I had a lot of false expectations about Barcelona. I expected it to be fairly similar to the rest of the European cities I'd been to. I had expected that we would be OK in terms of the language barrier, because my host sister speaks Spanish. I had also expected it to be vegetarian-friendly like the rest of Europe (save Paris). None of these things were true. The buildings in Spain have entirely different architecture, the general wildlife and plants are different, they speak Catalan instead of Spanish, and vegetable sandwiches come with fish on them. Barcelona is not NEARLY as bad as Paris for vegetarians, but if any non-meat eaters are planning a trip to Barcelona, I give the city a 0 or a .5 on my vegetarian-friendliness ranking scale. However, there is the CAT Bar, which is entirely vegan and full of pictures of cats.
Barcelona is notorious for its pick-pocketers and we all managed to not have anything stolen! Yay!! However, our trip to Barcelona was plagued with transportation issues. We flew Ryanair out of the airport near Munich on a Friday. Right before we were going to board around 1pm, we were informed the plane was delayed until 4pm. It turns out the radar in Munich had broken so no aircraft was allowed in the area until they figured out what the problem was. Somehow our flight took off before 3pm without incident, so it turned out that radar-fixing was not as stressful as originally thought!
My host sister lives in Valencia, but doesn't consider it to be a good place to visit, so we opted to go to either Madrid or Barcelona. The deciding factor? There's a Lost-themed bar in Barcelona.
With beers with Dharma initiative-like labels.
Other than the LOST bar, I thought Barcelona was a great place to visit. When I did my mini-internship at the hospital, I was shadowing a medical student who had a Mexican father. Her last name was therefore Mexican and all of our patients would exclaim "Your name reminds me of Spain! I love Spain!" I now know why By pure coincidence, a friend from my program was in Barcelona our first night there and he informed us of a water and light fountain show.
There was also a Harley rally near the fountain.
there were also beautiful beaches, which we got to visit on Saturday.
On our last full day in Barcelona, we wanted to take a walking tour. We were able to choose between a general city tour and a Gaudi tour. Since my host sister really wanted to see Gaudi architecture, we went with the Gaudi tour. I had no clue who he was before I took this tour, but I'm glad I did take it! His buildings were pretty crazy cool.
We also chose to go inside the Sagrada Familia, because it was gorgeous.
These structures in there are made to look like trees. It's awesome
We also took the elevator to one of the towers and got a nice view of the city.
At night we went to see Flamenco, but sorry, no pictures of that! On our last morning we took a trip out to Park Güell. We really wanted to see this mosaic lizard statue thing, but it turned out so did every other tourist in Spain.
The park itself was cool anyways.
I know what you're thinking. After all these beaches, parks, and walking tours in the hot Spanish sun, I was must be really tan, right??? Check out this Sexy Hollywood Bräune:
Ok, you didn't expect that to be serious, did you?
Once it was time to leave Barcelona, that's when the real problems started. You see, I had looked up the shuttle schedule to Heidelberg and thought there would be a bus leaving 30-45 min after we arrive. Turns out that wasn't true and the next one wasn't leaving until 12:30am. So it's 9:30pm and we're stuck at Frankfurt-Hahn. We decide to pay more to take a shuttle to Frankfurt and take a train from there. Our shuttle turns out to be semi-late, but we're in luck! There's an IC leaving for Heidelberg! I have my friend hurry to the track while I buy tickets. The conductors are telling her to get on and she's explaining that I'm coming with the tickets. They decide they don't care and leave anyways. In a rushed decision, I stick us on a regional train to nearby Mannheim, hoping that a solution will appear in Mannheim. On the train, I am able to use my kindle's 3G coverage to look up the SBahn schedules from Mannheim to Heidelberg. It is then that I realize that the SBahn won't be running to Heidelberg until 4:20am, which would leave us stranded in Mannheim for 2 and 1/2 hours. We are forced to spend two hours on that regional train thinking about our terrible fate of being trapped in Mannheim. It was misery. However, when we get to Mannheim, the conductor makes an announcement saying that anyone going to Heidelberg can get on an IC leaving from track 4. Confused, I walk to track 4, only to find that the same IC that had left without us in Frankfurt had managed to become 40 minutes delayed and had not even arrive to Mannheim left. This was possibly the happiest I have ever been about a late train. Long story short, we get into Heidelberg before we would've had we taken the Hahn Express leaving at 12:30am, which I supposed would be a success!
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