We finished out orientation week with more 9am cultural sessions and Spanish classes and some afternoon activities with the program!

On Wednesday we went on a “hike” (more of a leisurely stroll) around Montjuïc; one of my favorite areas of Barcelona so far. It was much calmer and more relaxing than other parts of the city, and a great way to meet other people on the program. The first thing you see when you walk up is a beautiful fountain framing this quaint castle on a hill in the background (I’ll post a picture). Once you walk up to the castle and turn around, you can see the entire city laid out in front of you with another fountain/waterfall thing- breathtaking (I have a picture of that, too). Past the castle is the site where Spain hosted the 1992 Olympics which, as we learned, had a huge effect on the city. Pictures taken of the diving pool that looks out on the city and mountains behind catapulted the city into the public eye. We ended our walk at the base of Montjuïc (Jewish mountain, named for its history as a medieval Jewish cemetery), and I mentally bookmarked it as somewhere to return. Natalie, Luke, Patrick, and I took on the nearly 90min walk back to the Sarría Sant-Gervasi district afterwords.

Thursday was Park Güell day. Commissioned by Catalan industrialist Eusebi Güell and designed by Antoní Gaudí, the original intent was to be a private city and gardens for rich people. The failure of this idea led the space to be turned into the iconic park it is today. It was another hour walk to get to the park from the lunch place we had gone to, and it was pretty mush a straight shot up the mountain. Once we finally arrived, we didn’t see anyone from our program and quickly realized we had gone to the wrong entrance. After much confusion and Google Maps manipulation, we had to hike several flights of stairs and crazy steep roads back down the mountain (no exaggeration at all..), over to the other side of the park, and up again to where everyone else was waiting. I was glad we went to the effort to find the right entrance, because it was truly breathtaking. Surrounded by beautiful forest in front of me, the grand park gates to the right, and brown and blue tiled houses giving off very strong gingerbread house vibes to my left, it felt like a scene out of a fairy tale. We spent over two hours walking around inside the park- there was so much to admire! Views of the city (you could see all the way out to the ocean), wildly cool architecture poking out of the vegetation, and tiled everything everywhere you looked. The sun showed up big time and I was starting to feel more connected to my study abroad mates; it was a fun afternoon!

It seems every day has a theme, for Friday was Tarragona day! This is where my pictures of quieter streets, Roman ruins, and the ocean come in. I slept the entire bus ride there and back, and it took willpower to stand up from my seat when we got there. This day trip was mandatory: everyone in the program chose to visit either Tarragona, the land of the Roman ruins and ocean, or Girona, famous for its Jewish legacy and being the place where Game of Thrones was filmed. I was happy with Tarragona because I was able to touch the ocean (with one finger!) and there were less U Miami kids there. We got a guided tour of some of the ruins and if I remembered any of what our guide told us, I would’ve describe it here. It was cool, though, because I got to take the tour in Spanish with some of my friends (even though our guide kept accidentally switching to English) and we went inside ancient Roman walls and tunnels. Our last stop was the Colosseum, which you can view below, and was stunning. Afterwords we went with a group of almost 15 to a small cafe for lunch (the St. Olaf group plus some new additions from the tour). We had a leisurely Spanish lunch, with the people at my end of the table struggling to hear anything from the other end of the table. Afterwords we walked over to a fish/meat/vegetables market where I got to see more guts than I ever needed to see, countless decapitated fish of every kind, including crabs, jellyfish, and everything in-between, and the most gigantic hunks of meat casually hanging from the ceiling. It was all very Spanish and very fresh. We had just enough time to see the beach before we left. A few other people and I climbed down the rocks to the shore, a process in which I almost lost my phone (it fell out of my pocket into a hole in the rocks, but thankfully it only spent a few terrifying moments there before Luke was able to reach far enough in and grab it).

After finally being done with jet lag, I think the weekend just undid all my progress. But it was worth it because I got to experience what everyone is so hyped about, especially here in Barcelona: Going out. Friday night was a fail turned fun, and Saturday night was the classic clubbing experience to make up for Friday. I knew I would feel really lame if I didn’t go, and I stand by that because it was an overall fun experience both nights.

