Friday, February 22, 2008
Gone for a while
For those of you who don't know and who didn't see the little note down to the right, I will be away for a week on my spring break. February 23-26 I will be in Rome, February 26-28 I will be in Venice, and February 28-March 1 I will be in London. I am bringing my computer so hopefully I will have the opportunity to log in and tell a story or two. I'm sure when I come back I will have about two weeks worth of posts to write which is why I hope to do some as we go along. I'm quite excited about this trip and look forward to seeing the Vatican and the gondolas (non-skiing versions) and London. Talk to you in a week!!
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
OOhhh Tibidabo
So as mentioned before, us guys had quite the day already by the time we got back to the hostel after the tour of the Olympic sites. However after we ate and rested, we still wanted to go up on top of this giant hill with a big church on it that was a little bit outside of Barcelona but you could still see it from where we were. I guess you might consider it a small mountain rather than a hill since the top was covered by clouds some of the times we looked up there. Since we had a daily metro pass already we were just going to take the metro to the base of the "hill" and then the funicular up to the top. A funicular is just a fancy name for the metro cars that go up a hill attached to a cable.
So we all grabbed our camera since there would be an awesome view of the city when we got to the top and we walked to the metro stop. We thought we knew where we were going but we didn't even know the name of the metro stop or the church's name so we looked at the metro map and decided on the stop we needed to get off at. We sat on the metro for quite some time and thought to ourselves that this ride was talking quite some time but we didn't think too much of it since we knew this place wasn't exactly in downtown Barcelona. Then we turned a corner and saw the hill we wanted to go to behind us and we were getting farther and farther away. Not so good. We then realized we had got on the commuter rail system train and we were now in a suburb of Barcelona so we quickly got off the train not knowing where we were.
Thankfully this station had a platform where you could get to the other side without exiting the station altogether so we didn't have to pay to get pack in since we were out of the range where our metro passes would work. There was an employee of the metro system at that station so we tried asking in Spanish/English where we needed to go in order to get to this church and they gave us directions on how to get there. SO we got back on a train which came about 5 minutes later and headed back the right direction. Really the day couldn't go more wrong if it tried. But it did very quickly. We followed the directions of the metro employees and transferred metro trains at the right stop and headed up to where the funiculars were. If we wanted the funicular which headed directly in front of the church we would have had to make a couple more transfers but according to the map, the funicular we were at now was about the same distance away as any other two metro stops which is probably only about 7-8 blocks or so. So we made the decision that we wouldn't mind walking those couple of blocks as long as we got up there because we wanted to make sure we left enough time to catch the metro back down since that would have been the only way down. There was nothing on the metro map which said map not to scale.
Us three guys loaded onto the funicular and headed up the hill. When we got to the top we noticed that we couldn't see the actual church who's name we learned was Tibidabo. But we used our "sense of direction" and walked up a flight of steps and at the top we could see the church. It wasn't exactly close but at least we could see it. We then started our walk towards the church taking roads we thought would take us to the right place. We then came upon a fork in the road, neither direction appeared to be going right to Tibidabo so we had quite the decision to make since we didn't want to walk too far down the wrong road. We obviously took the wrong fork and had to turn around when we got to the dead end which thankfully wasn't too far down. After we turned around we walked past a Spanish couple who were taking their dogs for a walk and Jesse stopped to ask them directions to Tibidabo. I don't know if they didn't like us because we were obviously tourists or if they really had no sense of distance. But the guy said that we had to go back to the fork in the road and obviously take the other road. He said that it wasn't a well lit road to be walking on since I guess most people don't go this way. This should have been our first hint that this wasn't normal. He also said that the walk was about one kilometer. So we decided we didn't care walking one kilometer at all so we started on our way.
Well we got to the fork and started down the right road which turned out to be a pitch black road which wound up the side of the mountain and had no shoulders and a guardrail on one side. And i forgot to mention that it also started to rain. We walked and walked and walked. There was no signs saying Tibidabo this many kilometers but all we knew was that guy's guess at 1 kilometer was about 5 kilometers or so too short. This road wound up the side of the mountain and we honestly thought we would never get there. By the time we got to the top, we were literally walking in the clouds which just pretty much dampened all of our clothes.
