"welcome to ameeeeeeeerican idol!"

I think my weekend in Barcelona will now go down as one of my favorite weekends ever. Everything about it was fantastic and so fun! 

I'll start out with describing our hostel. Forward: Caitlin, Beth Ann, Robyn, and I have never stayed in a hostal, seen one, or had any experience remotely like staying in a hostal. We walk up to this place and first notice that it is called Barcelona Dreams. Creative name. Then we see that is a juvenial hostal. Our first thoughts: its a youth hostal! Awesome, we might just have booked a place that requires a 10pm curfew. Much to our relief after talking to the nice australian girl at the front desk, it was not. 

Our second impression: this place is a hippies dream. Funky music playing, artwork drawn by guests of the hostal all over the walls professing themes of peace, love and traveling, interesting decoration with things like dream catchers and recycled couches, funny smell, etc. Very quirky place, but I loved it. We got to our bedroom and it was literally just brightly painted walls, four beds with labels 1, 2, 3 and 4, and corresponding lockers. I must say, the beds were extremely comfortable. better than any nice hotel we had stayed in yet. 

It was such an experience staying in this place though. Not the most posh living, but it did give us free internet, great people watching from all over this world, breakfast, comfortable beds, and lots of laughs. Oh, and we just happened to stay there the same weekend that a very large group of special ed people did. H-i-l-a-r-i-o-u-s!

. 

This is a picture of the lounge area. Just a snapshot of what it looked like. 

After getting settled in our hostal, we went exploring. We made it to the main street, La Rambla and got a great taste of the energy of Barcelona. La rambla is a long street with various shops and restaurants on either side, then the middle contains small street vendors, and performances by acrobats and various odd characters willing to do anything for money from tourists. We stopped to watch these three men do an acrobatic performance of flips and jumping and things. Then one of the guys decides to pull 2 people out of the crown to be apart of a stunt where one of the guys jumps over them. Guess who got chosen? Yours truly. They would choose the tall american girl. So, while my heart was pounding away, me, this other tourist and one of their friends got jumped over by this short spaniard. I am happy to say I survived and am here to tell you the story. 

This is the best picture of what happened. See that pale girl with a brown short sleeved shirt behind the guy in the green shirt: thats me. See that orange blob above us: thats the spaniard jumping over us!! 

That night we just ended up going out to dinner at a fantastic restaurant on La Rambla and calling it a night, eager to get back to our hostal. Haha. kinda. 

The next morning, after being rudely awaken by some construction worker with a jack hammer, we started our day off with several touristy things to visit, thanks to my excellent Spanish guidebook. 

Our first stop was the infamous Sagrada Familia. It is basically a huge cathedral that is still being built since its start in the 1800s. It was designed by Gaudi. It was a really cool place, however kinda a let down. We paid a whole whopping 9 euros to enter, walk around for max 10 minutes, only to realize that it wasn't worth the 90 minutes of waiting in line to climb very steep stairs to the top only to see yet another panoramic view of a city of Spain. So we took a few pictures and moved on to the Picasso museum.

Sagrada Familia itself

I was very excited to see this because I just love the work of Picasso. We saw tons of tons of paintings by the great man himself, as well as learned a few interesting facts along the way. My favorite part was seeing the incredible paintings he did at a young age of 15. I will never ever be able to create something like what he did a that young of age. It was inspiring. 

courtyard of the Picasso Museum

After that, we were starving and decided to take the advice of my guidebook and eat at this local pizza place that promised 2 slices and a drink for like 3.50 euros. It ended up being the best pizza I have ever had! And for an awesome price.

The group eagerly awaiting our pizza! Shoutout to Carolyn, friend of Beth Ann's and Anne Langhornes who came all the way from London to visit us in Barcelona!

Our next museum may be one of our favorites. The museum of CHOCOLATE! It was fabulous, mostly because the ticket came with a free sample of dark chocolate. Wonderfully delicious!

The museum basically consisted of facts on the history of chocolate and then sculptures made out of chocolate. This so happens to be a scene of Don Quixote. 

After that we made it to the much anticipated Barcelona beach and worked on our tans. It was beautiful. However, I have seen more of the human body than I ever want to see in my lifetime. When in Spain, expect to see people in the nude on the beach. I would include a picture, however, you might see some things you normally wouldn't want to see. 

That night we decided on skipping the showering at Barcelona Dreams, for the sake of our personal hygiene and mooched off of a hotel our friends were staying at. We called it the "princess palace." Long story short, a bunch of our group booked a hostal that turned out to be quite sketch and ended up quickly booking a super nice, however notedly pricey hotel. Outside it was one of the greatest things I have ever seen in my life. It was this light show slash waterfall extravaganza. There were all these waterfalls that would light up and change to various songs playing in the background. It was the type of show where you would expect Celine Dion to pop out of the center and belt out in song. 

The next day, we met up with two of our friends, Kathryn Wiley and Hunter McGee from Baylor, who were studying abroad in Paris, France. They flew in to experience Spain for the weekend. What a treat! We all ended up taking a bike tour of Barcelona through the Fat Tire Bike Company. But what was supposed to be a 4 hour tour ended up being an all day tour, thank you Amy Gibson. We had a bit of a problem with flat tires. 2 to be exact. Nevertheless, it showed us some great parts of the city and made for an adventure. 

The whole group in front of the Arc de Triomf

Amy's second flat tire. 

That night we then all went out to dinner, had some great paella and spanish tortillas and ended up meeting these HILARIOUS group of British men who were in Barcelona for one of the guy's bachelors party. I have never laughed so hard talking to a group of people than these guys. Their accents are so funny and they are so proper! Everything you would think when stereotyping people from England. I do have to say, they thought my english accent was the best out of the group. Probably because I am partially from the English decent. They especially loved my last name, Lockhart, saying it was a good strong english last name. 

Then when they tried to do our accent, oh goodness. It was so funny. They were hooked on imitating Ryan Seacrest and saying "Welcome to Ameeeeeeerican Idol" and "whats up dawg" like Randy. Hilarious! We then easily convinced them to take a picture with us, which they were very excited about, exclaiming that "we LOVE americans!"

The one guy in the middle, if you can't tell is trying to make an "A" for america. 

That pretty much sums up our weekend and also doubles as the longest post in the history of blogspot.com. For your sake, I will cut the observation of the day, although I have a good one in mind...

Cheerio!

Maria