After yet another long week of class, I headed over to Barcelona with two friends. The way to the airport was uneventful (once we figured out that the Karlsruhe airport is actually in Baden-Baden.) The flight was nearly uneventful. For the second flight to Spain in a row, we shared a plane with a group of loud, obnoxious, drunk, 30- and 40- something-year-old German men. A man the row in front of me was taking a lot of pictures, but I was half awake so not really paying attention. Then I realized that even though he was acting like he was taking pictures of his friends in the aisle, the camera was actually pointed too far down… right at me and my friends! So I conjure up the meanest evil-eye I can muster and aim it directly at the camera. Shortly afterwards, he takes the camera down to look at the pictures, and I could tell exactly what moment my “I know what you’re doing, and I don’t approve of it” pictures came up. I heard a very loud “Bahhh!” But at least he put his camera away afterwards. We land and find there’s a bus waiting for us. “This is going too smoothly,” Aymi kept saying. “Something has to go wrong.” We shushed her and told her she’d jinx it.
Our hostel in Barcelona was in a great location- minutes away from the port and from La Rambla, a street I would liken to a Catalonian Third Street Promenade, only without all the clothes stores. It’s known for its living statues (think the made-up creepy people you see in every city, only with much more elaborate costumes), and for a jewelry market on weekends… where I may or may not have bought Christmas gifts. Katie and I walked around a bit, got hungry, then decided to call our other friend, who had decided to stay with her friend for free instead of us. We never did get a hold of her, which was sad, but we didn’t worry since we knew she was with a friend who knew the city better than we did.
After dinner, I discovered that there is definitely a reason they tell girls- particularly blondes (like the other Katie) and redheads- to be particularly careful in Barcelona. I GOT OFFERED DRUGS! I’ve never had that happen before… but I got OFFERED DRUGS! By a stranger! GAH! We ended up getting majorly creeped out and calling it a early night. You know you’ve been in Europe too long if you think you’re in bed early when you go to bed at 2 on a Friday night.
Saturday was a busy day, as Barcelona is a huge city with a ton to see. After getting totally ripped off at the exchange office (I don’t want to talk about it), we browsed the jewelry market, trekked up to Parc Guell, this gorgeous park designed by the famous architect Gaudi, whose works are all over Barcelona. This park is covered in mosaics. I was particularly fond of the mosaic lizard- it took me forever to wait around to get a picture of it that didn’t have any tourists standing in front of it! After spending some time in the park, we walked to La Sagrada Familia, another one of Gaudi’s “masterpieces.” This cathedral- perhaps one of the oddest I’ve ever seen- was started at the end of the 1800s and was unfinished when Gaudi died. Most of his original plans for the finished product were destroyed during the Spanish Civil War, and there’s been a lot of disagreement over what precisely was Gaudi’s original vision, so it’s still not done. It’s expected to be finished in the next 20 years, I think. Then we walked to the Picasso Museum and the Barcelona Cathedral, where there was a mass baptism going on, and you could barely move amidst the sea of strollers. For dinner, we decided to try a restaurant recommended in Katie’s Let’s Go book- one which supposedly had fabulous meals for “astonishingly low” prices, but you needed to show up well before you hoped to eat because the lines would go halfway through the square it occupied. We showed up about 20 minutes before it opened (again, you know you’re in Europe when a restaurant won’t open for dinner before 8:30), and there was already a huge line. Thankfully, we were still among the first to get in. To give you an idea about how popular this place is, the line was so long that some people who were in line BEFORE IT OPENED needed to wait until the first batch of people filled the two floors and outside patio, finished their meals, and left before they could get seated. Anyways, since the prices were good, we ordered a lot, and thus had an expensive meal anyways. (It doesn’t seem so expensive until you convert the euros to dollars, and then think “Oh yeah… crap.”) Afterwards, we went to the Irish pub a couple doors down from our hostel, where we made friends with the Australian doorman, and the two bartenders from New Zealand and Wales. I love English speakers. I’m thoroughly convinced we are some of the friendliest people in the world. Katie and I were the guinea pigs for the New Zealand bartender- she would try to design her own cocktails and give us each a shotglass full of whatever she’d come up with to try it out, and they were usually pretty good. We went to bed early because we had to get up at 6:30 to take the metro to the bus station to catch the 2-hour bus to the airport to catch the 4-hour plane to catch the 1.5-hour train to finally get back to Freiburg. We set our alarms and call Aymi one more time. Still no response.
The next morning, Aymi wasn’t on the bus. This bus company schedules its buses to Girona to correspond with Ryanair flights. We figured it’d be no big deal, as there was another flight 30 minutes after ours, and she could still be on time if she took the bus intended for that flight. We get to the airport, we check in, we eat breakfast, then we go to watch the arrival of the second Barcelona Bus. She’s not on that one either. We call, and it goes straight to voicemail. So we go through security and hope she found a cab. Eventually the plane takes off without her. When we land, we call a friend to make sure Aymi hadn’t tried to contact her. She hadn’t, so we decide if there are no e-mails when we get back to Freiburg, we’ll call the program. This was a terrible situation as we left for our Western Europe field study the next day, and if you miss the group departure, you’re responsible for making (and paying for) your own arrangements to meet up with the group. Katie and I decided to facebook stalk Aymi to find out what her friend’s last name is, then I tracked Aymi’s friend down on Skype, where I discovered that Aymi’s phone had died (which was why we couldn’t get a hold of her), and they lost track of time eating breakfast. By the time they got to the bus station, they realized the next bus to Girona wouldn’t arrive in time for our flight. She could take a cab for 120 euros, but there was no guarantee that would make it on time either. Since Girona is a small airport, there’s no guarantee there’d be another flight to southern Germany that day. So she went to the main Barcelona airport, and said “I need a flight to southern Germany, but not to Munich.” Eventually she paid an extraordinary fee to get on a flight to Stuttgart, had an adventure with her train connections, and made it, exhausted, back to Freiburg and caught the bus to Luxembourg the next day. All without crying or smoking a single cigarette, which we were very proud of her for.
Pictures are on the photo page.