Barcelona

A group of me and 5 other girls flew to Barcelona for a weekend. This is one of the only known cities in Spain that we do not visit as a school, so we wanted to see it on our own. Our first day there we decided to just take in the city and walk around. We walked to their main plaza and visited the shops. We came across and amazing food market that had every kind of anything you could ever want. It was fabulous! I bought a dragonfruit. If you have never tried one before, don't be fooled by their looks. It is a bright pink fruit with a white speckled inside. So you would think that this tropical looking fruit would taste good...wrong. It had no taste at all! We ate some local Barcelonian food for dinner, and it was fabulous! Our hostel was kind of in a shady neighborhood, but the hostel intself was really nice.

Because Barcelona is so huge we decided to dedicate the next day to taking the Barcelona tour on those double decker tour buses. This was the easiest and quickest way to see the city. We saw cathedrals, the FC Barcelona futbol stadium, Olympic games museum, the marina, and lots lots more. We were not able to go to the beach because time just got the better of us.

The frustrating thin about Barcelona is that they don't speak Spanish. They speak Castilian. It is similar to Spanish...but definitely not the same.

We booked our flight with Ryanair, which is one of the discount airlines here in Europe. That being said, there is not always the best choices of flight times, and they usually fly into the small airports on the outskirts of the cities. The airport we flew into was about an hour and a half away from the actual city. This was not as much of a problem when we arrived in Barcelona, but it was on the way back. Our flight left at 6:40 am. So we had to catch a bus at 3:45 am to get to our flight on time. We made it, but were definitely not in the best of moods. :)

Barcelona is definitely a city that needs to be seen over the course of a week; as are most of the cities in Europe :)