Week 27: School continues… and I fall in love.

Just another fantastic week in the life… living the dream. Wow, has this week been amazing! You know, except for midterm exams. Without those, this week would have gone a little better. However, nonetheless, my week still started out wonderfully, with showing Walker around a little more on Monday, and a fabulous day at my internship, and continued to increase in quality from then on!

I went to my internship during the day on Monday, getting in a little late because the class I normally would go to first hour in the morning had misbehaved and so the teacher had told me not to bother coming in. The teachers I work with in my internship always want me to work on speaking exercises with the kids, taking advantage of my ability to correct them as a native speaker, and I happily oblige them. So I went through all my different English classes and my French class at the end of the day, always a little bit on edge as there’s always something unexpected that mixes up my day. After my internship, I met Walker up in the main square, and from there we went on a nice walk on the sendero ecológico to see the valley and the river, and to have a chat. After we had taken in the fresh air and the gorgeous views, and after we spent some more time reminiscing on the past semester, Walker decided that it was time for him to get back to Madrid to be able to meet up with more friends, and so I walked him to the bus station and helped him get a ticket, and off he went. Altogether, a great visit from a great (albeit British) friend. ;)

It really is beautiful!

Walker enjoying the sights.

It was a great visit!

St. Josef Market.

Coffee and a pastry for breakfast, as has become my travel norm.

Fresh juice of every color and flavor imaginable!

Passing by City Hall on our way around the city.

The Catalonian flag, something we saw a lot of around the city.

We even saw parakeets all over!

One of my favorite places in Barcelona.

Woolly Mammoth sculpture in the park!

The Arc de Triomf.

The beach!

My first taste of Indian food. It was fantastic!

The famous opera hall.

First time at a classical opera!

The famous opera itself.

One of the most famous churches in the world.

The main nave of the church.

Brilliant colors reflecting through the windows with the sunlight.

A puzzle found on the outside façade, with explanation in the museum.

A scale model of the church. The tan parts are what has yet to be built.

View of the city from the tower. 

Construction between the towers. 

Just one example of the millions of little details throughout the church. 

Descending from the tower heights. 

A beautiful view of the interior.

One last view of the whole thing. 

A view of the city as seen on top of a hill behind Parc Güell.

An emblem representing the name of the park.

Looking down the hill at the entire city. <3

On Tuesday, I woke up in the morning with a smile on my face, because I remembered that I only had two classes instead of three, because my internship class was irrelevant, having no midterm exam. So, the two classes that I went to consisted of review and more review, and so the morning went fairly easily (if a bit slow). The evening went by fast, with my alternating between procrastinating and studying. Wednesday went pretty fast as well, as I had theology class and my internship as usual. In my internship, I helped kids in Santi’s class with a writing exercise, which I really liked because I’m a tutor in the Writing Center in my university, so I have a lot of experience working with students’ writing one-on-one. My first actual midterm exam was also that day, theology, which I felt a little shaky about afterward, but we’ll see how it turns out. In the evening, I studied for my theater exam the next day with a couple of classmates, and then went home to chill and de-stress…and of course I had to make sure to get lots of sleep, because Thursday was a bit of a doozy.

Thursday was the motherlode of exams. I ended up having three right in a row. Can you say ouch. I got up a little early with the intention of studying, but I ended up just taking my time getting ready for the day, which went a little ways to lowering my stress level, but not much. I went into my exams for theater, literature, and history feeling fairly confident but not cocky, and I definitely liked the theater and literature exams more, as I had more to say. History has always been interesting to me, but not quite interesting enough to merit extra effort, so I where I wasn’t exactly pleased with what I wrote on the exam, I’m hoping it’s enough. In the evening, I definitely took advantage of the time to just relax and prepare for the big trip I had coming up… to Barcelona!

My American friend and Fundación classmate Amanda and I hopped on a bus to Madrid on Thursday night, to catch an overnight bus from Madrid to Barcelona! We had both remarked in the past couple weeks how we didn’t have any plans for this weekend, but wanted to go somewhere, and as neither of us had yet seen the famous northeastern Spanish city, we booked our tickets and hostel that same day. After a little bit of a hassle trying to find the correct bus that would take us there, we got on the bus, and settled in for a rickety night’s sleep (I made sure to take some melatonin to try to help the process). We ended up getting in at a nice early 7:20AM, and I actually felt a tiny bit refreshed, probably due mostly to the melatonin. The first thing Amanda wanted to do was find a wholesome breakfast wandering through one of the famous markets in the city, and I couldn’t argue. Thanks to Amanda’s excellent navigational skills and smart thinking downloading an offline map, we made it to the market not too much later, where we found a coffee and some excellent pastries for breakfast, and I even got to speak some French to one of the employees! We then continued on wandering through the market, taking in all the sights and smells.

Throughout the day, we really made our way around - we found a park with a zoo, where we avoided the 18€ entry fee in favor of discovering more of the city, and we ended up discovering some pretty cool sights in the park along the way, including a building tied to the tutelage of Gaudí, a greenhouse with plenty of beautiful shrubs, and even a Tai-Chi class or two on some of the lawns in the park. It was a great way to spend a few hours, and definitely a cool way to discover the city.

