Okay, that was probably not a great opening line... I had a great time in Barcelona this past weekend! (But it's true, and I'll be sure to elaborate). This kid in my writing class named Alex came with me so the two of us explored what we could in the city all day Friday and Saturday. We did a LOT, and I have a lot of thoughts and feelings, so sorry/not sorry if this is a little hefty of a blog post.
We took an overnight bus on Thursday to get to Barcelona Friday morning. Of course I slept like crap, but it was a good use of 7.5 hours. We got there at like 6 AM in the morning, and a couple of the metro stations were closed, so we had to walk pretty far to get where we wanted. First we wanted to get to the Joan Miró museum, and on the way we found this little park that had awesome views of the city horizon in the morning (if you look really closely, you can see the giant castle looking Sagrada Familia peeking out of the horizon about a centimeter right of the middle of this picture).
My weekend was pretty much filled with panoramic shots, like this one:
While we were waiting, we found a little garden called the Jardins de Laribal. It's a little difficult to see me but it was pretty!
Next we went to the National Art Museum of Catalonia, which was really impressive. This picture doesn't do the building justice. I can pretend that it's my castle.
The museum was really cool because you could follow the exhibits through the medieval times up until modern art. It was really interesting to see the evolution of art! The architecture of the building was really interesting (Barcelona has some awesome architecture, for the record) and some of the paintings were really beautiful. I don't have many pictures of inside the museum because I was afraid they would yell at me if I took any. But the building had a lot of really high arches with stone paintings that they saved on them. The end of the exhibit led to this giant room (and yet another badly taken panorama)!
There was also a rooftop terrace place where you could see great views of the city! This is the Olympic Torch (Barcelona hosted the Olympics in 1992 - hooray!).
Barcelona really is pretty.
After, we went to the hostel to check in and drop off our stuff. We were exhausted at this point, but it was only like 3 PM! Then we went leisurely exploring the streets and the port. We found a market actually that sold some seafood and other little things, like fruit juices. I had a Papaya juice! Then we wanted to try paella (because that's Spanish, right?) so we found this restaurant that sold a combination of tapas (3 appetizers) and paella.
I'd like to point out at this point that Spain has NO WATER. At least, Barcelona doesn't. So you literally can't go in a restaurant and order tap water with your meal. We asked for water and the guy gave us a bottle of mineral water (and I'm pretty sure he gave us the most expensive water they had because it was like 3 euros). The water in Barcelona really was crap. I've been spoiled with good water in Rochester, Pittsburgh, and Aix, where we've had access to some great tap water, so I would consider myself a pretty good water connoisseur, and my verdict is that Barcelona water is terrible. My only description is that it tasted like plastic and sulfur created a mutant baby which then proceeded to fart iron into the water, so it not only tasted gross, but it smelled bad, too.
(Also, did I mention that being an American tourist sucks? I felt like people were trying to trick me into buying things or paying for things I didn't ask for, and they succeeded because I literally did not know what they were saying. Ugh.) Honestly it was entirely my fault because I didn't think to look up cultural differences between France and Spain. It was really dumb of me to assume that since France and Spain were right next to each other that they would be pretty similar culturally (I was wrong! It's like they are completely different countries... HA HA).
[Okay this is a side note of cultural observation, skip ahead if you just wanna see pictures!]
Anyway, that night we met some Slovakian people at the hostel and an English guy. They thought I was 25! I was sort of indifferent to that knowledge, but then they acted like it was really offensive that they thought I was older (a lot older) than I really was, so now I'm not sure how to feel. Marie-Claude and I discussed once how Americans seem to mature a lot faster than other teenagers because we get a lot of responsibilities when we're younger, like driving and voting. People here can't even get their permits until they're 18, and they need like a year of training and pretty much mandatory auto-school to even take their exam. Marie-Claude said that 18 year olds are still considered babies in Europe. Europeans here are considered youths until they are 26. The ones we met probably didn't expect kids like me, like 18 and 19 year olds, to be traveling alone, so I guess I can understand why they thought I was old.
