Barcelona y Tarragona

I spent the weekend in Barcelona (and went on a day trip from Barcelona to Tarragona), where we found Catalan to be even more confusing and horrible to understand than the good ol' Andalusian Castellano. We had Monday off for "Fiesta de la Hispanidad"... not sure exactly what that is, but it gave me a long weekend so I'll take it. I went to Barcelona with Liliana, Kristin (Liliana's roommate), and Audrey. All of them are from Michigan. I guess that's not very surprising. Anyway, we spent the weekend walking all over creation. I think the best way to show what we did is through pictures.

The Boqueria was easily one of my favorite places. It is an enormous market filled with fresh foods of all kinds for very cheap prices. We went there for lunch one day, bought cheese, bread, olives, and a lot of fruit, and hauled our feast over to Parque Guell (later in the photos) for a picnic. We also picked up food here for dinner for the night that we spent in the airport. Oh, yeah: we spent our last night in the airport because our flight boarded at 5:50am and we were too cheap to pay for a hostel for only a few hours of sleep. That was fun.

I. Love. These. Flowers. So little, so colorful, so cute.

Still in La Boqueria... you'll be shocked to know that I didn't love the meat section quite as much as the other sections (read: I made immature gagging noises whenever we walked down a row with stuff like this). You could still see the hair on the pigs' snouts.

Enjoying the wonderful freshly-squeezed orange juice! Left to right: Liliana, Audrey, Kristin.

In one of the many aisles of La Boqueria. It's not a great picture of me, but I feel like I should be putting more pictures of me up on the blog. Plus I like the woman behind me in her sunglasses. It makes me think of you, Angie.

At first I thought this was cheese, but no, it's fish.

*immature gagging noises*

I don't normally take pictures of the inside of churches (they all start to look the same and I never really want to look back through those pictures later for fun once I take them), but the Catedral in the old Gothic neighborhood was really something. It was built in the Middle Ages. The church felt older and barer than any other church I remember being in.

Another cool thing about the Catedral was that it had a patio with all sorts of trees, shrubbery, and ducks!

I guess I should have warned you that food was going to be a theme of this post. Shops like this made me aware of how close to France we were. Then again, there are shops sort of like this in Sevilla, too, so I might've just wanted to feel French for the weekend.

It's so hard to capture the mood and beauty of the old winding streets. This was as close as I got.

We were pretty close to the water. The bright blue water, white boats, palm trees lining the dock, and beautiful architecture on the shoreline were quite a combination. I had a hard time capturing this, too -- I don't know if it was me or the fact that I had my little point-and-shoot camera as opposed to my beast.

The view down from the little balcony our hostel room had (we shared our room with two guys from Bilbao).

We spent a day on Gaudi, more or less. I love his stuff. Here is one of the apartment buildings he designed. Dad, it reminded me of you. I feel like you were a building, you might be something like this.

La Padrera, the apartment building on a corner that has no ninety-degree angles. I wanted to go in, but it was expensive and the line was at about a 40-min wait. Still, the outside was very cool.

Bonus points if you know what this is!

One of the many fantastic views from Parque Guell (also from Gaudi). The tower building thing is in the park, and then out from there you can see part of Barcelona and the Mediterranean.

Me in the park. I tried to get a good picture of those benches, but it didn't work out.

Kristin taking a picture in Tarragona, which was a very cute little town about an hour-and-a-half away from Barcelona by train. It was an old Roman city, and the main attractions were the ruins there. The old center of the city was also great (on the top of a cliff/hill thingie; the peak of the town) and we spent a decent bit of time wandering around there. A little fair/market was going on and I had the best chocolate covered churros I've had yet. Mmm mm.

The amphitheater in Tarragona with the sea behind it.

Again.

So I know this picture is pretty irrelevant to everything, but I love it. It might be the best picture I've managed to take with my dinky camera. We found this little guy when we were walking along the old (3rd century BC with Medieval Age modifications) city wall. Audrey and I thought she took some pictures of me there, but she must not have pressed the button down hard enough. Oh well. It was gray and gloomy and rainy, anyway, which is another reason I don't have better pictures of the the buildings in Tarragona. I guess it doesn't matter too much--they all start to look the same, anyway.

I have been thinking a decent bit about my College Scholar proposal and what I want to write my thesis on. I kind of want to incorporate southern Spain in some way, but I'm still not sure exactly how. Nando explained some conjugation of past that Spanish has and English doesn't as "feeling farther in the past" than other past tenses, and that really interested me, but I'm not sure how I would go about writing about that. Especially because I have never taken linguistics. Oh well -- I'm keeping my eyes and ears open and hopefully something will jump out at me one of these days. I also need to do some reading. Right. Add it to the list.