up to have breakfast, shower, and get on our way for an early start. We set out to find the infamous Gaudi Cathedral and found an interesting Gaudi apartment building on the way…
The Cathedral was by far the weirdest thing I have ever seen! I can’t even describe it to you so I will show you and you can draw your own conclusions….
Please note that those are FRUIT on the CATHEDRAL!
Then we move along the side of the church to find…iridescent windows! I guess that’s nice…
Then we move to the back of the Cathedral where we apparently find a completely different everything and a built in Christmas tree!
On a side note about the church: apparently it was started by a completely different architect which I think explains the entirely different architecture in the back of the cathedral. When he died, Gaudi took over the construction of the cathedral and began turning it into (in my opinion) the most cracked-out thing I have ever seen. Gaudi however never got to see his completed cathedral because he died in it before it was finished. Since his death there has been continuous construction on the cathedral and according to our guidebook it probably will be perpetually under construction for the next 30-40 years. We did not go inside because of the long lines but I’m quite curious as to what is in there. We don’t know why it is still under construction, it looked pretty complete to us but perhaps there is more fruit that needs to be added to its towers…I don’t know. I thought it was more a mock of the church instead of someplace for people to worship but again, that’s my opinion. As we stood and looked at the cathedral before we left I said, “Who in the WORLD decided that would be a good addition to Barcelona? Who looked at those plans and said, ‘yes, I like it’ ?? I don’t understand.” and Kristen said, “I think the better question is, who the hell actually PAID for that?” We just shook our heads and walked away…
After we got over the shock of this church we decided to go to the 1992 Olympic site. We hopped on a subway and headed down. After some confusion on the bus ride into the park, we found ourselves overlooking the entire city from up by the Olympic museum. We had such a beautiful day and were so luck to get to see it all. It was definitely a better view than in Zurich…
We wandered around the area looking at all the buildings for the Olympics. There was this huge statue/monument thing that I’m not really sure what the purpose is but it was cool looking and I got a great picture of it with the beautiful blue sky in the back!
We also saw the grand Olympic Stadium that we proceeded to walk around for about a 1/2 hour trying to see if we could get into it. There were some mysterious poles everywhere that we eventually determined lit up at night. We also thought we were never going to see the inside of the stadium but we rounded the final corner (almost to where we started from) and saw the torch and entrance. The stadium was gigantic! I read that it was actually built for the 1936 Olympics that were granted to Spain but when the civil war broke out, they were taken away and so for 1992 they just refurbished the stadium.
After the Stadium we decided we really wanted to see the FC Barcelona soccer stadium. (I think we were inspired by all the athleticness of the Olympics) so we got back on the subway and headed up towards the stadium. We got lost a little trying to find the stadium but when we finally saw it, it was giiiiigantic. However we couldn’t find a way in so once again we wandered around to see what we could see. It turns out the stadium is even more gigantic than we thought it was. Total, we ended up walking around it for about 45 minutes…but we finally found the entrance but you had to pay 17 Euro to see the field so we just saw the outside, some statues, the gift store and headed out.
After the soccer stadium we headed to the ocean to enjoy the sunset and Medeterranian. It was a beautiful day and we did a lot of walking which killed my feet by the end of it.
We had another dinner just like the one from the night before but at a different restaurant. It was equally delicious, if not better. Then we headed to a Flamenco concert which was pretty amazing. (I have some videos of it if anyone wants to see it in action…)
We went to bed straight after Flamenco because we had to get up at 6:25 am so we could leave the hostel at 6:45 so we could walk 25 minutes to the bus station where we could get at 7:30 bus back to the airport for our flight at 10:35 then to the bus back to the train station to get on a train back to Kehl to get on a bus back to Strasbourg. We were home by 3:00 pm. It was by far the most intense traveling I think I’ve ever done but it was SO much fun and I can’t emphasize how good it was to see the sun! The food was delicious, we packed in an insane amount of things in the 48 hours we were there, and had a really fun time!!
I LOVE EUROPE!
