Barcelona!

This past week has been Semana Santa which essentially means spring break! Because a general rule of studying abroad is that if you have more than three days in a row off of school you have to go somewhere, my roommate Kathleen (and her dad and brother for the first two days) and I went to Barcelona. For the record, I think that's a good rule :-).

Barcelona was a really exciting city. It's on the Mediterranean Sea, so it's kind of a beach town, and yet if you traveled just up the main thoroughfare, Las Ramblas, and then went down one of the little streets you found yourself in an old Gothic neighborhood. If you went up the street from that you felt like you were on Michigan Ave. in Chicago. I guess to me Barcelona felt like it was a lot of different places all rolled into one. But as Kathleen's guidebook said, when you're in Barcelona "you're not in Spain, you're in Catalunya." And that sentiment was very true; Barcelona felt significantly "less Spanish" than a lot of the other places I've been...and it makes sense concerning the history of the region--Catalan culture and language were so repressed under the Franco dictatorship that now the differences between the region and the rest of Spain are highlighted a bit more as a matter of pride I guess. Honestly, I wish I knew more about Barcelona's history in general because I think I would have appreciated the city even more if I knew more about it, but also, by the end of the trip I missed the "Spanish-ness" of Madrid. However, I would definitely visit Barcelona again and again because there is so much to do there!

Anyway, the highlights of the trip were seeing the buildings and the park designed by Gaudí. I had seen pictures of his work before and I knew it was trippy, but just looking at these buildings that seemed to have no angles and this park that, as Kathleen's brother said, looked like Willy Wonka designed it really makes you reexamine your own perspective. Other highlights of the trip included hunting for beach glass on the shoreline (I grew up on Lake Michigan and never had seen beach glass like that before! I pretended I was finding emeralds instead of worn down pieces of beer bottles). I saw an amazing (free!) art exhibit about an abandoned prison and the grafitti found on the walls there and also these letters written by a woman to her lover, a political prisoner. I also enjoyed going to the Olympic stadium because I have memories of watching the '92 games with my mom when I was four and I think that was when I first learned about Spain. Perhaps the funniest thing on the trip was that the best meal I had was at an Irish pub--I don't know, it's just funny when I think that I was in Spain, but really in Catalunya (with the Sagrada Familia behind me--it's the most famous Gaudí building and is the picture at the top of this post) eating Irish food with a traditional Irish band playing in the background but hearing American pop music blasted over the speakers.

For some reason, it's really hard for me to come up with words right now to describe any more about Barcelona, so I'm just going to let you check out the pictures:
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4