So I´ve been really bad about recording my day to day activies, so I´m going to try and catch up on EVERYTHING that I forgot to write about. And that really is everything. Let´s start from the beginning:

Barcelona

I took a cab from BCN to the only place in Barcelona I knew of... the Sagrada Familia. I figured there´s a metro stop right there and I would just hop on the metro to my hostel (since there was a stop about a block from where I was staying). After paying way too much for a cab I tried to buy a metro card with my credit card but it just was not working. Thankfully, a nice man bought my ticket for me then asked if he could see my feet. Of course the first person I met in Barcelona had a foot fetish. He got on the train with me and asked if he could show me around the city, but I made it clear that would not be happening and practically ran off the train when it pulled up to the Encants metro stop. Encants became my home base for everything in Barcelona.

My hostel was the Graffiti Hostel located a few blocks from the Sagrada Familia and approximately a hundred blocks from everything interesting. I check in about the same time as a tall Italian man named Claudio. We didn´t really talk other then to exchange names since I was so tired, but don´t worry, we meet again. I got into my room, on to my bunk and passed out for a few hours. When I woke up I took a walk to the Sagrada Familia to take some pictures and think about what I´d gotten myself into. When I was feeling pretty satisfied with myself for successfully making it to Spain, I headed back to the hostel where I was able to absorb the reality of the hostal I had so uncarefully picked. It was disgusting. The floors were dirty. The showers were coated with mold and hair. The kitchen had old food caked on every surface and bugs came frequently to feed on it. At that point I stopped feeling satisfied with myself and began to panic. I had clearly made the wrong choice when it came to my hostel. It was too far away, too dirty and I did not hear one person speaking English. I was convinced that I was going to spend a week in this dirty hole with no friends, and I would probably be calling my dad begging him to fly me back to the states. Thats when I made my first friend. It turns out English really is the universally accepted language, and I began talking to a Swedish girl named Miriam. She and her friends took a long weekend off of school to come to Spain and get absolutely trashed since the weather is apparently much nicer than in Sweden. I spent the night drinking with her and her crazy friends which is how I got reaquainted with Claudio. Claudio and I spent a good three days walking around Barcelona together before he started creeping me out. At first I liked that he was affectionate and complimentary, but it started to become a little overbearing. A perfect example is when Daniele (an Italian who worked at the hostel) took everyone out to a club. I was determined to spend time with other people but Claudio was at my side all night. At one point he grabbed me a the force ended up knocking me into almost everyone around us. I was annoyed and a little freaked out so I pushed him away which is something I will never regret. Because I pushed Claudio away I was able to spend time with Florian, a nice French boy staying in the hostel. Florian was great because he was a friend right off the bat and never anything more. He was funny, nonthreatening, and sweet. Barcelona was great for me as a traveller and a tourist because I was able to see a lot of sights and take in the culture, but from a social aspect I didn't make a whole lot of friends. Of course I bonded with the French kids in my hostel and there was this Swedish girl Nicole I was close to, but I think I was still too nervous about my huge, life changing adventure to bond significantly with anyone.

A nice treat for me in Barcelona was actually meeting up with some Americans. There were some American kids teaching in France who were in Spain on Vacation and a drifter from Oregon that I was able to have a real conversation with. Even though a lot of people speak English in Europe, it was nice to have an effortless conversation where I didn't need to explain my idioms or sarcastic remarks.

Leaving Barcelona was scary for me. Even though I'd made it successfully through my first week in a foreign country by myself, I was unsure how traveling between cities was going to work. The train was perfect. It was clean and punctual and it only took 3 hours to get into Madrid (it would have been 8 hours on a bus). Of course, I was still fighting a cold I'd picked up before I left the states so I was a snotty mess the whole ride.

*I was a victim of pickpocketing in Barcelona. My digital camera was stolen from my purse. Barcelona is infamous for this kind of petty crime, and I was disappointed but I stayed in high spirits. I may have lost a weeks worth of pictures, but I took pictures for the rest of my trip on my iPhone. It work out perfectly.