Me in Spain

Was woken up by the cleaning people around 11. Which at the time was annoying, but turned out to be good for my barcelona experience. I walked down one of the larger streets running North/South in Barcelona, Passieg de Gracia (by the way all the Catalan everywhere is kind of annoying. I get it, you guys are independent. Now speak Spanish). It was a nice day and tons of people were out, making the walk more entertaining. I went to La Sagrada Familia, the famous in construction cathedral. I don’t know how much I like the way it looks, honestly. But I do like that it is very different and is a cathedral that does not feel religious. There were tons and tons of people here. I can’t remember another monument with the same type of tourists. The cathedral has its own city block, so there were tons of tour buses on every side, with TONS of people taking photos. This is one of those scenarios with photos I don’t understand. Take a few with you in it, and then call it a day, no? You aren’t getting an artistic shot from your double-decker bus, I am sorry.
I continued walking around and hit a few more sites/cool buildings. Then met up with friends and went to the Picasso museum. It was pretty cool. I remember when I went to a museum of his in France when I was 13 and not liking his paintings much. Now, I definitely found them cooler, if still weird. I am not going to spend this blog commenting on art (I don’t have all that much to say on the subject), but I do have to say it is a sort of a limited way to construct a museum by focusing it entirely on one artist. I did enjoy seeing how his work progressed, but it would have been nice for there to be comparisons of his art with his contemporaries/those who influenced him and people he influenced. I could have passed on some of his work.
I had a really early flight, so ended up going straight from an Irish pub to hostel to airport. The Irish Pub was very non-Spanish, but there were tons of people, we were there with our whole group from the hostel, and there was karaoke… which I actually enjoy in small doses. Luckily I can sleep on buses, in terminals, and on planes.

Met up with another Columbia friend named Michelle, who is studying architecture in Barcelona. (Prompting Evan to call the trip Jon Michelle Barcelona like the Woody Allen movie. I would have preferred to replace the Cristina, because that would mean I got to be in a love triangle involving Penelope Cruz, alas.) We walked around the gothic section of Barcelona and found a nice outdoor coffee place near an art fair. The gothic section is very confusing, has tons of small streets, and at night gets weirdly dangerous. It seems like a touristy area, which I guess is why? But definitely saw some fighting, lots of people selling drugs, and pick pockets.  Personal example: I was waiting for change after buying a water bottle. Some shady man comes into the store, goes to the back, comes back up, and then buys a drink from the fridge near the door. The storeowner could clearly tell that there was something in his jacket and asked him to open it. The shady guy keeps yelling profanities very loudly, SLAMS down his money to pay for the soda and storms off with his stolen alcohol then the owner starts to chase him but doesn’t want to leave the store and comes back. So I don’t know how I felt about it as a whole, it’s a cool area but I was definitely over it by the time we left Barcelona

A large part of the day (4 hours) we spent biking. And it was awesome. So while I was in Barcelona, there was a small, but existent, portion of my mind that felt the need to constantly compare everything to Madrid. There were definite pros and cons and I don’t think I came away thinking Madrid or Barcelona was clearly superior. But, Barcelona clearly has Madrid (and most cities) beat when it comes to biking. Several of the large streets have the directions of traffic separated by a very wide walking/biking path. We made it through a good portion of the city, heading through the Arc de Trionf, down to the park where cathedral is, ended up on the beach. At this point is was pretty dark, around 7, and also began POURING rain.
This was not God getting teary eyed at the finale of Armageddon when Bruce Willis has to stay behind (no? only I did that?). This was God as a 17 year old girl watching Titanic.
So, we biked back for 45 minutes in God’s Titanic tears and I was soaked. I felt like I had done my laundry, except part of the load was my hair, face and legs.

Got to the hostel. Met up with Evan and Joe who had stayed with me in Madrid, and another kid from Columbia who I hadn’t met before  (ended up getting along very well) named Nathan. I only could get a reservation at this hostel with them the first day, as it was pretty small. I really liked this hostel, its really the first one I had ever experienced.
It was very relaxed and nice, the staff were cool but more importantly the other people staying in the hostel were people that we were able to hang out with. It seemed like a good hostel, but compared to my next 2.5 night hostel it was spectacular (get to that in a sec).
The first day we mainly just got our bearings, walked around the hostel, found some paellaand then went out with the hostel. The hostel is a mini-chain, called San Jordi, so we walked to the HQ (the larger hostel affiliated), met up with some very American people and went to a club. It was pretty fun, felt very “American abroad”.