By some miracle of God we wound up in front of this church. It was obviously closed by the hour we got there and we were in the clouds so there was really no good picture to be taken of it so we took the pictures we could and decided we should head back down to the city so we could get changed and get ready to watch the Super Bowl. There was a man in an office up there that said customer service on the window which turned out to be very ironic. He was sitting there with his cigarette reading a magazine. We didn't know where the funicular was to go back down so we asked him. In his very annoyed voice he gave us the news we had coming to us all along,"The metro is closed up here now." All 3 of us guys looked at each other with stunned/terrified looks on our faces. So we told Jesse to go back and ask where the bus stop was. Even more annoyed now, this "customer service" representative said in an even more annoyed tone "The buses don't run now."
I don't know if anybody has ever gotten a feeling of being completely stranded but I got it at this moment. There was a road we walked on but we hadn't seen a car in probably an hour. We went over scenarios in our heads and we came up with 2. We would have to walk down this entire mountain and try to find a car/metro/taxi to get back to the city. We were miles and miles outside of the city. Our other option was to go back to this hotel we walked past about 45 minutes before which had porches and BMW's parked in the lot which meant it would cost a pretty penny for a room. All of us were absolutely terrified.
FINALLY while we were standing there a car drove up and the couple got out and took some pictures of the church. I said to Jesse that he had to go over and ask them immediately if they could please give us a ride down to Barcelona if it wasn't too much trouble. This was our only hope of pretty much avoiding exhaustion from walking down. Thankfully the guy spoke English and even more thankfully he said it would be no problem giving us a ride down. His name was Carlos and he was working in Barcelona but had just come back from a semester in Chicago. I have never felt more gracious to anybody before in my life. It took us almost a half an hour by car to get to a metro stop and we definitely would have missed some turns had we walked. On the way down he even stopped at this observation area and showed us some of the landmarks of the city. From this point we could see the FC Barcelona football stadium where a game was going on and the amazing thing was that we could actually hear the crowd. We finally got down to the metro stop and we all thanked him without end. We got back to the hostel with quite the story and it wasn't even 11:00 yet.
At the end of the night I got to ride in a European car which was cool, I got to see a church which now I think is quite overrated and too far away from Barcelona, I got to see a great view of Barcelona (given it was at night and in the rain), I got to walk several miles on quite a dangerous road, and I learned that maps are not drawn to scale. Lesson learned. All in all it was obviously something to remember and something that I will never ever do again.
So we all grabbed our camera since there would be an awesome view of the city when we got to the top and we walked to the metro stop. We thought we knew where we were going but we didn't even know the name of the metro stop or the church's name so we looked at the metro map and decided on the stop we needed to get off at. We sat on the metro for quite some time and thought to ourselves that this ride was talking quite some time but we didn't think too much of it since we knew this place wasn't exactly in downtown Barcelona. Then we turned a corner and saw the hill we wanted to go to behind us and we were getting farther and farther away. Not so good. We then realized we had got on the commuter rail system train and we were now in a suburb of Barcelona so we quickly got off the train not knowing where we were.
Thankfully this station had a platform where you could get to the other side without exiting the station altogether so we didn't have to pay to get pack in since we were out of the range where our metro passes would work. There was an employee of the metro system at that station so we tried asking in Spanish/English where we needed to go in order to get to this church and they gave us directions on how to get there. SO we got back on a train which came about 5 minutes later and headed back the right direction. Really the day couldn't go more wrong if it tried. But it did very quickly. We followed the directions of the metro employees and transferred metro trains at the right stop and headed up to where the funiculars were. If we wanted the funicular which headed directly in front of the church we would have had to make a couple more transfers but according to the map, the funicular we were at now was about the same distance away as any other two metro stops which is probably only about 7-8 blocks or so. So we made the decision that we wouldn't mind walking those couple of blocks as long as we got up there because we wanted to make sure we left enough time to catch the metro back down since that would have been the only way down. There was nothing on the metro map which said map not to scale.
