Alright, ladies and gentlemen. Time for the long awaited majesty that is STORIES FROM MY SPRING BREAK. As I may have told you, I spent the first half of Spring Break with my dear friend/roommate/non-romantic-life-partner Melanie Ward (her blog is here) in Barcelona and Lisbon, and then wrapped up the week in Strasbourg (which is in the Alsace region of France on the German border) with my true love Evan Revak. As usual, shenanigans will ensue.
Part One - Barcelona and Lisbon
By some grace of God, Mel and I managed to find each other at the Barcelona Airport. Which in case you were curious is like the biggest fucking airport in history. By a second grace of God, we got to our hotel, using public transportation. We were directed to take a train to one place, only to discover we were misguided, took the train back to the airport, and then took a bus.
Thankfully we had these things called "Barcelona Cards" where, essentially, you pay 10 euros a day for free unlimited public transportation. A lot of the big cities in Europe have them, and if you ever find yourself touristing there, I highly recommend it.We managed to get to our hotel, which was a Marriott (HALLELUJAH! Because you know what I am so over it's not even funny? Hostels.) and wasn't even that much more expensive.
It was a beautiful hotel, actually, with beautiful rooms and, I kid you not, a COMPLIMENTARY MINI BAR. What is this madness??? The bathroom too was beautiful and covered in mirrors (we don't have a mirror at the College where you can see anything below your shoulders UNLESS you stand on a chair). Which, as Mel pointed out, is pretty awkward if you're trying to take a shower and then you have to watch yourself bathe. Which it is. The first night we went to a fancy mall/shopping center thing near the hotel for dinner and rested for our EXCITING EARLY DAY OF EXPLORING SPAIN!! WOOO!!
Our subway adventures took us to the Placa Catalunya which is basically the center of Barcelona. It was hot and very sunny and gorgeous. As Barcelona is a gigantic fucking city, and one we knew very little about at that, we decided to do a bus tour. I've said this before and I'll say it again, I'm a huge proponent of bus tours if you don't have a car to explore a city. They take you to the things it's important to see, you can get off and explore, and they take you to the next thing it's important to see. Voila. This advice though sort of depends on what you're doing. It's not the "local" experience, but if you have 2 full days to see all of Barcelona and just want to see all the art and sights and landmarks, it's great. Highlights included:
La Sagrada Familia
Gaudi was an architect, that, to the best of my understanding, built Barcelona. He started this cathedral (now declared a basilica) like 150 years ago, and they're still working on it. The result is a weird combination of old and modern architecture that was really interesting.
Park Guell
This was probably my favorite place we visited in Barcelona. So beautiful and rich...somewhere I would definitely like to go back to.
"The World of Color Palace" aka Placa Espana
Our concierge told us that there was a fountain show with music and lights, "like in Las Vegas." Of course Mel and I were playing it all cool and then got into the elevator and were like THE WORLD IS A CAROUSEL OF COLORRRR!!! WONDERFUL WONDERFUL COLOORRR!! A RAINBOW OF IMAGINATION...#disneylandproblems #melandmichaelaproblems
Barcelona is part of a region of Spain called Catalonia (Catalunya) where they speak, officially, both Spanish and Catalan. I was not aware of this prior to our visit, and needless to say was really confused at the number of people not speaking Spanish. HOWEVER, turns out Catalan is really easy to understand, because it's basically Spanish and French mixed together. It is, on the other hand, impossible to figure out how to speak.
We enjoyed ourselves greatly, and in the evening decided to go out to dinner and then to IceBarcelona, which is an ice bar.
If you've never heard of ice bars before (and I had not) they are basically rooms made entirely of ice, with ice furniture and sculptures and glasses. They give you a warm coat and gloves, and you pay 12 euros to go in and have a drink and take stupid touristy pictures of yourself. WORTH IT.
