2.Catalan. You can’t read anything in Barcelona… I know they want to be separated from Spain and all, but still. A little Spanish on the side of a building or menu would be nice.
3.Valencia takes more pride in the antiquity of their city. Barcelona is currently turning its bull ring into a shopping center… lame.
4.The dogs are soo well behaved in Valencia. It’s amazing how well behaved all the dogs are here. In Barcelona, a dog came and stole my friend Emily’s turkey in the park…
5.People are nicer in Valencia.
6.Chocolate con churros… they don’t know how to do it in Barcelona…
7.Valencia’s streets are cleaner.
8.The metro’s quite sketch in Barcelona. The machine to buy tickets broke down, and then the door wouldn’t open at our stop, so we had to get off one down, wait 5 mins for the next one to come along and take us back to where we needed to get off.
9.Stuff is way more expensive in Barcelona than in Valencia.
10. It’s difficult to navigate through Barcelona. Valencia is pretty straight forward… (old river here, park there, old city here, new center there, beach here, mountains there---)
As one may guess, I went to Barcelona this weekend with ISA on one of our excursion trips. We left early Friday morning, had a 5 hour bus ride and got in Barcelona around lunchtime (2PM). When we got there we decided to just walk around and so we went to a restaurant and got some coffee. We there proceeded to walk around and wandered our way into a chocolate museum. I got a GOLDEN TICKET….! (Actually it was silver, but still very cool.) So that was good times… learning about the coco bean and whatnot. Then we found our beloved OpenCor, got us some bread, cheese, chocolate and box wine and had ourselves a fiesta in the hotel room for the rest of the night.
Saturday was a crazy long day. I woke up super early for some reason, as in 7am and then got ready and made my roomie come with me to get some b-fast in the hotel. We did that, chilled, and then everyone hopped on the bus and we went on a tour of the cathedral, some churches, random streets… Our tour guide was Guillermo. He had a habit of ignoring everyone else on the tour and talking to just me. People started asking me how my personal tour was going… it was funny.
Thus after that, me and the girls went and grabbed some coffee quick and then headed into the Picasso museum. We spent a couple of hours there, and it was amazing! Probably my most favorite part of the trip. I grabbed some postcards of my favorite paintings, and I plan on framing those to make a little wall collage when I get back home. I really liked Picasso’s paintings from the blue period. There was one that I literally went back to look at 5 times- “Azoteas de Barcelona.” I don’t know why, it was captivating… I also liked his collection of “Las Meninas”, which are 48 renditions of the Velazquez painting (which we happened to see in the Prado Museum in Madrid). So that was super guay too.
After that, we went to las Ramblas, which is a big market street that you can buy some really neat things in. (You have to be careful there though… people like to rob you there more than anywhere else in the city I guess….). Then we made our way to the Sagrada Familia, which is really amazing architecture by Gaudí. But it was never finished and is still a work in progress…
Then I went and had some chocolate con churros with some other chicas. (Except it was hot chocolate like we have in the US. So that was kind of a letdown.) After that excursion, I came back to the hotel, and there were a ton of people in my room as always. : ) So, I was coerced into going out with all of them… First we went to this bar DowJones which was like the stock market of alcohol. It was the COOLEST thing ever. Depending on what drinks were being sold and which ones weren’t, the price would fluctuate. So I got some Heineken pretty cheap, and then the market crashed, so my friend Kelsey and I got some Strongbow as well. It was sooo much fun. We just loved sitting there staring at the screen. Haha!
Then the group decided it was time to move on so we took the sketch metro the beach area. There we split up, some of the people went to the Ice Bar, and then some of us went to a discoteca. I chose discoteca: A. If I wanted to drink in the cold, I can just go sit outside in the snow at home and drink something… B. I didn’t have to pay cover to get into the discoteca.
However, both of our groups ran into some kind of scary situations with guys trying to grab us and take us somewhere… Luckily we had our heads on and were able to steer clear of trouble for the most part. No one got back until approximately 5am or later… crazy. And the norm is to stay out even later… =/. So after taking the longest shower of my life in the hotel and sleeping for a couple hours a new day started.
We went on a tour of Parque Guell and Paseo de Gracia (more Gaudí architecture), which was cool, but due to a severe lack of sleep I (along with a good majority of the group) was dragging. So after some free time for lunch (and seeing a guy get chased around by 20 policemen at the port) we finally got on the bus and I slept the whole way home.
So, an interesting weekend. There were some aspects of Barcelona that I thoroughly enjoyed- mainly the museums and architecture. However, Barcelona is a huge city with A LOT of creepers and I have no ambition to return there… enough said, I have more appreciation for Valencia now and it was really nice to get home and sleep in my own bed.
Roman columns.
Gaudí architecture.
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