Meeting those students (they were 23-25 by the way) made me think pretty hard, actually, about the role of travelers. The girl we met, Martina, was asking me and Alex a lot of questions because she was curious. She asked if Alex and I were a couple and then when I made a face and we both protested loudly and said a vehement NO, she was like, Oh because you are siblings! ..............Umm... No. What??? At that point, the guy Jacob said to Martina, "Are you done embarrassing us???" in a joking but half-serious way. I know they weren't trying to be rude, but it made me think about a lot of things. Like how social cues must be different for different cultures. And also that it would be really easy to assume that all or most Slovakians are forward or assuming or rude or generous or kind based on my one-time interaction with two Slovakian graduate students. Like it would be so easy to stereotype all of them based on one interaction.
This made me think about how as students studying abroad, and as travelers, too, that we really are ambassadors for our country. I definitely see how it would be incredibly easy to put all American tourists in a box of Rude, Loud, Obnoxious, Ignorant, based on just one or two interactions. As a "tourist" this weekend, it felt pretty awful to go somewhere and not understand why we were being treated a certain way. It was like as soon as I asked if people spoke English, they put us in this box of "American tourist" and treated us as such. It might be pretty unfair for me to think that, but it just made me think about how we need to be more open to other cultures and avoid stereotyping (and also the importance of doing research on a country's culture before visiting said country). I've been really lucky that until now, I've only been to countries where I've spoken the language fairly well, so I've mostly avoided being ostracized for being an outsider. Anyway, just food for thought.
[End rant]
Saturday morning, we visited La Sagrada Familia! Talk about some cool architecture -- this thing has been under construction since the 1800s! Don't be too marveled at this bird eye's view picture... it was actually a picture of a poster.
Like this building doesn't even look real! It looks like a fake building straight out of a video game.
So we got there to buy tickets, and we couldn't get in until like 3 hours later. That's ok though, because there was a music museum with some free exhibit, so we did that while we waited!
I "left my voice" for the world at this little recording booth. Pretty cool, huh?
Giant organ with some giant pedals??
Cool horn thing
Really long horn thing
Check that out
Interactive room where I got to pretend I played the harp!
I thought the music museum was honestly one of the coolest things! I definitely appreciated it a lot because of course I played quite a bit of classical music back in the day, so it was very exciting for me to understand this side of art. They even played music throughout the exhibits, and I recognized some of them!
Finally, the Sagrada!!
It honestly looks fake
The ceiling
Some organs
It was so beautiful. It was definitely the most expensive thing there that we did (besides food) but honestly, the view was pretty worth it in my opinion. Have you really been to Barcelona if you haven't been to La Sagrada Familia?
On our way to the Botanical Gardens of Barcelona, we stopped by the Olympic stadium. Another panorama!
There was a little Bonzai exhibit at the Botanical gardens, which was so cute! Baby versions of trees!
Honestly, at this point we were really trying to figure out what to fill our time with while we waited for the bus (11:30 PM, hooray) so we got dinner and then visited this beach. The sunset makes for great lighting!
Then we stopped by this beautiful park! I wish we had gotten there before the sun had set, but we were like, Ugh the beach is too pretty to leave. And we could mooch off of free wifi.
And of course, we ended up at the bus station again, right next to Barcelona's own Arc de Triomphe! There was a concert there actually, which was okay.
That was my weekend in Barcelona! Got back Sunday morning and spent the day relaxing and doing homework (rather unsuccessfully). Marie-Claude was visiting her mother for the majority of the day, which was really nice because that meant I got to spend a lot of alone time. I really needed it after I spent the last 48 hours - literally spent the last 48 hours - constantly with people. I was going insane! Especially because I had a constant companion. It is really too much time to spend all at once with one person, especially one I barely know. I mean don't get me wrong, I was really glad that at least Alex was there on the trip, especially because I seem to be insanely bad at reading foreign metro maps (or maps in general. I'm amazing at it in the US but these European maps... man).
I cannot tell you how happy I am to be back in France though. People here actually speak something I understand. Hahaha. And everything is like 3 times cheaper in Aix than it is in Barcelona. AND THERE IS GOOD DRINKING WATER. DRINKING WATER THAT IS FREE. Thinking about going back to the US in just 3 weeks honestly kind of depresses me. The only things I miss are my family and friends, my dog Kirby, and late night Fuel-and-Fuddle.
Anyway I'll be going on a couple of more adventures in the coming week, so until next time!
-Cindy
No comments:
Post a Comment