barcelona

what is travel without adventure, pain and some desperate need of a haircut. since valencia we have been addicted to eating baguette sandwiches at the fast food place ‘pans’, in barcelona we have one right across the street from our hostel, plus there is a mouse who shares our love for the baguette/bacon hot dog so that automatically makes me want to go back. our train ride was successful. it was on time, we had tickets and there were no surprises. i ripped my bag, most likely due to the weight of paper (brochures, maps and the 5 kg september issue of vogue españa) inside it, so now i need a new one (somehow my lack of packing skills brings me to a similar predicament nearly every time i travel). my back feels broken from carrying the bags through a good chunk of the city. we went to the wrong hostel (the centric hostel not the centric point… thanks for nothing lonely planet) and thus got off the wrong metro stop, the correct location was only 6 blocks away but of course 6 blocks can feel like to the moon and back when your tired, sweaty and ready to be broken in half by your luggage. barcelona is, weather wise, much cooler then the rest of the places we’ve visited so far, which is a blessing. it does not, however, discourage the boys in our room to crank up the a/c every chance they get. i am now also sick with a cold. the last 4 days i will try to tough it out and ignore it, under my 6 euro blanket and top sheet. i will be a predictable mess upon my arrival back home. it’s only been a day here in barcelona but gaudis’ presence is well known. we are staying just across the street from the famous casa batllo with it’s storm trooper-esuqe balconies and the first thing we went to see was la sagrada famillia, which has been under construction for over 100 years and is nowhere near being completed. gaudi’s work is so surreal it looks like something belonging at a theme park, it is very obvious when walking though park güell, which by the way is covered in it’s entirety by tourists, there was no single opportunity to take a photograph with an empty background, there were people everywhere but the sights are well worth seeing. jason is not interested in seeing gaudi’s modernism as much as i am so we spent the rest of the day browsing thorough macba (museu d’art contemporani de barcelona), where we even made some modern art ourselves, when the lady handed us macba stickers and asked to display them somewhere visible (see photo below, i call a stroke of genius). contemporary noises included the museum is located near la rambla (the shopping street in the old district of the city) so we walked the way down to the port, we had some delicious waffles, ate some pans and complained about our sore sore feet. new pair of sneakers later i am ready for the upcoming days in barcelona. p.s colin-we thought about you around photo #5 😉 xoxo