Saturday: Day 12
BARCELONA DAY THREE!!
In the morning, Heather had another SAS trip, so Kyle and headed into town to go to La Boqueria, which is a fresh market off of La Ramblas. They had all sorts of stands selling products ranging from fruit to bread, pasta, and all sorts of meats including seafood (fish with their heads on and octopi, live lobsters, crabs, and all sorts of other crazy things), chicken (some with their heads on too), and other red meat including ham and rabbits both of which also had their heads sometimes too. It was pretty gross. Not gonna lie. Kyle and I kinda wished we were vegetarian after seeing a rabbit completely skinned but still with its eyeballs. GROSS. There were men and women literally chopping the chunks of meat and heads off meat left and right. The fruit stands were so beautiful! All sorts of fruits. They had real fruit juices that are apparently very popular in Barcelona because EVERYONE was walking around drinking them. So Kyle and I tried them. Kyle got a pineapple coconut one that he really liked and I tried a cherry mango one. Mine tasted pretty good, but I am not really a fan of smoothie things with that consistency. A for effort though! Kyle also got a small tray of fruit for a euro, and I got an APPLE! I was so excited. I’ve been craving apples like nobody’s business on this ship! It was delicious. So delicious in fact, that when we got to the shuttle and the driver told us we could not take our fruit on, I made Kyle wait for the next shuttle so I could finish it HAHA. :)
We picked up Heather back at the ship, then headed to McDonalds to steal free wi-fi. Kyle wanted to skype his family. Meanwhile, Heather and I wrote postcards and in general fooled around in the Spanish McDonalds. During which time we scored awesome world cup glasses that apparently over here come free with any meal purchase. Over here everyone leaves their trash on the tables. Its kind of weird. Someone must come and clear it for them. Anyways, this group of people left like 7 glasses on their table after they left, so I “reused” them. They were still in their packages and everything and now all 6 of us have glasses (cause we snagged some for Lacey, Daniel, and Clark too because we are good friends like that).
Kyle’s backpack looked a little ridiculous after we stuffed all 6 glasses and his laptop into it, but never the less we left the McD’s happy campers. We headed down to the Gotic area to check out the architecture. We ran into a group of SASers as well as my extended ship family on the way! So I got a hug from my “ship mother” and some advice of stuff to note while we walked around. We went through the Picasso Museum. It was really cool. They had Picasso’s life though his art work as well as information about each of the time periods. It was interesting to see him progress and digress in each chunk of time. They mentioned the times in which his father guided his art work in which you could notice how realistic the paintings and drawings were. Those works of art were particularly interesting to me because I am only used to the typical Picasso works you think of with all of the geometric shapes and more abstract art.
Afterwards, we got lunch/dinner at a little place called Pleasure 23. Was kind of touristy, but they had some tasty nachos. The other two plates we got were just ok. Kyle and I also split one of the local cervesas to see what it tasted like. It was also pretty good and went well with the nachos. While we were waiting for our food, a little parade festival came around. It was obviously a religious festival and included these costumes on stilts. Later, we actually saw the people taking them apart and snapped some pictures. I cannot really explain how those worked, so I will just try and post a picture or two. After we left, we headed down to see the Barcelona Cathedral. It was also really pretty and located in a neat square. We walked up one of the side alleys and found this cute little store where we all eventually made a purchase of some sort. I started my jewelry collection there when I found this awesome necklace made locally. I am collecting basically three things from every country:
*a postcard (which I am mailing to myself at my school address. I think it will be cool to have it processed in each country and also it will be fun to get them when I get back to school and relive some memories :D haha),
*a magnet (which is also cool seeing as all our walls on the ship are magnetic so I already have a little collection of them on my wall! So exciting!),
*and a piece of jewelry (which I noticed before I left that I really don’t have much of. So earrings, necklaces, or anything else that I see are fair game)
Other than those three things, I have found a couple of other things that I picked up for myself or gifts all of which I am also really excited about!
So back to the little store… we made our purchases, and then were summoned out the door because we heard music outside. Little did we know that we had just stumbled upon another first for the three of us: a gay pride event. We knew it was Gay-Pride week in Barcelona, but man did we stumble into an awkward situation. Barcelona people go all out for this apparently, because all of the participants were dressed in little to no clothing and what they were wearing was pretty ridiculous and included whips and thin fishnet tights. Basically, we each saw wayyyyy more Spanish body than we ever wanted to. Oops!
Pretty quickly we stumbled back out of the festival and back to the cathedral. More specifically, to the chocolate store we saw down the street. We tried churros con chocolate and crema catalayna (or some similar spelling) gelato basically crème Brule gelato. Both were excellent!
From there we headed back to the ship to meet up with the rest of the gang, who were supposed to be getting in from there SAS trip that evening.
We decided we wanted to go out in Barcelona and see what the nightlife was like, and boy did that turn into an adventure! Lacey, Heather, and I all got ready and planned to meet up with Daniel and 3 other girls Lacey met on her SAS trip. Kyle and Clark did not want to come, so they just hung around. When we realized that there were 6 girls and only 1 guy, we tried to get the other two boys to come so that we would feel a little safer especially if we ended up getting stuck somewhere and needing a cab. As mentioned from Barcelona night 1, cabs here only take up to 4 people, and we really did not want to have to split up and have a cab with only girls. Apparently us calling and explaining that to Kyle somehow got misinterpreted to Daniel, because when we went to meet him he was nowhere to be found. He had told Clark and Kyle he was headed out and they assumed he meant to meet us. Well, long story short, the 6 of us girls still wanted to go out so we decided we would proceed with our plans. The two boys decided to be our escorts after they found out we were still going out even if Daniel didn’t come.
By the time we got to the club, it was already 2:30 am. Even weirder is that clubs in Barcelona do not open until 1 am and most of them close at 8 am!! This compared with American clubs which are open usually around 9 or 10 until 2 am if you are in Charleston. So really us being there at 2:30 am would be compared to about 10:30 or 11:30 pm in Chucktown. It was pretty evident of that when we walked in. There was a good amount of people and the club was cool, but by the time we left at around 4:30am, the dance floors were jam-packed!! Apparently 4 am is prime dancing time in Barcelona haha. They boys had not wanted to come into the club, so they waited outside with Heather (who also ended up not being able to come in the club because we did not realize that clubs are not smoke free in Barcelona. Another thing we really appreciate and do not realize in America: smoke free zones. There are little to none in Spain and Italy so far. Heather is very asthmatic and did not want to risk going in the club).
We had a lot of fun in the club. They played a huge variety of music. Mostly American music, though, which we thought was interesting. They varied from current Lady Gaga hits to old school Will Smith’s “Welcome to Miami.” Sooooo funny!! The 5 of us girls had a great time, but by 4:30am we were ready to crash, so we headed out to meet the other three. Took the metro back, and promptly tossed off our dancing shoes and hit the sack. Three hours later we were up and moving again……….
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