Ronaldinho

Jess, Mark, Me and the Mediterranean
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Barcelona for a weekend?!  heck yes we did.  Something like 15 students went and most everyone stayed in the same hostal.  They were going to a soccer game but Jess and I skipped out on that part.  It was a really good trip!  Our 11pm flight was delayed so we got on a 9pm flight and beat the rest of the group there.  20 euro cab wasnt so great but we were too tired to figure out the bus system.  It was really weird there though because my Spanish knowledge didnt always help; they speak and write a lot of Catalan which seems like a mix of spanish, italian, and french.  Oh this was also the first big trip for our little troll friend who we hope will accompany us to many more places :)

Friends in the sun! Corrine, Dan, Micah, me, and Jess
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The two full days there we all got up early to eat at the continental breakfast. this hostal was slightly hipster, but I loved it.  people from everywhere.  Jess, Sydney, Katrina and I stayed in a room with 4 girls from a study abroad program in London.  they were not very pleasant and we only saw them leaving in party attire late at night or sleeping all hours of the day, they also stole my shoes, still pretty upset about that.  We also met a bunch of Sevillanos who are Americans studying abroad with a different program so that was random enough but one of them KNEW Missy, I couldn't get over that for awhile.  Anyways, we had a great city guide and his name was Micah.  He planned the days for us which helped us see the maximum of the city, it was good Jess and I didnt have to figure that out on our own.  I really liked having that size of group, I got to know alot of people more, especially Dan (one of the Bakers) and Micah, we had 'heart to hearts' in the hostal bar/lounge each night.

Everything he creates is really magical

Micah and Mark and the traveling troll
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We saw:

La Sagrada Familia: a HUGE church being built since 1883 by Antoni Gaudi, it is expected to be finished in 2026.  It is the most visited construction site in the world.  Gaudi was a weird dude so it is actually really cool, not even close to finished but cool nontheless.

Park Guell: originally going to be a little housing district also built by Gaudi.  so it has his nice architectural touches.  fun fact here, it was featured in America's Next Top Model.  Everything he creates is really...magical.  There is a random building downtown too that is best described as looking like a fairytale.  He used very bright colors and unique designs.  I liked it, I'd live there :)

troll in front of La Sagrada Familia entrance, scenes from The Passion
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Some really cool look out point that i dont think had a name: this was on the way to Park Guell and we had stopped at a supermarket to buy our lunch to share in a group, 3 euros each, doesnt get much better than that for all we ate!  (ham and cheese sandwiches, cookies, chips, pop, water, fruit, chocolate) we ended up doing that again for supper, i love it.  But it was soo nice and sunny that we just laid around and baked in the sun while chowing down and then just continued to lay some more when we were done because we're on vaca, no hurry!  You could see pretty much the whole city from there.

Park Guell, also the Next Top Model site
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Mediterranean beaches: who doesn't love the beach!  It wasnt all that warm but we didnt let that stop us.  The marina was an amazing site too to see all the ships masts together.  It was a good place for sunset watching too!

Las Ramblas: basically just one really long street/sidewalk.  It has a crapton of venders selling anything you could want, from animals to flowers to souveniors etc.  It was also a good site for street performers which was my favorite part.  A bunch of people being statues - my favorite of which was a guy standing still with his tie and coat tails stiffened into position to look like he was running while holding his foot out and his briefcase back.  The pictures never did him justice.

This is the whole group minus photographer Sydney
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L'Aquarium Barcelona: why is it that ocean/big body of water cities always have aquariums? we had to check it out though.  The best part was the Oceanarium, the huge 80m long transparent tunnel complete with moving walkway.  jess and I had some camera fun in there, and also some Little Mermaid seranading to the other unsuspecting visitors :)

Picasso Museum:  i expected to see Picasso's crazy cubism paintings but this museum houses his earlier works therefore more traditional.  There was, however, an entire room of his own cubistic renditions of Las Meninas, a famous painting by Valezquez.  That was cool to see how many different ways he saw to paint the same thing.

Plaza de España, Barcelona version: Sevilla has this too so it symbolically embraces the whole country but I think this one is much more beautiful.  There was so much water everywhere, fountains on everything.  There is a fountain/lights/music show every night at every half hour.  Once again pictures cannot do justice but it was very intriguing.  It was also adorable that a little girl was doing her own improvised ballet routine right next to the fountain to the classical music being played for the show.  She was so comfortable in front of probably a thousand people there watching.  So once the show was over Jess and I performed our ballet routine from class last semester on the stairs, with only our friends and a handful of strangers watching but we had a lot of fun doing it again :)

The soccer game (which explains the 'Ronaldinho,' he's a Barcelonian soccer player) everyone was attending was on Sunday night but we decided not to go and get back earlier in order to go to school the next day with some rest.  We didn't however get any rest for the 6am flight on sunday morning!  we stayed up and talked to the other hostal guests; french, british, american, romanian, spanish all of which were very entertaining.  The romanians were the bartenders and they gave us a lot of free things, like a huge can of pringles and I got free beers for some of the people in my group (because I dont like beer but I think they thought I was drinking it).  The british kid, Adam or Ginger or Adamshair as we lovingly refer to him, was probably the funniest kid there.  He absolutely loves Oasis ('best band in the world man') and showed us the pic of him with Noel Gallagher (lead singer).  He would enunciate his words for us all the time too so we'd understand his amazing accent ('in the ghetto, i put the t's in for you because i say ghe'o) loved it.  So anyways... we stayed up until the flight taking another unfortunate 20 euro cab to the airport and tried our best to nap in the airport and on the plane, neither of which worked very well.  the worst part was carrying our duffles all the way home, the half hour minimun walk from the bus station from the airport, i was in heels all that time too!

It was an amazing trip and I would definitely go back!  Anyone want to come over and join me?!

(there are more pics, check em out :) )