I'm Satan!

Yesterday was our first day in Barcelona--yahoo!! It's like my vacation has finally started, even though I've really been on vacation this entire time.
The 12 hour bus ride was pretty painless because we got to watch Friends episodes haha And then we watched this Spanish movie called The Secret of the Eyes or something like that. It was about a rape and etc and it was kind of haunting. But it made time fly by, and before I knew it we were here! It's more humid here because we're next to the Mediterranean, and there are palm trees! The architecture here is crazy because of all Gaudi's works and his influences, but more on that later.We arrived around 8 pm, so we left around 11 pm to get tapas and to go clubbing. When we sat down at a tapas place right around the corner from our hotel, a man from North Carolina came and talked to us. He was obviously very drunk, and his pretty drunk daughter apologized to us profusely for his behavior, but I really took no offense because he did no harm. He just really wanted to take a picture with us, so we did hahaha

There he is! Suzan was not pleased, as you can tell hahaha

Then we headed over to Razmatazz even though people here don't start REALLY partying until 3 am. That's crazier than Salamanca's 2 am! I don't know how they handle it. But anyway, it was a pretty not-awesome night. Ana warned us about a lot of pick pocketers and warned us about the people here-it's a large city with a lot of immigrants, artists (aka crazy people), and she told us to stay in really large groups. I'm sure this place is no more dangerous than NYC, but I was still pretty paranoid. It may have been caused by the rape movie in addition to her warnings in addition to the fact that I'm in a strange country. Either way, I wasn't super excited to be going out because I was worried.

We took the metro to Razmataaz, but we had to walk through pretty shady areas to get there from the station. We walked through "goth street"--there were crowds and crowds of people wearing lots of black and chains and dredlocks. Some were making mixed drinks outside, some were shooting up heroine. But honestly, I wasn't really terrified at this point because there were so many people, and you're always more safe in a large crowd. But there were a lot of points where we were the only girls walking down a street of five men staring at us. And we even saw rats scurrying in front of us! Yipes. Rather take the rats than the scary men though.
And the night was pretty much deemed bad when we were walking back, and a man passing me jumped at me and yelled, "SATAN!" I hate it when people jump out and scare me like that, especially when I'm already kind of crabby. And worried. At that point, I just wanted to apparate home like Harry Potter.

But today was really cool--we went to see the Sagrada Familia, which is the church that is currently being built and was designed by Gaudi. He's a huge influence on this city. He really believed in giving buildings spirit and energy, so he tries to make them replicate nature as much as possible. This makes a lot of his works wavey, so a lot of the buildings here are curved.

The amazingly ornate outside of the church

The ceiling looks like flowers! And the pillars like stems!

How beautiful, right? It's supposed to be done in 2022, but the Pope is coming this year to consecrate it. We got to go all the way to the top, and the view was beautiful.

It was pretty windy.

Then we went to Park Guell, which was designed by Gaudi too so it had a lot of funky stone and cave-like structures. My battery on my camera died unfortunately, so this was the only picture I could take there.

That guy goes really well with the background hahaha whoops

Amanda and I climbed all the way to the top, so we had the most amazing view of Barcelona. We could see the sea and the shores and all the buildings on a 360 degree view. It was so perfect, and I was really mad that I didn't completely charge my camera. But I knew I wouldn't have been able to capture the awestruck feeling that it gave me anyway. So I'll just flip through the photos in my head when I want to instead!

We had some more tapas when we got back, and we were so pooped and unfazed by last night's club experience so we decided to stay in. I should've been sleeping an hour ago, so off I go now!
BEACH MANANA!