Us three guys loaded onto the funicular and headed up the hill. When we got to the top we noticed that we couldn't see the actual church who's name we learned was Tibidabo. But we used our "sense of direction" and walked up a flight of steps and at the top we could see the church. It wasn't exactly close but at least we could see it. We then started our walk towards the church taking roads we thought would take us to the right place. We then came upon a fork in the road, neither direction appeared to be going right to Tibidabo so we had quite the decision to make since we didn't want to walk too far down the wrong road. We obviously took the wrong fork and had to turn around when we got to the dead end which thankfully wasn't too far down. After we turned around we walked past a Spanish couple who were taking their dogs for a walk and Jesse stopped to ask them directions to Tibidabo. I don't know if they didn't like us because we were obviously tourists or if they really had no sense of distance. But the guy said that we had to go back to the fork in the road and obviously take the other road. He said that it wasn't a well lit road to be walking on since I guess most people don't go this way. This should have been our first hint that this wasn't normal. He also said that the walk was about one kilometer. So we decided we didn't care walking one kilometer at all so we started on our way.
Well we got to the fork and started down the right road which turned out to be a pitch black road which wound up the side of the mountain and had no shoulders and a guardrail on one side. And i forgot to mention that it also started to rain. We walked and walked and walked. There was no signs saying Tibidabo this many kilometers but all we knew was that guy's guess at 1 kilometer was about 5 kilometers or so too short. This road wound up the side of the mountain and we honestly thought we would never get there. By the time we got to the top, we were literally walking in the clouds which just pretty much dampened all of our clothes.
By some miracle of God we wound up in front of this church. It was obviously closed by the hour we got there and we were in the clouds so there was really no good picture to be taken of it so we took the pictures we could and decided we should head back down to the city so we could get changed and get ready to watch the Super Bowl. There was a man in an office up there that said customer service on the window which turned out to be very ironic. He was sitting there with his cigarette reading a magazine. We didn't know where the funicular was to go back down so we asked him. In his very annoyed voice he gave us the news we had coming to us all along,"The metro is closed up here now." All 3 of us guys looked at each other with stunned/terrified looks on our faces. So we told Jesse to go back and ask where the bus stop was. Even more annoyed now, this "customer service" representative said in an even more annoyed tone "The buses don't run now."
I don't know if anybody has ever gotten a feeling of being completely stranded but I got it at this moment. There was a road we walked on but we hadn't seen a car in probably an hour. We went over scenarios in our heads and we came up with 2. We would have to walk down this entire mountain and try to find a car/metro/taxi to get back to the city. We were miles and miles outside of the city. Our other option was to go back to this hotel we walked past about 45 minutes before which had porches and BMW's parked in the lot which meant it would cost a pretty penny for a room. All of us were absolutely terrified.
FINALLY while we were standing there a car drove up and the couple got out and took some pictures of the church. I said to Jesse that he had to go over and ask them immediately if they could please give us a ride down to Barcelona if it wasn't too much trouble. This was our only hope of pretty much avoiding exhaustion from walking down. Thankfully the guy spoke English and even more thankfully he said it would be no problem giving us a ride down. His name was Carlos and he was working in Barcelona but had just come back from a semester in Chicago. I have never felt more gracious to anybody before in my life. It took us almost a half an hour by car to get to a metro stop and we definitely would have missed some turns had we walked. On the way down he even stopped at this observation area and showed us some of the landmarks of the city. From this point we could see the FC Barcelona football stadium where a game was going on and the amazing thing was that we could actually hear the crowd. We finally got down to the metro stop and we all thanked him without end. We got back to the hostel with quite the story and it wasn't even 11:00 yet.
At the end of the night I got to ride in a European car which was cool, I got to see a church which now I think is quite overrated and too far away from Barcelona, I got to see a great view of Barcelona (given it was at night and in the rain), I got to walk several miles on quite a dangerous road, and I learned that maps are not drawn to scale. Lesson learned. All in all it was obviously something to remember and something that I will never ever do again.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Hola Barcelona
Well it has been almost a full week since I returned from a trip to Barcelona, Spain. The best news of all is that nothing went wrong with any of the travel or lodging for the trip which surprised me quite a bit. There were 10 of us in total that made the trip and we were on 4 different flights going both directions and everybody got there on time and safely. I was in the first group out of Lyon last Friday afternoon since I don't have any classes on Friday and was in the last group out on Monday evening since I don't have any classes on Monday either. So it was a little more than 3 days in Barcelona. For the most part, the weather was horrible but I will get into that later.
