The Barcelona Adventure

 During my stay with my Grandparents over the Easter holidays we decided to go on a spontaneous adventure...to Barcelona. We blame it on Woody Allen's 'Vicky, Christina, Barcelona' (which everyone should watch!) but also on a serious lack of sunshine. So on the day we went to Narbonne with my Grandma, Grandad and Great Uncle George we were left behind to wait for a night bus that would take us to Spain. It was CRAZY. Firstly, the bus was late, which meant a lot of hanging around. It was so cold and all we had in the rucksack were a couple of towels, so we wrapped them around us like sarongs and hula danced around the bus station trying to keep warm. We must have looked like nutters. When the bus FINALLY arrived, we honestly felt like we'd stepped onto a coach full of illegal immigrants, with hindsight it sounds hilarious, at the time we were pretty terrified! The journey was also pretty ridiculous, every hour we stopped for a 15 minute cigarette break, then when we crossed the border FIVE people got chucked off the coach - I am SO glad we had our passports. Our original plan once in Barcelona was to hit the beach, we figured it'd be sunrise and there'd be enough light to walk through the streets. Instead we arrived at 4am, just outside the train station, which felt like the middle of nowhere and it was PITCH black. YAY. So we huddled ourselves in our towels and waited outside the station until it opened and then sleepily washed ourselves in the toilets before heading towards our hostel.

AND THEN, the fun began. The hostel we stayed at was amazing and thanks to the free wi-fi we were able to spend between the hours of 6-7 researching all the sites we wanted to visit. Our first stop was the Gaudi's Sagrada Familia with a trusty Starbucks (we thought that since the Spanish aren't renowned for the coffee we could get away with going to a chain and anyway with only 4 hours sleep we needed caffeine FAST!)

Following the Gaudi trail, which is basically how you're supposed to see Barcelona cos it is HIS city, we then went towards Park Güell, but we ended up taking a detour and saw the most MAGNIFICENT view from the top of the hill. The park itself was horrendously crowded, but we were unashamedly touristy and elbowed are way into all the conventional tourist shots. 

                        

                                                                              

From the park we could see the glittering sea, by which point the temperature had risen to a pretty steamy 24 degrees so we just headed in the direction of the beach where we crashed sort-of dozing, sort-of sunbathing and sort-of protecting our modest belongings from pickpockets. Our only protection from the sun was an old bottle of Soltan factor 8 that we'd found in my Grandparent's bathroom, which  for us two pasty white kids didn't go down to well. After getting mildly sunburnt we'd both pretty much decided to move to Barcelona and teach our kids to speak Spanish and Catalan and started wondering the streets as if we were natives, trailing sand and crumbs as we went.

This wishful thinking was cruelly interrupted by our weak bladders, consequently we began urgently searching for a toilet, getting more and more lost. We finally made a pact that the next Museum we saw would be our toilet stop. Unfortunately that Museum was the Museum of Modern Art, for which our sleep deprived, sun-burnt selves could be summed up in this photo...

It was a pretty expensive toilet stop. After stumbling around for an hour or so, picking sand out of our hair, trying to make sense of the exhibitions, determined to make the most of our tickets, we finally gave up and went back to the hostel to shower. We met a couple of our awesome room mates and set-up our bunks for the night. After freshening up we stepped out on Las Ramblas in search of PAELLA, which is definitely our new favourite food and COMPLETELY GLUTEN-FREE YAAAAAAY. After our yummy dinner and walking back through a very balmy and very beautiful Barcelona, we crashed out on our bunks and didn't even hear our room-mates come in from what seemed to have been a pretty crazy night out.

AND THAT, LADIES AND GENTLEMAN, IS THE STORY OF THE BARCELONA ADVENTURE!