On Friday a group of 8 of us spent $20 each on tickets to a club that was 23+. Somehow no one saw that when buying their ticket, so we showed up and immediately showed out. Just to make the situation even better, it started raining pretty hard after we got turned away. We ran down the block to a McDonald’s that was still open, where we regrouped and waited out the rain. We decided to walk around and see if we happened to run into a different club or bar. We didn’t, but we did run into a supermarket where everyone except me bought a bottle of some type of drink and drank it (illegally, it turns out) as we continued wandering around. Eventually we caught wind of an Irish bar called George Payless (George Pains, its an inside joke) and made it our goal to get there. 30 minutes on the Nit Bus (Night Bus) later, and we had accomplished that goal only to run into another roadblock: The bouncers didn’t believe that me and this other girl Peyton were 18 and they wanted us to show them our IDs. It seemed like the only thing they were going to accept was our physical passports which neither of us was carrying around (smartly), so we had traveled all that way for nothing. Until… the people we were trying to meet up with came running out of the bar! Our two groups merged for a short while and convened at the second fast food restaurant of the night, Popeyes (at this point it was around 2am). However, we realized this new group of mainly U Miami kids kinda sucked and were very full of themselves and rude (we all agreed), so we split off again in search of a nearby speakeasy. We were so so tired but we needed one success before the night was over! And it really was a success.

I kinda thought speakeasies were a relic of the 1920s. I also kinda thought they were dirty and gross. And I surely thought I would never go into one. But I was wrong on all counts! This place was disguised as a barbershop, so the guy let us in only after we requested haircuts. He sat Luke down and actually began shaving his hair before asking us for the secret passcode. We needed a few hints, but eventually he pushed open the mirror behind the barber’s chair to reveal the actual bar: Clean, aestetic, and slightly quirky. There were many upsides to my experience at the speakeasy, and only two downsides: (1) Everyone had to order something (the cheapest drinks they had were 13 Euros, and I really didn’t feel like ingesting anything more), and (2) They closed a half hour after we got there so we didn’t get to soak up the vibe for too long. Nevertheless I ordered a passion fruit Moscow Mule which was tastier than it could have been and we enjoyed a happy ending to a rainy night.

So, although I was incredibly tired the entire night, you can see why I ended up having a good time on Friday night. It was all the community and adventure of clubbing without actually going to the club! As far as my twenty dollars… tragic. Saturday was the real clubbing experience - pregaming at a cheap shots place (we shared a pitcher of some drink that was surprisingly good… until we mixed the alcohol in) and hitting the Twenties club afterwords around 12:45. The group tonight was me, Natalie, Gracie, Araba, Luke, Patrick, Miguel, and Max, and it was raining and cold again because that is just what Spain has become. Natalie worked some instagram magic that allowed us to get in for free, and we circled up directly in front of the DJs on the dance floor. Instead of trying to describe my experience, I am just going to include some of my thoughts on clubbing below:

  1. It’s not terrible but its not that fun either
  2. Can be very expensive
  3. I’m surprised regular clubbers aren’t deaf already
  4. The floor was disgusting and covered in spilled drinks and broken glass.
  5. It would be so greatly improved if I knew like any of the songs at all.

Going clubbing in Spain is also incredibly time-consuming. Because dinner can be at 10 or 11pm, people don’t start getting to the clubs until after midnight. This also means that if you eat dinner at 8 like us, you have time to get cozy reading a book or writing a blog post before leaving for the bar, which will make you tired and make the idea of going out into the cold, wet, dark night very unappealing. Clubs start to get busy around 1 or 1:30am, and the party continues until 4, 5, or 6am. All this to say, you probably won’t be going to sleep before 6am which makes doing anything before noon the next day hard. And you feel really weird sneaking back into the apartment and going to bed when your host mom is less than an hour away from waking up.

We stayed out until 3:45 on Saturday night which means we spent about 4 hours “dancing”. Dancing comes naturally to me when its a song I know and like and have plenty of space to jump around and make large, sweeping movements. It’s a different story when I have people shoving and bumping into me every three seconds as I’m trying to maintain a circle formation with seven other people. Dancing in this case is extremely awkward and difficult. Your options, or at least what I could think of, were to: step side to side with the beat, move your shoulders to the beat, nod your head to the beat, or jump (more like bop up and down) with your hands in the air. By the end of the night I was so tired that my definition of dancing had become: Stand there and at least try to smile.

You know something else that is time-consuming? Blogging! I intend for my blog posts to be short summaries as I think that’s better both for me and for my loyal readers, kudos to you, but I just don’t have it in me to write concisely sometimes. Who knows, hopefully the next blog post you see is a fun little tidbit I wrote over a 15 minute coffee break, but don’t be surprised if its a full-blown book.