Started off the day waking up early (don’t feel too bad, it was around 10:30) and getting to my new hostel while my friends slept. Lady working there starts talking in a weird Spanish accent, turns out she was British.

First (of a few) problems with the hostel: reservation couldn’t be found on the computer. Prompting me to be slightly worried, go down to the computers to look it up, and then she found it. Seemed odd, it was in the computer… hard to misplace. Anyway, I couldn’t use my room right when I got there because they were going to be cleaning. I’ll take this time to voice my complaints about this hostel from the next couple nights.
I don’t know if the lady running the place is obsessive compulsive, but they clean that place ALL the time. I feel like if you have cleanliness issues, hostel management is the completely wrong business. The equivalent would be starting your own dental practice, but freaking out every time there is blood.  There is a 2 hour period of EVERY DAY designated to cleaning rooms. AND they do it at 11:30 which is early if you have been out till 6 the night before. The room I had was essentially 4 bunk beds with not much else. How much cleaning goes into it? I feel like there is a lot of wasted maid time at that hostel. Those maids could fly to Madrid, clean my room, and still spend enough time each week cleaning that hostel.

-The hostel had a no alcohol policy. By itself this rule was fine with me, but it made it so that people did not ever hang out in the hostel.

People I did meet:
-2 girls from UK who had been traveling together for 7 weeks.
-Mexican avocado salesman. He did not go around with a giant sack of avocados trying to sell them, which would have been awesome. Worked for a company trying to expand their business.
-Australian guy, dating a German girl, and together they were traveling through Spain. If there was a culture prize they win.

For the most part, however, I was staying in a room with 8 people and never even met most of them. I would be gone most of the day, would usually come back before dinner/go on computer for a little bit, then head out again. But no one would ever be in the room, and most people were only staying for one night.
So, I would come back late at night, everyone would be sleeping. By the time I got up they were all gone. It was really bizarre. My only interaction was trying not to wake them up when I got ready for bed, and I will never know how successful I was.

Started off my trip with the first of what will probably be one of many RyanAir flights. RyanAir has cheap flights, but part of doing so makes them have weird rules about luggage and traveling in general. I feel like in the States they would end up charging more and having less weird rules, because all people would do is complain.
So my flight was a little earlier than I had thought and I wasn’t sure exactly how long from my house to the airport, which all equated to me being really tired on the plane. I chose a window seat and proceeded to pass out. I have to say, I continually impress myself with my ability to sleep anywhere when I am exhausted. If any reality show executives are listening… I would like a show where I try to sleep in the most difficult places. “Tonight on ‘Where can he sleep next?’ Jon Kaplan braves the center of penn station, armed only with his favorite orange blanket and a pillow.”
Anyway, as I was falling asleep, someone sat next to me in the middle seat. The stewardess then put down her stuff for the security demonstration on the aisle seat. Somewhere around here I fell asleep. But! When I woke up, there was no one in the aisle and the dude sitting next to me was still there! How weird is that? I could not think of any conceivable scenario where someone would prefer a middle seat next to someone sleeping… was very odd. This reminded me of a flight home I had from New York a year back, with assigned seating.
I was last to board the plane of my row, so the aisle and middle people got up to let me through. I then had the following conversation with the guy who had the middle seat:
Guy: “Oh, would you be able to switch seats with me?”
Me: “Umm, I have the window.” (Thinking: Is he going to have some weird excuse?)
Guy: “Yea, but I never get up during the flight.”
Me: “Uhh sorry, no dice.” (Are you serious? Now I am going to get up once just to spite you. I actually had to use the bathroom, but still).
Ok I don’t remember the exact conversation, but he definitely tried switching from the middle to the window. I didn’t care to start a discussion with him about how NO ONE when choosing seats is like “Oh crap they ran out of middle seats, I guess I will settle for the window. IF ONLY, there is someone sitting next to me in the middle who will be kind enough to switch with me.” Anyway, this guy and the man sitting next to me on RyanAir could meet up, I think they would get along.

Much delayed and I haven’t been in the habit of writing, which is unfortunate. But I will have a post for every day of my trip to Barcelona 2 weeks ago. Note: since this was a couple weeks ago, the time in-between will be lost forever to history. I didn’t do anything entirely thrilling so you aren’t missing much.