As we got through the park, we noticed a famous landmark: the Arc de Triomf! (That's Catalan, not Spanish or French.) We enjoyed it from a distance, and I noted how it definitely is more integrated into the city than its French counterpart; the French one has an entire plaza around it, with twelve different streets leading straight into the roundabout surrounding the monument, whereas the Barcelona structure has a long strip of pavement in front of it but is located in the middle of the city, with streets surrounding but not leading directly to it. Then, after all that sightseeing, we decided it was time to go to the sea, if only to have a look. We enjoyed it altogether (how can you not enjoy the sea?), and we decided we could of course understand how such a lovely beach city could attract the attention and votes of the International Olympic Committee for the 1992 Olympic Games (even though we didn’t get to visit the Olympic park and stadium the whole weekend). It was definitely a great way to spend an afternoon!

After seeing all those sights, we were feeling pretty hungry, and as Amanda had spotted an Indian restaurant right down the block from our hostel, I decided to try my first ever taste of Indian food. It ended up being excellent, as we each had a sampler dish filled with samosas and other typical Indian cuisine. I ended up really enjoying it, and being glad that I decided to try something new - and Amanda was certainly happy, as Indian is one of her favorite cuisines. We then decided to take a little nap, after all the excellent food and sights that we had already seen, to prepare for whatever we would decide to do in the evening.

The nap refreshed us, and helped us to decide what the rest of our day would look like. We ended up walking around a while, picking up dinner at a grocery store as well as some wine and nail polish to finish off the afternoon, and then we decided to check two items off our list at once: go see the famous Palau de la Música Catalana, while seeing an opera! We actually ended up getting last-minute seats for “Carmen” that night, and it was excellent! It was amazing actually seeing classic opera for the first time, and despite our not so great seats, we had a great time! Afterwards, we decided not to push it for the day, as it had already been long and filled with sightseeing and fun activities, so we turned in at the hostel, to get ready for the next day.

Saturday wasn’t so much filled with busyness as it was with wonder: we finally saw La Sagrada Família! As we made our way over to the beautiful brainchild of Gaudí, we got breakfast in another market, and then we finally saw it for the first time. It was like a little echo of the sentiment I had felt seeing the Eiffel Tower for the first time; in both cases, I immediately fell under its spell, and fell in love. Little did I know that my amazement, that only grew and grew as the day went on and we got closer and closer to the actual monument, would completely overwhelm me as we made our way inside.

Thanks to purchasing tickets in advance, we got to skip the hours-long line, and so we just had to wait to pick up our audio guides. Once we got them, we started the tour, and oh my goodness… The only words I have for those first moments are that the meticulous thought put into every single detail in the space captured my heart, and I haven’t gotten it back since. It was so enchantingly beautiful, and I couldn’t have asked for more. Truth be told, I hadn’t really known what to expect from the church, other than it was a famous church that I absolutely must see in Barcelona, and so when I started listening to the details in every single inch of the space, and the story behind it all, completely unaware, I was blown away. We even went up into the tower, where we saw even more artisanal and symbolic carvings and decoration, and at that instant, I knew I would be leaving my heart in Barcelona. What an amazing moment.

After finally coming down from the clouds a tiny bit, we made our way over to Parc Güell, to see more of Gaudí’s work. The Barcelona metro is one of the places I have felt the least safe in Europe, and so I made sure to keep an eye on my pockets and purse and on Amanda’s as well - we actually have a friend who caught someone pickpocketing her, but she luckily didn’t actually lose anything. That was a little jolt of reality in an otherwise unreal day. After figuring out that only recently had admission to the park risen to 8€ per person instead of free, we walked around the park barriers, looking in, to see what we could. We actually ended up running into a couple groups of other students from the Fundación, as they had also chosen this weekend to come to Barcelona, so we walked with them for a little bit while we decided what to do next.

We then decided to get an early dinner at a tapas place, and our next move ended up being a pub crawl! We were certainly excited for the event, as neither of us had been on one before. We met a few cool people, our host was hilarious and great, and we had lots of fun! (Just to elaborate a tiny bit, many Harry Potter shots were involved, as well as good music and lots of dancing! It was really fun.) And so our night ended early the next morning, grabbing a cab back to our hostel, and then sleeping in until 11 the next day.

Sunday we definitely took as our chill day. We once again walked along the beach a lot, and this time we saw some slack liners and skipped some rocks into the sea. After such a great weekend, there wasn’t much left for us to do (even though we hadn’t necessarily hit up all the main attractions, like Montjüic). We ended up chilling and wandering around the city for the better part of the day, and then we headed to the station to grab another overnight bus back to Madrid. Unfortunately we went to the wrong bus station first, so we missed our original bus, but we luckily got to get on the next one, and settled in for a not too perfect night’s sleep.

Barcelona was an absolute wonder to visit this weekend, and it was even better traveling with a great friend! We made new friends, saw new places, and certainly had a wonderful experience. The beautiful church was of course not the least of our experiences, but there were many other enchantments to Barcelona that have me sure that I’ll come back soon. For the moment, I’m just happy to be done and over with midterm exams - but still a little ways away from the end of the semester. On to the next; homework, Toledo life, and travel await me. Until next time - ¡Hasta pronto!