We went to bed exhausted and watched some quality Spanish reality shows where they make children gamble on trivia questions, "That kid is gonna lose all his regalos!" But then as we fell asleep, there were all kinds of sirens and shit that sounded like they were coming really close to us. I get really uncomfortable and on edge when I hear sirens, and they kept coming and sounded like they were right underneath us, so I jumped out of bed and went to the window and looked outside. In my mind it was like a robbery or a fight the cops were trying to break up, because I heard what sounded like gunshots. This is how the following conversation went:
Me: Holy. Shit.
Mel: What is it?
Me: There's like...a giant fire.
Mel: WHAT?
Mel jumped out bed and joined me and we stared out the window for a long time, until finally whatever was on fire next door was out and the firetrucks left. I've never seen flames that big in real life, and I had no idea what it was. We thought the building next door had burned down or something. I had so much adrenaline I kept jerking awake as I tried to fall asleep. The next morning we went outside only to discover what, in fact, was actually on fire.
Turns out this car had caught fire and then caught the tree next to it on fire. Thank God it was only that.
We went on another bus tour (on a different route) this day for a while, which took us up to Mont Juif (Mountain of the Jews..) where the views are spectacular and the Olympic Stadium is. The Olympic Stadium itself was huge and gorgeous, but had literally THE SKETCHEST BATHROOMS EVER (I don't know how else to explain it.) The whole courtyard thing too was breathtaking and very peaceful, and we stayed there for a while taking pictures.
That evening we went to La Rambla for dinner, which is the main "happenin'" street in Barcelona. La Rambla is very energetic but also very overwhelming. It's an exciting place to be, and definitely a place to go again.
The next morning we went to the beach for a little bit, mainly just to say we'd gone, and then took the bus back to La Rambla for lunch and further exploration. I finally had from-Spain-sangria, which was a main goal of my Spain experience, and it was fabulous.
We then took the bus back to the Barcelona Airport where we had all of the excitement of getting delayed 3 hours (hooray for the air traffic controller strikes!) before we went to Lisbon. The only remarkable thing about this many hours in the airport experience was 1) A fantastically epic game of hangman. 2) Babies from various countries making friends in line. It was straight up like out of a Huggies commericial...adorable multi-ethnic babies cooing and whacking at each other. How cuuuute. Our flight to Lisbon was quick, and then we arrived at the Lisbon airport (blessedly smaller than Barcelona's) and were taken by a taxi driver to our hotel. We hit 100 kmh on this ride. I watched the speedometer. It was crazy, and he was blastic techno, and I felt like I was in a video game. It only cost 6 euros. Fuck yes.
Despite their cheap taxis, Lisbon was a more expensive city than Barcelona, but still quite pretty. In the morning we did a long tour that took us to various landmarks, including the tower, the Coach Museum, the big church (look at me remembering what all these things were called!), the old town, and the city square.
We learned that Lisbon is famous for stuff made out of cork, port wine, and for looking like San Francisco. They have cable cars (but they're yellow) and a bridge that looks strikingly similar to the Golden Gate, although much smaller. One of our taxi drivers was quite taken with the fact that I was actually from San Francisco and wanted to know how similar it was. Frankly not super similar, but the bridge was very cool to see. Lisbon is very dignified and quiet and picturesque, and a very interesting place to visit.
Ponte 25 de Abril (Portugal's take on the Golden Gate)
The Coach Museum
City Center square
However, most importantly something very very life-changing happened while we were there. Drumroll please...I SAW THE HUNGER GAMES!! IN ENGLISH!! Portugal shows all their films in the original form with Portuguese subtitles (which I guess makes sense, because dubbing in Portuguese seems like kind of a niche market) and that was really really exciting. I really enjoyed it, as a separate entity from the book. It was really concise and well done and interesting, and yes..quite. Very exciting, not overly emotional, just well done. It did make me want to read the books again though, especially Catching Fire. It better be the best movie ever made or I'm going to kill someone. With a bow and arrow. So it's fucking relevant.
The next morning, after enjoying reasonably-priced room service and figure skating on TV (where Mel determined that my future career as a figure-skating competition commentator is in the bag), we parted ways at the Lisbon airport, she to go back to Glasgow and then to head to Italy and me on the first of my flights/trains to Strasbourg.
To be continued!
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