Barcelona

Hello from Barcelona!



Today we arrived in Barcelona after a 12 hour, over-night train ride across Spain. The train had little compartments where the seats folded out into bunk beds. Three beds stacked on top of each other. Calli, Katie, Katie and I shared our compartment with a nice lady from Salamanca who used to be an english teacher but now doesn't remember any english. She said that she barely spoke english in the classroom when she was teaching it anyway. We were a little confused.



So who wants to guess the first place we went to in Barcelona? Of course we went to starbucks. I love spain's coffee (Café con Leche), but my iced caramel machiatto was refreshing and reminded me of home. We hung out for a few hours and wandered around Madrid until we could check into our hotel. Our hotel is nice. The four of us are sharing one room with two twin beds, so we'll just have to squeeze tight for the next few nights.



Today we went on a Fat Tire Bike Tour of Barcelona. It was a four hour tour, and we saw all the important sites of the city. We saw Gaudi's La Sagrada Familia, we went to a pretty park with a beautiful fountain, also by Gaudi called "Cascades". In the park there were lots of people picnicking and enjoying the beautiful day. We ended the tour at the beach where we ate dinner with the rest of the people on the tour. Every person on our tour went to A&M. It was the four of us and then 6 other finance students studying abroad with the A&M. The aggie network is everwhere!!

...i had left off here in Barcelona and now i will finish:

The next day we went to the park where we saw Gaudi's cascades and read for hours and that night we saw a movie in english--What Happens in Vegas. It wasn't a great movie but we were so glad to be watching a movie that we understood that we didn't really care! After the movie we went to Hard Rock Cafe. Needless to say, we had a very American night.

Our last day in Barcelona we went to the beach. The beaches in Barcelona are part of the Mediterranean and it was absolutely beautiful. We laid out all afternoon. The sell everything at the beach. There were men walking around singing little songs about all the cold drinks they had for sale, and Calli and I both got massages from Asian women walking around saying "massage?" I'm not sure how certified their services were, but Calli and I both enjoyed it very much. If we decide not to come home, we can just give people massages at the beach to make a living...That night we ate at a nice restaurant on the beach called "Arenal". There we celebrated Katie Crawford's 21st birthday and enjoyed watching people at the beach. Later that night we went to watch the "magic fountains" of Barcelona. They are these huge fountains that turn all different colors and change as music plays. I'm going to try to post a video of that on this blog. I took about 5. I'll do that in just a little while.

We took an 11 hour train ride home on Sunday. It was almost too much to handle, but we survived. The trains are a very nerve racking thing because they don't give you much time to get on or get off. The four of us brought 2 gigantic suitcases to Barcelona (we packed for 3 weeks instead of 3 days) and they were hard to get on and off the train. So in all the hustle and bustle of getting everything off the train I forgot to grab my school work from under my seat. Every single handout and every single note I've taken in the last 2 weeks is gone. I started from scratch on Monday. Oops. I don't think it'll be that big of a deal though because I'll just study with Katie and the tests shouldn't be that hard. I can't believe we only have 2 weeks left! It's flown by!

Tonight we will probably lay low and start studying for exams. Clemen has lots of movies so we might try to find one that has english subtitles. I think that's all for now! Thanks for checking in! OH...i'll post that video in a sec.