Barcelona and the directionally challenged

After spending enough time traveling in countries where i don't speak a word of the language, i decided to prepare a little better for my trip to spain. for once, i was going to be "ready" for new cities, barcelona and madrid. so i came up with a list of vocab to help us out along the way.. which to be honest didn't get us very far, but hey, at least i tried! although in barcelona they also speak catalon, so we were still a bit lost.
Samina and i arrived in barcelona to find sunny (and more importantly, not freezing) weather. since we arrived in the afternoon, our couchsurfing host wasn't quite ready for us to show up, so we headed to the pier and sat and enjoyed a bit of downtown.

after wandering around a bit, it was nice to be able to set our heavy backpacks down. when we realized we were a little bit hungry, we found a random bar to get a snack. there were so many people with dreads i thought i may have accidentally teleported back to santa cruz for a second.
eventually we wandered to our hosts house and actually got there with perfect timing because we hadn't even gotten a chance to text him or buzz his apartment when he walked up to us. he and his flatmates were very nice, but didn't speak much english, which made for an interesting couple of nights of communication.

the next morning samina and i headed straight for the beach. and by straight i really mean we attempted to go straight to the beach, but didn't quite succeed in getting there directly. we weren't really sure which metro stop to get off at, so we randomly picked one. well we found the water, but it turns out it was kind of an industrial area and there was a whole bunch of construction (this would only be the beginning of our directional failings). it took a little while, but as we walked along the road, we finally found a way to get to the water. i hadn't really realized how much i missed the beach and was so excited to be able to put my feet in the sand.

i was also so happy it was warm enough to be able to take my coat off for a little bit!

by the way, the Mediterranean is kind of cold in january, but it was fun to touch the water anyways :)
for lunch we decided to try some tapas and sangria.

after lunch, we wandered a bit figuring we would go see the famous cathedral de sagrada familia, or find guell park. plans changed quickly when we saw a gocar parked on the side of the road. immediately we both decided that we wanted one of these too. we found a phone number in the car and called to see where we needed to go so we could rent one! soon we were at the rental place and giving the necessary information.. sort of. in order to rent one we needed to give a passport number, a driver's license, and of course some money. well. i provided the passport just fine. i provided my expired driver's license. and we paid. then after being instructed how the car works, samina got in the drivers seat. clearly, this was a very strict process. now this car was cool. it had a gps and gave us our own personal tour including which ways to turn and describing what we were seeing. it could even get us back on track if we missed a turn. or scold us if we didn't follow directions too well. whoops. we just wanted to feel the wind in our hair! well sort of, we were wearing helmets of course.

our awesome gocar: the talking tour car

a few things we saw on our tour:

this represents david and goliath

seriously though, such a great spur of the moment decision.

next up was dessert time. i got some delicious chocolate thing. and we sat down at tables we found outside.

a wierd lookin guy came up to us with a ketchup bottle. i swear he almost squirted us with it. "i don't know what he wanted, but i felt threatened." when we weren't giving him whatever he wanted from us though, he left us alone. a waitress from a cafe came out to take our orders since we had sat down there. she was perfectly friendly and told us to just ignore the random guy. when she returned with our drinks, she asked, "can you please pay now? i'm cold and don't want to come back out here. and those bastards won't let me wear long sleeves." we thought it was hilarious but obliged. and soon moved inside as well since we were also cold. she found this slightly amusing.

finally we made our way to check out the famous cathedral de sagrada familia by gaudi, though we only went into one small room. you can still see lots of construction, since it isn't supposed to be completed until 2026.

i really liked these windows

though as we wandered around the side, we did find this:

better picture than i took, courtesy of samina

after checking out the cathedral, we decided to decide to try to find guell park. this proved to be much more difficult than we anticipated. we got off at three different metro stations and still couldn't figure out how to get there. even had someone give us some directions. after it was obvious this plan was going to fail that night, and realizing we wanted to see it during daylight anyways, we gave up and headed back to our host's house and decided to try again in the morning.
we decided to text our host to see what he was doing for dinner and decided to eat with him. we asked him if we needed us to bring anything and he said no, so we returned empty handed. when dinner time finally came around at about 10 pm (which is normal in spain), there was no food. obviously something had been lost in translation. samina and i decided to treat everyone to kebabs to thank them for their hospitality and afterward they played music for us, asking us to correct them/ sing along.

day 3 (well full day number 2): the most ridiculous day of the entire trip.
goal for the day: eat breakfast, find an internet cafe to print our tickets to madrid, maybe find the bubble thing, find guell park, maybe find the cable car?
what actually happened:
short version: we spent most of the day lost and somehow i learn to understand spanish.
long version: we ate breakfast at a cafe but couldn't find an internet cafe near the apartment. we hopped on the metro and headed downtown in hopes of finding internet (i might add this was in the opposite direction of guell park, our most important destination of the day). we walked into a random shop and got directions to internet and this time managed to find it and print our tickets, check email, look up which stop exactly for guell park, etc. we took the metro to guell park and got off at the nearest stop (which happens to be not at all near the park..) we found a large escalator, and ended up taking a detour where we found a nice view at jardin de turo. we saw a mysterious castle on a hill (really far away), and decided to add that to our itinerary.