Barcelona is a very different city from Lyon. I heard more English being spoken in Barcelona than I do in some parts of New York City which was very surprising. Barcelona is a much more tourist friendly city than Lyon. All of the employees in Barcelona that I encountered knew at the very least 3 or 4 languages. They mostly all spoke French, English, Spanish or the local dialect of Spanish which is Catalan. It was a nice surprise coming from a place where only French is spoken. I could actually go around the city and communicate with people working at any store. There was also a lot of American students that were in Barcelona. I don't know if they were studying there or visiting just like us. Just in our hostel there was a group of about 25 students from Notre Dame who were studying in London and were on vacation. I felt semi-home with all of the English being spoken.
Watching the Super Bowl overseas is also an experience in and of itself. First of all, for the entire week preceeding the game, I looked all around Lyon for a bar or pub that would be playing the game and there were NONE. Nobody cares about American football here. Barcelona was a little different since it is such a touristy city. There were a couple of the bars and pubs that were showing the game. The bar we went to was called "The Sports Bar" so we felt it was a good bet to be playing the Super Bowl. I can't even tell you how nice it was to be able to watch television. I had been living a month without it so it was a nice change.
The actual game started somewhere near 12:30 at night. The game was being broadcast on some channel called Sky Sports which I guess is a British station. For the actual gameplay, the feed from FOX was picked up so there were the usual FOX commentators. However any halftime or commercial breaks were filled up with the Sky Sports analysis team who were people nobody knew. When there was a stoppage in gameplay and when America went to the commercials, we got to watch analysis. NO COMMERCIALS which usually would be a good thing but it was the Super Bowl and the commercials are almost as good as the game usually. As you all know, Giants won, Patriots lost so at the end of the night when the game ended around 4 am I was exhausted but happy. I then had to walk about a mile to the hostel in order to be up and out by the 10 am checkout Monday morning. Monday morning was not too fun. Nobody was in a really good mood and most of us had little patience.
While in Barcelona, I visited the site of the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona. In order to get there Jesse, Akshay, and I had to take a gondola which went over a harbor. It was a great view of the city and a great time to wonder how old the cable is that is carrying a cable car packed with people several stories up across water. When we got to the other side it was around noon and we checked to see when the last cable car back across would be so we would not miss it and be stranded on this giant hill that the the olympic venues were on. So I saw the Olympic pool which has gone downhill from its use. Grafitti all over it and looks very run down which is a shame. We got to walk into the Olympic Stadium where the track and soccer field is. Couldn't really walk around it because they had it closed off but it was huge. Saw the baseball field, it was a joke. Saw where the Olympic flame was and the various other things that go along with the olympics.
O I forgot to add it was pouring rain as soon as we got off of the gondola over the water. A nice touch when you are walking around with no raincoat or umbrella. I wasn't about to buy one either and spend 10€. So we walked over to what we thought was a church and it turned out to be a museum. The actual building looked castle like but it still looked relatively old until you kind of got right up to it and looked. I could kind of tell this building wasn't as old as they were making it out to be. And then a nice Irish guy told us that it was built at the end of the 1920's for some exhibition in Barcelona. He also added that it was built in only 100 days. The whole beauty of the building disappeared after that comment.
Then we went to some fortress which was also on top of this big hill. I have no idea what the point of the fortress was since I can't remember the last time Spain was in a war. While we were up there it started to pour and since we were on this giant hill, the wind was whipping all around and it was quite cold. We swore that we saw some kind of freezing rain/sleet since the rain had a nice white tint to it. Now that we were all soaked from head to toe we decided it was time to make our way back to the gondola. SO we get back to the gondola station and it had finally stopped raining BUT the gondola was closed due to weather conditions. We were now stranded on top of this hill since the metros do not run up this thing. We had to walk all the way down and walk around this Little Haiti looking part of town to find a metro station so we could head back to the hostel to change and get some food.
One good thing about the food we found near the hostel was that it was an all you can eat buffet for only about 10€. We all ate our fair share of the food and ice cream and were finally stuffed full of food without spending too much. We then returned to the hostel and rested our legs a little bit after all of that walking. And then the guys decided that we wanted to go up to this church which was on an even bigger hill just outside of the city. And so begins the biggest mistake of the trip which will be the next blog entry...
