BARCELONA BEGINS

Where to start, where to start, where start? This weekend was amazing. I am in love with Barcelona! I will start with the 11-hour bus ride. Actually it was not that bad. We took it in three, three-hour shifts, with hour breaks in between. We watched Troy and The Bodyguard (the boys were thrilled with this choice) in English. I might be going a little delusional, but I think I actually saw the resemblance Tim claims he has between him and Brad Pitt, haha. Our Madre packed us a mega lunch again. The boys were extremely happy to have our leftovers again. The good news was that she made our sandwiches on whole wheat bread!

We got to the hotel around 7 pm, and got situated with out roommates and luggage and everything else. I was with Leah again! The hotel was nice, but nothing compared to the fabulousness of hotel in Madrid. We had dinner with the group at the hotel at 9. This was a very interesting dinner. Lets see, it started out with a huge bowl of ketchup. Everyone was pretty confused by this absurd amount of ketchup that had been placed in front of us. It is a common Spanish stereotype that Americans love ketchup, but this was an outlandish amount. Then they brought out pasta and salads platters for everyone. My best guess is that the ketchup was for the pasta, kind of like pasta sauce, but that sounds horrible. Some people tried it I gave my pasta to the boys and stuck with the salad, which was delicious and filled with wonderful vegetables. After the salad, came the Spanish version of hamburger and fries. By Spanish version, I mean there was no bun with the meat patty. It was just a meat patty and fries on a plate. The boys got my meat patty along with about six others from all the other girls. Dessert was the best part. It was a rich chocolaty brownie tart with walnuts. It was wonderfully chocolate! I think the Spaniards will have to reevaluate their belief on Americans and ketchup. We only used about 1/50th of the ketchup they brought out for us.

After dinner a few people went out, I went out walking around the city with 10 other people. We took the metro to the Las Ramblas, which is a big street with a wide sidewalk in the middle. Las Ramblas are typical of coastal European cities. Las Ramblas in Barcelona was filled with people, street performers, hookers, club advertisers, cafes. You name it, you can probably find it on Las Ramblas. We walked down toward the bay where I got my first glimpse of the Mediterranean Ocean. The bay was filled with sailboats. We walked out to the across the on the docks and found a centro commercial on the other side, which we ended up visiting the next day. The mall almost seemed to be floating on the water. On our walk back to the metro station we were very creeped out by the vast number of Africans that kept coming up to us and telling us how beautiful and sexy we were. Yuck! When we got back to the hotel it was off to bed. Saturday was going to be an action packed day filled with parks and museums, and tons and tons of Guadi stuff!