mysterious castle on one side

cathedral de sagrada familia on opposite side

at this point we turned around and headed back down the escalator (always downward in defeat luckily. we both decided it's so much nicer to be walking up hills when we still have our hopes high, and walking downhill when we realized that once again our directions had failed us), and back across the bridge to the metro stop (a bridge that we had now crossed probably 3 times between the two days in search of the park). we stopped at a market for some food for lunch and continued on our way. after a while of walking up and down the same streets, we realized we should probably stop for lunch because we were both getting a bit grumpy. we then asked a few people if they spoke any english so they could help us out. a few just said no, but finally found someone who could at least tell us which bus to take. man, if we had just had this info 2 hours earlier, we both would have been much happier (and probably seen more that day). getting lost still wasn't funny this early in the day. so the bus arrived and we paid for tickets (something we later realized we didn't need to do because our metro ticket worked for the bus as well) and got to the park just fine (well only relatively considering the rest of the morning). upon entering we found gaudi's house and decided to pay the 4.50 euros to get in.

turns out, his place is pretty small, but there were still 10 guards making sure people didn't touch anything or sit on anything. one even got mad at me because my coat accidentally lightly brushed a table.  also, because i was holding a water bottle (mind you, it was closed), but i still had to put it in samina's bag. here is about half of the house:

finally we found the famous view with the bench.

and we found the lizard. my new best bud.

i've decided i really like gaudi's artistic style. and i also liked how even some of the more naturey parts of the park were also sort of mosaic-like, though evidently i forgot to take a picture of it. too bad.
we got a little more sangria and then went to see some more of the park. we found a cross thing with a cool view and a ridiculous/terrible singer.

the view 

really no words to describe this guy. notice the leopard print onesy.  he was an awful singer.  

where the previous photo of a view was taken from

soon we were on our way again. but as we left the park, a japanese woman came up to us. she wanted us to be models for 5 minutes. something about some magazine. i'm not really sure. but we played along through our confusion. i mean, if this day hadn't been odd enough already, why not let someone random take our picture? it was quite a bizarre experience. apparently we are fashionable people.

to get back into town, we got on a bus, this time realizing we could use tickets we had already purchased. when we saw an escalator, we hopped off. we exited through the wrong door (you are supposed to exit from the back because people enter from the front, whoops). suddenly we realized it wasn't the same escalator and we needed to get back on the bus. we tried to get on in the back door. wrong again. the bus driver was nice enough to let us get back on through the front door though, and off we went again. when we got off at the stop we meant to get off at originally, once again we almost exited through the wrong door, until i realized and we turned around. when we got off correctly, the bus driver applauded us. pretty sure we had just made his day with our ridiculousness. but we were amazed that i had suddenly learned to understand spanish when we had gotten back on the bus and he explained the whole which door to use situation. now we were back at the bridge. though i was turned around enough that i didn't realize this until we were half way across. give me a break, it wasn't a bridge crossing water! but then 2 seconds later i also saw out of the corner of my eye that we could have gotten off one stop further and been closer to the metro. my perception is evidently a little off sometimes.
anyways, we found the metro and decided it was castle time. we had asked at the gift shop at the park where it was located/ called and been told it was only from the 20th century and therefore not interesting, but we decided to go anyways. we realized we needed to take the brown line to get there. we then spent a rather large amount of time in the metro station trying to figure out how to find the brown line. we saw signs, but they didn't really make sense and so we went back and forth multiple times. up and down multiple times. we were really confused why this wasn't working for us. we finally took a break for dunken donuts since we had passed it enough times. we used to be so good at the metro, i'm not really sure what happened! though by this late in the day, after all of our screw ups, we were starting to think they were all just funny. i mean of course we would screw up the metro, it's not like we had really done anything correctly that day! it was also a little ironic because samina had said this town was easier to get around than previous cities. but it's just so big!
eventually we found the brown line and made it to the correct stop, but decided to eat before heading to the castle. while we were eating, we decided not to go to the castle, we figured it might be expensive to take the funiculaire, we had already seen a couple views, and it was dark anyways. plus, that guy had said it wasn't interesting. change of plans again. anyone surprised?
instead we decided to look for conditioner in small bottles. this didn't happen, because it is an impossible task in europe, but we did find small plastic bottles which we could then fill with conditioner in a china store! here we got yelled at for making a mess (we were going to clean it up!) because as we were searching through the bin some other bottles were falling on the floor. then we went back to a grocery store and bought a regular sized bottle of conditioner. we felt pretty successful.

we got back to the normal metro (the brown line was a little different) and promptly got on the closest line we saw. i should probably mention this is not the line that went to our host's apartment. fail again. so we got off and tried again. when we got off, we somehow got off at a different exit than before, and then walked the wrong direction on top of that, all the way to the previous stop just to be sure we were walking in the wrong direction. when we finally got ourselves going in the correct direction, we found an internet cafe a block from the apartment. really now?!

by the time we made it back we couldn't stop laughing. our day had been so ridiculous, and we hadn't even made it to many places because of our directionally challenged ways. and of course what was our host's flatmate's first question? "what did you do today?" we couldn't help but bursting into a fit of laughter, and i'm pretty sure they thought we were crazy. but due to the language barrier, it's not like we could explain ourselves all that well. soon he gave up on us. we decided we DEFINITELY had to get ice cream the following today (following sackheim family tradition of course).
eventually we got ourselves together enough to hang out with our hosts. and later we went out with our main host, and his friend (who thankfully spoke more english), and spent most of the night out. remember how i said people in spain don't eat till 10pm? well because of this they don't go out till midnight. which means staying out till 5am is normal. i love barcelona, but i don't think i could ever live there for long. my schedule is just too backwards!
i would love to go back someday, especially if i learn to speak spanish. though maybe when it's even a littleee bit warmer.
also, i found it interesting that there was cellphone service in the metro! and that we never had to wait more than a minute for a metro. loooove this fact.
oh, and i totally meant to send a few people postcards, buttttt i forgot to buy any. sorry guys. maybe next time!