ugh… so the whole reason i hate not posting daily, is that i so quickly start forgetting what happened and when. little details start getting lost. especially when travelling and there is just soo much going on, it´s so easy to start forgetting bits and pieces… but you really dont want to forget and levae those little details behind. it sucks to remember only the major highlights and what famous monuments you saw, but to forget all the tiny things like the little cafe around the corner or that one street performer that was especially funny or just a random quirky incident…
anyways, i dont have too much time online, so i´ll try to review the last 3 days quickly here and give just the highlights.
10/5/04
today everyone was a bit tired from the night before and feeling a bit lazy. we decided to meet at the boqueria market, this huge outdoor market on the ramblas. this place was nuts! they sold all sorts of crazy seafood (most of it still alive and sometimes we´d see clams sticking their tongues out at us), weird fruits from all over the world, emu eggs almost as big as your head, and crazy meats like bunnies (so sad!!), whole pig legs, etc.
after the market caryn and i headed up to the miro museum. this museums not only had tons of miro´s stuff (he´s one of my favorite artists) but also a bunch of other moder art exhibits. they even had some mobiles made by calder. one of the art pieces i remember most from the museum was called “when angels come too late”. it was a biblical scene. the one where abraham takes his only son to the top of the mountain to sacrifice him, but god cuts in just in time and tells hime to spare the child. so the painting shows abraham with ahuge knife about to kill his son, and an angel flying down telling him to stop. at first, i didn´t quite get why this was called “when angels come too late”, but then i noticed that there was a tiny peephole right in the middle of the painting…. you look through the peephoole, and it´s playing the video of the beheading that the kidnappers in iraq did a few months back. ugh. so disturbing. but at the same time, i thought the piece was just so brilliant and a really really creative idea.
after the museum, caryn and i wandered around that area (the top of montjuic aka jew mountain). we wanted to take a cable car to the top to see this castle, but the cable car was broken. kater that night, we all went out to this bar that was the oldest bar in spain. it was a couple hundred years old, and it looked it which made it really cool. tons of super old dusty bottles lined the walls etc. we all bought some absinthe and did the whole light your sugar cube on fire and melt it into the glass thing. dude, that shit tastes soooo horrible. i couldnt drink more than a couple sips. after hitting a couple other bars, we went to this absolutely horrible club. the music was shite, and the crowd was so totally whack. complete meat market, so we called it a night. it´s crazy just how late everyone goes out. every time that we´ve gone out i look at my watch and it´s like 3 am and we´re still out, this city never sleeps!! so cool!
10/6/04
erica randomly heard about this huge labyrinth in the city. we took the metro to this place that was on the barcelona university campus. we really wondered if this maze would be small and dorky and whatnot, but it actually turned out to be a huge maze that we got totally lost in. it was hella fun to wander through it and eventually we found the center. after that you could wander around the park surrounding the labyrinth and we saw cool koi ponds, fountains, etc. it was really nice to get out of the city and into the “forest” foir a bit.
we spent most of the rest of the day wnadering around from internet cafe to internet cafe. we really needed to figure out how we would get to morocco but there were so many different options (trains, planes, etc) that it was hard to see how we would get the fastest route for the least $$. we wasted soooo much time online (including wasting tons of erica and kevins time, sorry!!). later that night everyone went out again, but i decided to crash out early (early being 1:30am) since i was tired from the nght before…. of course the next day i heard that everyone had a totally insanely fun night and i regretted going to bed early.
10/7/04
today was our last full day in barcelona. after having a really good lunch (this chicken stuffed w/plums that i kept seeing on menus here), caryn and i got online *again*, that would become the theme of the day. we spent soo much time online today researching options for morocco. ugh. anyways, the one cool thing we did do, was to check out the bastillo house, a house that gaudi designed. this place was a total trip. there were hardly any straight lines in the whole place and all the walls, windows, staircases, etc were all these curvy wavy lines. it was architecturaly crazy.
at night we all went out to some really good mediterranean food for dinner. it was our last dinner together in spain (and my last dinner w/ erica and kevin for the next year 🙁 . it´s sad that the time in barcelona is over… it was a really nice city.
10/8/04
ok, so we´re leaving tonight for morocoo. guess how we´re getting there in the end?? we´re *driving*. yes. driving. from barcelona. we´re renting a car tonight at 6pm and making the *13* hour drive down the coast to algeciras at the very bottom tip of spain. when we get there (tomorrow morning), we take the ferry over the straight of gibraltar and arrive in tangier, morocco, africa!!! then we take a 9 hour train from there south to marrakech!! it´s gonna be a hell of a journey. who knows what the internet situation is like in morocco, so i may not be posting for a while (12 days in morocco)….
*v