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...