Barcelona: October 30th-November 2nd
Our last official, Hamilton-sponsored excursion took place over Halloween weekend. After meeting everyone in the airport and flying to Barcelona, we explored our hotel in the middle of the famed modernist architecture of beautiful Barcelona. From my hotel room window (if you craned your head out the window a bit, which was always open because the weather was beautiful) you could see a house built by Antonio Gaudí, his famous Sagrada Familia cathedral and the mountains looming in the distance. The only thing missing was a view of the Mediterranean! After checking in we had our usual HUGE multi-course Hamilton meal and walked it off while viewing some of the incredible Spanish Modernist architecture in our neighborhood. Multiple houses by Gaudí, all the things I could view from my window but this time up close and spectacular!
Here's a photo of me on the terrace of our hotel- mountains and Gaudí in the background.
We also went inside this church later, but it's been under construction foreverrr due to lack of funds, so there was mostly just scaffolding and some abstract stained-glass windows on the inside. After our night-time tour of the neighborhood, a bunch of us took the metro to these huge fountains where there is a colored lights and music spectacular that they put on, it was really awesome and included a queen song that went like this: BARCELLOOOOOONA! over and over. We mostly had low-key nights in Barcelona because we had a group-wide curfew of 1:30, and a lot of the clubs in Barcelona didn't even open until then soooo we didn't go out much. I did a bit of window shopping around our neighborhood, the shops were all very upscale and cool. I found out that this store called Desigual (known for its clothes with crazy patterns and color combinations) has a birthday celebration each summer where if you show up in your birthday suit to the store, you get to pick out a free outfit!
We also found an amazing restaurant that consisted of a conveyer belt of delicious asian food- sushi, miso soup, fried everything, dumplings, shrimps, desserts, udon noodles, chicken skewers, nom nom nom. It was all you can eat so basically we all went crazy. Here is a photo of me, gone crazy, with my stack of plates and the conveyor belt in the background.
After this restaurant we had enough fuel for the next couple days, in which we toured the inside of a lot of very cool Gaudí houses, celebrated Halloween by touring the Gothic architecture in the old neighborhood (I dressed up as a ballerina and no one really got it. Halloween isn't all that big here), and had a fabulous seafood dinner (and a lot of fabulous wine) at a restaurant that looked out on the Mediterranean from the beach. Oh and I can't forget to tell you about the AMAZING trip we had to the Picasso museum! This museum has 3, 500 works of art by Picasso, including a lot of his early work. It was an amazing and overwhelming representation of his evolution as an artist from master of technique and composition to a series cubist and abstract representations of the famous Velzaquez painting "Las Meninas." I was also in full costume for this tour, so I got a lot of puzzled looks from tourists while I was trucking around in my purple tutu.
After this restaurant we had enough fuel for the next couple days, in which we toured the inside of a lot of very cool Gaudí houses, celebrated Halloween by touring the Gothic architecture in the old neighborhood (I dressed up as a ballerina and no one really got it. Halloween isn't all that big here), and had a fabulous seafood dinner (and a lot of fabulous wine) at a restaurant that looked out on the Mediterranean from the beach. Oh and I can't forget to tell you about the AMAZING trip we had to the Picasso museum! This museum has 3, 500 works of art by Picasso, including a lot of his early work. It was an amazing and overwhelming representation of his evolution as an artist from master of technique and composition to a series cubist and abstract representations of the famous Velzaquez painting "Las Meninas." I was also in full costume for this tour, so I got a lot of puzzled looks from tourists while I was trucking around in my purple tutu.
The great thing about Barcelona was that we had good chunks of free time to explore the city and also two Spanish university students came along with us. Daniela (one of the students- pictured above with me under the Arco de Triunfo) had lived in Barcelona so she brought us to a really great tapas bar and some cool neighborhoods full of thrift stores. I didn't get anything but I did find a mysterious stash of tshirts from Minnesota athletics!! I was so excited- there were shirts from the Eden Prairie Soccer Association, from Eagan, Burnsville, Mound, Harris and many more. It was the craziest thing. Plus they all cost like 25 euros and had probably most recently been worn by sweaty Minnesotan teenagers.
Here's a photo from inside the famous Barcelona market we visited. These are some of the fresh juices you can get. I got coconut, it was thick and delicious, sweet just my luck. My favorite kind of juice! It was sensory overload and I wanted to buy everything. There were tons of chocolates (I bought some for my host family) and AMAZING candied ginger which is one of my favorite snacks in the whole world. I wanted to stay here and explore and eat forever, but we had to go to Figueras to visit the Teatro Museo Dalí. It's an entire HUGE museum devoted to Salvador Dalí's work. It was pretty amazing, and the experience itself was surrealist because the museum used to be a theatre so the exhibition space is very unique. I got lost a lot, there were a lot of winding hallways and dead-ends and like five floors and small, dimly-lit rooms where you had to get up really close to the small drawings and paintings to really see them. Then as soon as your eyes had adjusted to peering at a tiny oil painting of a person made out of rocks in a velvet-lined room with a very low ceiling, you walked into a room where the entire ceiling was painted geometrically to make you think you were looking up into the sky and at people who were standing on top of your point of view and rising into the sky. Dalí had an impressive command of painting technique and his vision was remarkable, but I was pretty overwhelmed after hours of exploring this amazing museum. If you get a chance, it's definitely worth the short trip outside of Barcelona.
Basically after that, I just walked around Barcelona with friends, listened to people speaking Catalan, enjoyed the beautiful weather and parks and prepared myself to return to Madrid, where I could once again understand all the street signs!
Love you all and hope to connect with you soon! Much more to come about Paris and Morocco.
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