Spain!

10/1/04

so i´m finally getting a chance to post about spain. sheez, so much has happened in the last several days, that i hope i´ll be able to remember all of it. i hate not beiong able to use the internet more often!

so, getting to spain was an adventure in itself. when we arriuved at the airport (really really late) no one we talked to had heard of which airline we needed (veuling), and so we weren´t sure of which terminal we needed to fly out of. to make matters more hatin´it, i had never received an email confirmation for my tickets. uh-oh. i started to really worry that this airline might not have existed and i had bought fake tix. luckily though, in the end we hopped online and found out where we needed to go and everything was cool. phew!

we arrived in spain and had just barely enough time to get a hotel room and sort things out before we met up w/ all of our friends. we were supposed to meet them all at flann obrians irish pub (errr, why were we going to an *irish* pub in barcelona??), and it was so crazy to walk into a room w/ a bunch of people from back home. we were all really excited to be in barcelona and hanging out. it was pretty unreal! after a few drinks we set out to try to find a place to eat. unfortunately, that proved to be harder than i though. everyone in barcelona tells you directions to a place, even if they dont know where it is. we ended up getting several sets of conflicting directions before finding the place we were looking for (which turned out to be “fresc co”… basically fresh choice, so we didnt go in).

eventually we found a place to eat and all got some tapas. the food was pretty decent, but nothing super good… which sucked cause i had been looking forward to tapas forever. last time i went to barcelona, i was so psyched on how good the tapas were and ever since then had been excited to go back and have them again. unfortunately, that day (and most of the following days) the tapas were always just ok.

after eating we all were too tired to go out, and just hung out for a bit and crashed.

10/2/04

the following day was fairly mellow and all of us just kind of wandered about town. we kicked it on the Ramblas which is the main street in town filled w/ shops, cafes, street performers, and people selling small pets (birds and bunnies mainly). spain is *nice*! it´s warm here and it has a really laid back and vibrant fun atmosphere. looking around, everyone here seems happy and smiling and laughing, no one walks at a fast pace, and there´s this exhuberance that i haven´t really seen in the other cities so far. i could really get used to living in a place like this. tons of stuff to do… but less of a frantic pace than london. plus it´s a coastal town, which i think definitely has something to do w/ the atmosphere. even though it´s october already, the weather has been really nice and warm the whole time.. and slightly humid. everything works on a different schedule here. shops close for siesta in the middle of the day, clubs stay open till almost dawn, bars are open late, people stroll the streets *constantly* during the day, and until all hours of the night.

after wandering, we ate fallafel at a place where you can putr together your own fallafel, and then headed back home to start drinking. natasha ended up dropping and breaking a whole bottle of apple shnapps in the grocery store, and form that point on, spilling things ended up being a theme of the night. so, we´re all staying at this *dope* apartment that erica rented. the place is really nice, with a small loft, one bedroom, a kitchen area, and a balcony. having that place, definitely added to things, since we had a place of our own to kick it and party it up.

well, we started drinking and then started playing uno for huge shots of vodka, and nextthing you know, all hell breaks loose. everyone got insanely drunk, to the poinmt of running all artound the place, wrestling each other… several cups were broken, stuff was spilled everywhere, and at one point kevin and yan ended up smashing through a flimsy ikea wall. Oops!! at this point we decided to get the hell out of the house, before we did anything else wrong. we ended up going to a small club right around the corner from home, and the 8 of us (5 of us and anne and 2 of her friends) pretty much took over the dance floor (to everyone else´s dismay) after bumping too many people and breaking yet another glass, we knew we had better get out of there. we went to another bar, and then me and natasha unsuccessfully tried to find our way home for almost 45 minutes (home was actually less than 2 blocks away, but we got soooo lost!)

it was definitely a totally wild out of control night. soo fun! afterwards, kevin and i went to try to find fallafels, but unfortunately after getting lost again and wandering around for like 1.5 hours, we came home empty handed.

*v