Day 4 - Barcelona, Spain - June 6

sagrada familia
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Hi everyone! We´re so excited to see your posts, we´re enjoying our adventures but missing you all terribly. It has definitely sunk in by now that we´re literally across the world-you might have thought it would sink in when we were wandering the streets of barcelona our first night, but there is something about settling in a bit, steping back a little, and taking it all in...Anyways, yesterday we slept in again; we´re certainly suffering from jet-lag. Once we got ourselves in gear we headed straight to the internet cafe to correspond with all of you. After a little more than an hour of photo uploading and comment checking we had a quick lunch and some dunkin donuts before starting our day!

taylor standing in the park by sagrada familia
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We began our day by purchasing a two day pass for the Barcelona metro. First stop: sagrada familia. The temple is absolutely astounding- it has been under contruction for 125 years; it is still under construction. Needless to say, the temple is overwhelmingly huge- it took us about a half and hour to walk around it´s circumference. After circling the temple we took a break in a nearby park to sit down, refill our water bottle, and oberseve the temple from afar. Shaun and I were sitting across from each other on benches chatting when we heard rustling in the bushes behind Shaun. About a minute later two drunks from the Dominican Republic stumbled out of the woods/brush. Shaun jumped up and joined me on the other side of the walkway. To our dismay the woman approached us and in her beligerant state, rambled on and on, and smooched us on our cheeks. We used an entire bottle of antibacterial lotion on our hands, face, arms- pretty much our entire bodies.

arc de triomf
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After the park encounter we decided to head to our next destination: the arc de triomf. The arc and the surrounding scenary were amazing. After enjoying the arc for a while we wandered down the street to what appeared to be a park. It was beautiful- palm trees, little paths, people lying out. As we were exploring the park we stumbled upon the Cascada- the most beautiful fountain either of us have ever seen! Happening upon the Cascada was both of our favorite part of the day. After the Cascada we continued to explore the park before heading home. We spent a while searching for a post office but by this time it was closed. We went back to our hostel to rest and get refreshed before heading to dinner. For dinner we tried another traditional Spanish dish- paella & sangria! Shaun loved it, I enjoyed it. After dinner we bought a bottle of sangria (we limited ourselves to one at the restaurant because its so much cheaper to buy it from the grocery store- 2.85 a bottle!) to have on the top of Montjuic. We took the metro to the top of Montjuic, but the sky shuttles were closed. A little disappointed that we wouldnt get to watch the sunset and drink our sangria at the top of Montjuic, we were still excited that we got to see a beautiful birdseye view of the city for free.

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After Montjuic we headed back to our hostel where we sat on our balcony, people watched, and drank sangria. We had a lot of fun with this; we made up stories about what we thought their lives were like. After a bottle of sangria we decided to try to see the agbar (a huge building that is lit up at night). On our way we met Sam. Sam is an American from California who has decided to live abroad for an indefinite period of time, arriving in Barcelona only 5 days prior. It was SO refreshing to be able to have a conversation with someone who understood everything we were saying! After chatting with him for a while we headed to find the agbar. Unfortunately we never found the metro connection we needed and ended up in an area we were not too familiar with- as Shaun says, we were "in a pickle:" the metro closed, we were about a 30 minute walk from home, we saw several prostitutes working the corners, and Shaun had an open knife in his pocket (just in case anyone wanted to start any funny business with us). We made it home just fine and ended up stopping for a drink at the bar nextdoor to our hostel. After that we hit the sack...another amazing day.