After taking all modes of transportation possible, we are home from our weekend in Barcelona!

Friday morning I got up at 5:00 in order to be ready in time for my 6:00 bus out of Caceres. My mom took me to the bus station and as I waited for my bus to arrive, I noticed a tall man with another woman next to him speaking English to each other. This is quite the rarity in Caceres so I knew that they must have been Americans who happened to be visiting Caceres. When the bus arrived, the woman I saw earlier seemed to be a little confused about what to do, so I decided I would go and help her. She appreciated my help and we ended up sitting on the bus together for the entire trip. It is always nice to have a travel companion, and especially one that speaks your own language. Diane, the woman on the bus, began telling me about her family and why she was in Caceres. The man that had dropped her off was her son in law, Wayne Simion. I thought that he looked familiar and turns out Wayne used to play basketball for Kansas and then the Miami Heat. He is now playing for the pro team here in Caceres and is living here with his wife and two little girls. Katy, his wife, just had another baby so Diane wanted to come over and visit. It also turns out that the church I had been looking into going is the one that they attend, we happen to live very close to each other as well, and on top of all of that, there is a couple in that church that is from the states, Ames to be exact. What a small world! We continued to talk the rest of the way to the bus station, and when we arrived, Diane offered to pay for a taxi for the two of us. This was such a blessing since I had been a little nervous about taking the metros by myself, and since I was on a time crunch, this worked out perfectly for me. We rode the taxi together to the airport and parted ways after we both got settled at our gates. It was such a pleasure meeting Diane and a huge blessing to have someone to travel with. God has definitely been watching over me on my travels!

After I left Diane, I made my way to find Caitlin. Luckily, we found each other right away at the place I had told her to meet. We headed towards our gate and checked into our flight with no problems. We left shortly after one and arrived outside of Barcelona about an hour later. Caitlin and I hopped a bus out of the airport and managed to navigate the metros in Barcelona without any problems. I was feeling pretty proud of myself by the time we arrived at our hostel after doing a day of traveling without any problems. We met up with Ginny, Sean and Andrew at the hostel and grabbed a quick bite to eat. After we got all settled in after dinner we decided to go walk around town for a bit to see where abouts we were. Our hostel, Kabul Backpackers Hostel, was in a perfect location. We were right along the main strip in Barcelona known as Las Rambas. Las Rambas has street vendors, musicians, artists and street performers lining the whole strip. It is entertaining in itself to just walk it at night to see all of the people and the different artists that are out that particular night. As we made our way down the road, we stopped and listened to a reggae band that was playing. They played a lot of Bob Marley covers and were actually pretty good; we even ended up buying one of their cds. After we left the band, we walked towards the marina. Barcelona is right on the water so at the end of las rambas there is a giant marina and a mall across a bridge that has a bunch of shops and restaurants. We walked across the bridge and enjoyed seeing all the people taking in the night on the water. We headed back to our hostel around 9 to get some food and settle in for the night. We were all very tired after a long day of traveling and just wanted to lay low for the evening. Our room in the hostel, rm 202, was apparently known at Club 202. It's a 20 person room with bunk beads and apparently everyone likes to party in there before and after the bars. We listened to all of the previous guests stories about who had stayed there the night before and all of the crazy stories they had about previous weekends. We ended up staying up talking with our new roommates for the rest of the night. We met a couple from Canada, a guy on an extended holiday from Australia, a student from Munich and a few other French guys. It was really cool to hear about all of their travels and the places they want to go and have been. Many of them had come to Barcelona only planning to stay a few days, but have extended their stay for more than a month. The majority of them were on no sort of a timeline, just seeing where they end up. A very free spirited group and a lot of fun to be around.

Saturday morning we woke up and got ready to see more of the city. Ginny, Caitlin, Sean and I walked around looking for the Picasso museum and ended up stopping at two different cathedrals on the way there. One was called the Santa del Mar and had some of the most beautiful ceilings and stained glass windows I have ever seen. The other cathedral had a large plaza with trees, a fishpond, swans and other plants inside it. I have yet to go to a cathedral that has not impressed me. After the cathedrals, we made out way to the Picasso museum. The museum had a large collection of Picassos works from the beginning of his career until the end. It walked you through his earliest sketches into his more famous paintings and ended with his ceramic work. I really do enjoy art museums so it was nice to be able to take some time to look at all of the different paintings that he had done. After the museum, we grabbed a bite to eat and went back to the hostel to meet up with some of the other students from ISU that happened to be in Barcelona as well. The other group needed a place to put their bags for the night so we packed the rest of their things in our lockers. We all rested for about an hour and then went back out to look for Olympic Park. Barcelona held the Olympics in 1992 and the main park is on top of one of the mountains that overlooks Barcelona. We hiked up that and enjoyed walking around the soccer stadium as well as the other plazas and stadiums that they had built for the Olympics. It was cool to see where all of that took place. On our way down from the mountain, we stopped at the old palace to look at another art exhibit that they had open to the public for free. The old palace was enormous and had a large cascading staircase that went all the way down to the road with fountains along side it. After all of that walking, we were all getting pretty hungry and decided to find a place to eat. We ended up at a sports bar that had some good American food in it. We decided that since we had been eating Spanish cuisine all weekend that we could treat ourselves to some good American food. The bar had nachos, quesadillas, wings, pizza, burgers, mozzarella sticks and chicken fingers. Let's just say I have been craving all of those foods since I got to Spain so I was pretty excited. Caitlin and I shared some nachos and chicken fingers and sat with the rest of the girls for the next hour and waited for the guys to get done. After dinner, we made our way back to the hostel. Some of the people in our room were going out, so a group of us decided that we would go check out some of the town at night. We went to go look for one of the more famous fountains in Barcelona that is lit up at night, but to our dismay, we were too late for the light show. We stopped by the Sagrada Familia on the way home to see what it was like at night and then took the metro back to our hostel.

I didn't get a whole lot of sleep Saturday night due to everyone coming in and out of the room during the night, but I still got up early so we could check out a few more things on our last day. That morning there was a marathon in town so we decided to go out to las rambas and check it out. It was a huge race and it was a lot of fun to see all of the people watching and runners participating. After the marathon, we made our way to the Sagrada Familia. This is one of Gaudi's most famous works. He died before he could finish building it, but his models and blue prints have been preserved and used to help finish building it. Although it is still in construction, they hope to have it finished by 2020. It is very impressive to say the least. There are a lot of Mediterranean themed statues and one of the main entrances looks like a tree sort of texture from a distance. It is a building like none other. Gaudis architecture is very prominent all over Barcelona as well as famous throughout the world. After the Sagrada familia we got some lunch and walked back to las rambas for the market. The market lines las rambas and runs every Saturday and Sunday. It was fun to look at all of the different venders with assortments of jewelry, clothes and crafts. Once finished with the market, we walked towards the marina and beach one last time before we were going to have to head back home. We met up with Andrew at the hostel around 4 and all walked together to the bus station. Our bus was more packed than I thought, but luckily I was able to sit with Caitlin for the majority of the 12 hour ride. We arrived back in Caceres a little after 6am and walked from the bus station to our house. I managed to lay down for an hour before having to get up and head to class at 8. Let's just say Monday was a pretty rough day. But, once we were all rested up, we were happy to be back home in Caceres.

It was neat to be able to see the opposite side of the Spain and understand the differences in both places. Barcelona speaks a different kind of Spanish and has many of its own cultures and types of people. It was a learning experience go from one end here in Extremadura, to the complete opposite. Spain has such a wide variety of places to see and I hope to be able to walk away from this semester with a better understanding of them all.