Welcome to Barca! June 27th

Our first day in Spain was a whirl wind day! We all woke up at 8 am to catch breakfast and had a meeting in the union with a guy from the U.S. embassy to discuss things we should and shouldn’t do in Barcelona. That was while they were checking all of our passports and such. Our first activity was going on an SAS trip to Montserrat which is this amazing mountain about 40 minutes outside of Barcelona that is home to a large monastery. We met to go on that in the union at 10:45 am, and my friend’s and I got yelled at because we had shorts on. I guess I forgot monks don’t really like sexy legs. So, we changed, boarded the bus, and started the drive. It was really pretty once we got to the mountain but driving up the mountain was INSANE. The road was super small, super curvy, and we were in a huge tour bus. Insane. My friend Candice didn’t go, but she would have freaked out if she was. She is afraid of heights. We got to the top of the mountain and were allowed to wander around.

It has the most beautiful views I have ever seen. Montserrat translates to Serrated Mountain because the mountain has these awesome cuts in them. We went to the main church of the monastery where the statue of the Black Madonna is. She represents the black Virgin Mary which some people believe is who the Virgin Mary was. Anyways, people come from far and wide to touch her orb which is supposed to make miracles happen. Also, it is said that if you kiss her, you will have a baby. We thought that was a little funny, but while we were waiting in line to touch the orb, we met a German family in front of us. The woman said she kissed the orb 10 years ago, and her 9 year old daughter was sitting right next to her. Pretty crazy. We ended up hopping out of line though because it was an hour and a half wait, and there was a lot more to see around the mountain. We did a little hiking and got an even better view. I really loved it. It was breathtaking. It is the second most popular place to visit and has 1 million visitors a year. People from Barcelona come all the time because they truly believe that it makes miracles happen.

On the way back, I slept a little on the bus. We then went to explore a little bit. We walked up Las Ramblas which is the main street in Barcelona. It cuts through the city, and there are a ton of people trying to sell stuff and steal stuff up and down the street. I can’t tell you how many people told us to watch our belongings. We ended up wandering off the main road and found a cute place to have tapas and sangria. Tapas is small portions of food that you share as a small meal. It was delicious, but the waiter was a little crazy. He kept asking for Maggie’s number and even gave us paper and pen to write it. We had seafood paella which is rice and seafood, croquettes which is deep fried cheese and ham, and prawns. It was delicious. After dinner, we wandered around some more. We kind of got into a bad part of town right around when the sun was going down which was a little scary, but we were fine. We saw two prostitutes and a poor homeless boy on the side of the street which was a little sad. I mean, it is like any major city, so what can you expect? There was also a crazy guy who jumped in the fountain. I think he was on something, but there are a lot of people like that running around Barcelona.

So, we started to look for a bar to go to. When walking up and down Las Ramblas, we got a ton of flyers about bar crawls and such. We weren’t really interested in any because they were sketchy people, but we met this one guy from Britain and decided to just go for it because we really didn’t know where else to go. We ended up having a great time and going to four different bars. We met a TON of people. We met guys from Ireland, Italy, Canada, and Britain. We also met a girl from Australia. The crazy thing was that we didn’t meet one Spaniard which was super weird. One thing I learned about Barcelona is that it is HUGE. There are 5 million people living there and a ton of them aren’t Spanish. Lots of young people move there because it is such a party city. People work to promote bar crawls and stuff like that just to be around the city. It is a great place to be young. During the bar crawl, we sang the Fresh Prince theme song because Candice is from Philly.

It is crazy how much of our culture they are aware of. At the last place which was the “disco” or club, they played a ton of 90s music which was pretty fun actually. At one of the bars, there was a really creepy guy that sat next to Katie saying things such as “I’m a gentleman, not a barbarian”. Guys that are not from the U.S. are a little creepy, but we stuck together, so it was funnier than anything. Also, according to Megan and Candice, the cops here are SUPER hot.  I don’t really see it, but eh. We also went to a rock bar that had huge headphone right at the bar. They played music like Guns and Roses and hardcore stuff like that. Candice was really in her element. We stayed out until about 4 or 4:30 a.m. then headed back to the ship. It was a great day.