Barcelona is a very different city from Lyon. I heard more English being spoken in Barcelona than I do in some parts of New York City which was very surprising. Barcelona is a much more tourist friendly city than Lyon. All of the employees in Barcelona that I encountered knew at the very least 3 or 4 languages. They mostly all spoke French, English, Spanish or the local dialect of Spanish which is Catalan. It was a nice surprise coming from a place where only French is spoken. I could actually go around the city and communicate with people working at any store. There was also a lot of American students that were in Barcelona. I don't know if they were studying there or visiting just like us. Just in our hostel there was a group of about 25 students from Notre Dame who were studying in London and were on vacation. I felt semi-home with all of the English being spoken.
Watching the Super Bowl overseas is also an experience in and of itself. First of all, for the entire week preceeding the game, I looked all around Lyon for a bar or pub that would be playing the game and there were NONE. Nobody cares about American football here. Barcelona was a little different since it is such a touristy city. There were a couple of the bars and pubs that were showing the game. The bar we went to was called "The Sports Bar" so we felt it was a good bet to be playing the Super Bowl. I can't even tell you how nice it was to be able to watch television. I had been living a month without it so it was a nice change.
The actual game started somewhere near 12:30 at night. The game was being broadcast on some channel called Sky Sports which I guess is a British station. For the actual gameplay, the feed from FOX was picked up so there were the usual FOX commentators. However any halftime or commercial breaks were filled up with the Sky Sports analysis team who were people nobody knew. When there was a stoppage in gameplay and when America went to the commercials, we got to watch analysis. NO COMMERCIALS which usually would be a good thing but it was the Super Bowl and the commercials are almost as good as the game usually. As you all know, Giants won, Patriots lost so at the end of the night when the game ended around 4 am I was exhausted but happy. I then had to walk about a mile to the hostel in order to be up and out by the 10 am checkout Monday morning. Monday morning was not too fun. Nobody was in a really good mood and most of us had little patience.
While in Barcelona, I visited the site of the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona. In order to get there Jesse, Akshay, and I had to take a gondola which went over a harbor. It was a great view of the city and a great time to wonder how old the cable is that is carrying a cable car packed with people several stories up across water. When we got to the other side it was around noon and we checked to see when the last cable car back across would be so we would not miss it and be stranded on this giant hill that the the olympic venues were on. So I saw the Olympic pool which has gone downhill from its use. Grafitti all over it and looks very run down which is a shame. We got to walk into the Olympic Stadium where the track and soccer field is. Couldn't really walk around it because they had it closed off but it was huge. Saw the baseball field, it was a joke. Saw where the Olympic flame was and the various other things that go along with the olympics.
O I forgot to add it was pouring rain as soon as we got off of the gondola over the water. A nice touch when you are walking around with no raincoat or umbrella. I wasn't about to buy one either and spend 10€. So we walked over to what we thought was a church and it turned out to be a museum. The actual building looked castle like but it still looked relatively old until you kind of got right up to it and looked. I could kind of tell this building wasn't as old as they were making it out to be. And then a nice Irish guy told us that it was built at the end of the 1920's for some exhibition in Barcelona. He also added that it was built in only 100 days. The whole beauty of the building disappeared after that comment.
Then we went to some fortress which was also on top of this big hill. I have no idea what the point of the fortress was since I can't remember the last time Spain was in a war. While we were up there it started to pour and since we were on this giant hill, the wind was whipping all around and it was quite cold. We swore that we saw some kind of freezing rain/sleet since the rain had a nice white tint to it. Now that we were all soaked from head to toe we decided it was time to make our way back to the gondola. SO we get back to the gondola station and it had finally stopped raining BUT the gondola was closed due to weather conditions. We were now stranded on top of this hill since the metros do not run up this thing. We had to walk all the way down and walk around this Little Haiti looking part of town to find a metro station so we could head back to the hostel to change and get some food.
One good thing about the food we found near the hostel was that it was an all you can eat buffet for only about 10€. We all ate our fair share of the food and ice cream and were finally stuffed full of food without spending too much. We then returned to the hostel and rested our legs a little bit after all of that walking. And then the guys decided that we wanted to go up to this church which was on an even bigger hill just outside of the city. And so begins the biggest mistake of the trip which will be the next blog entry...
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