27/4/09 Barcelona

I didn´t get that much sleep, but slept on the bus a little, listening to the ´Vicky Christina Barcelona´soundtrack.

The flight was fine, I was asleep before takeoff. I woke up at one point convinced missiles were being fired at us as we fleew over the desert. Turns out I´m just crazy. At the Barcelona airport, they had the most ridiculous customs ever, just some dude standing letting people through. I got yelled at in Spanish when I tried to go through, but it was fine.

The bus was uneventful, I slept some more. We tried to take the train to the hostel, but the person there was confusing us and somehow wanted to charge us €7, so we just decided to walk it. We got lost for a while at what we through was the big Columbus monument, but it was a smaller one. We ended up finding the right one and it wasn´t so hard to get to the place.

Our room was nice, the people seemed really cool and nice, so we took our time trying to figure out a place to stay in Tangier, and my Hotel Continental was booked, so we tried another place, a 4 star hotel for about €36 a night, so very cool. We´ll find out if we get it or not soon.

We went down to the beach and hung out there for a while. It was a little chilly with the wind and when the sun went behind the clouds, but it was nice just to be outside on the beach. The Mediterreanian is incredibly blue. It just would have been a little nicer to have about five or ten degrees warmer.

Since we were freezing we went back to put on warmer clothes. We went to a pastry shop on the way, getting an awesome chocolate filled pastry. We decided to wander around La Rombla, the big street in the city, filled with trees and shops. We took it all the way down to the end and walked up Garcia, and passed a lot of Anotoni Gaudi buildings. His architecture is absolutely amazing, probably my favorite architect ever. The buildings, built around 1900, look like Disney buildings, like nothing I´ve ever seen anywhere else.

We walked down there until we just sort of decided to go down some other streets up in the more neighborhoody area. It was nice, gave us a much more real feel of the area. The streets are great here, much older feeling, close together and clothes hanging from the interesting balconies.

After wandering for quite a while, we decided to go try to find something to eat. We picked a place out of my book and tried to ge down there. We spent about an hour trying to figure out which way to go, before giving up and saying that we should just go to a place on the way. We went back to La Rambla and wandered around until we found a place. Finally a tapas place where you could get three for €10, so we tried it.

I had some really good potatoes bravas, cheese and tomato salad, and fried mushrooms. It was all very good, and our waiter didn´t really understand English so we managed our way through the dinner in Spanish, including me asking if a dish had meat in it. I was pretty pumped, all of my Spanish came back to me a little.

We walked back and I typed this up in the basement since I couldn´t get the wifi to work, while other people watched Superbad.