Barcelona Trip

Today is my day to get stuff done! We just spent 3 days in Barcelona with Javi's parents and then he and I are off on a road trip to Sevilla tomorrow. We flew to Barcalona Monday morning out of Granada's airport. It's so small that we walked across a garden and out on the tarmac to board our plane out of the 4th and last gate. On the cab ride to our hotel in Barcelona, Javi's parents were telling the cab driver about how he's going to the US, and the cabbie told him to watch out for American girls. I think he felt a bit awkward when I piped up from right behind him! After getting to the hotel, we went straight to the Boqueria market, which is essentially a food museum. They have fish with creepy eyes that stare at you, giant slabs of icky meat, really colorful fruit and veggies, beautiful handmade candy, and pretty much any Spanish food you want. It smells very interesting with all these things mixed together. We then had a really expensive and bad lunch (accidentally went to a touristy place) and headed back to the hotel. Javi and I had been there exactly a year ago and seen all the sights, and his parents have been a lot so we weren't really into sightseeing.

In fact, we were on a special mission; Javi had a rendezvous with the king of Spain. They're old pals. Actually, Javi got an awesome scholarship to study in the US from a bank here, and part of the official ceremony was shaking hands with the king and queen. There's a video from the news I put on here, and you can actually see Javi shaking hands from 1:07 to 1:13. Now the back of Javi's head is famous!

The ceremony was on Tuesday and he could only bring 2 guests, so he went off with his parents while I hung out with Ana, who had studied abroad at Davis too. We went to Parc Güell, which Gaudì intended to be a village within Barcelona. People found it too weird so that never happened, but now it's a major attraction. We wandered around it and went inside the house where he grew up, which actually had pictures of the insides of all the other buildings he designed in Barcelona, so we saved some money not having to pay to go in those! Then we wandered down to downtown and window shopped at all the designer stores. This is a very common activity in Spain, but also very annoying on the narrow sidewalks of Granada, where you have to choose to step out into traffic to pass a group of stationary women or try to push through them. Normally the 1st option is safer. Ana and I had an awesome lunch and met up for coffee with Javi. It was really fun to reminisce about Davis for a few hours and explore the city with a local. That evening, Javi and I went for a run on paths we found. This was the first time I really felt good running since I got hurt!

On Wednesday, we went to the Sagrada Familia, a church designed by Gaudì as well. The story is that he designed this elaborate church with all these crazy details, and then got hit by a cable car and died before it was finished. So basically it's been under construction for a really long time. Things take longer in Spain, but I doubt this will ever be finished. It's too bad because the church is so beautiful, but there are all these cranes and construction elevators in it! Then we took the subway to the much quieter gardens of a royal palace. I don't know what they are all called, but there were at least 4 plants in the garden that are also in our yard in Walnut Creek! I'm pretty sure that makes us royalty (by gardening, not blood or marriage). It was a smaller palace (there are lots of houses for the royal family all over Spain), but the gardens where huge and beautiful. For lunch, we went to a newer version of the Boqueria market and a very trendy restaurant that seemed like something you would find in Napa. This was the 1st place I have seen tofu here, and I took advantage of it!

We caught a plane back to Granada, but I didn't think we were going to make it on time. We got caught behind a group of old people who I don't think had ever seen a security line. If this was the case, they should have looked at all the signs and videos telling them exactly what to do! It should have been in a TV show, seriously. One went through holding his coins in his hands, a couple tried to walk through the metal detector at the same time, the person after them just walked around the metal detector, someone shut down one of the x-ray belts, it was chaos! We made it on the plane and as we were starting to descend, I noticed how weird it looked that there were only clumps of lights where there were cities instead of the whole area being utilized. Landing in the US, you can see all the grids of houses and very little open space, but here, there is no sprawl and there are big distances between each town. Everything seems more compact and efficient. We are back in our apartment for a day, I have polo tonight, and we are heading off for more adventures tomorrow after lunch!

On a different note, I got all my registration info for St. Augustine via email today. I'm officially going there. Changed my flight (after battling with all of India) to come home April 28th! The packet is very informative- there's even a dress code. Bye-bye piercings! I've connected with some classmates and found 2 girls to live with who are nice enough to let me bum off their housing search.