Pre-Departure
We got back to Seville on Sunday night. In the middle of the bus ride home, someone in our program got word that the ash cloud from the Icelandic volcano had spread further south. As a result, flights everywhere in Europe had been canceled indefinitely, and anyone in our program who had planned trips for that week (read: everyone) was completely out of luck. (By the way, I hereby nominate that volcano for both the "Most Inconvenient" and the "Worst Name" award. Honestly... Eyjafjallajoekull? That's the best you could come up with? Did Iceland's official volcano-namer get drunk and mash a hand on the keyboard?)
After a good amount of panicking and several contradictory online findings, we discovered that all flights up until the day before we left had been suspended, but our flight was miraculously unaffected. Hooray, we wouldn't lose tons of money on non-refundable bus tickets and hostels! After breathing huge sighs of relief, Ramya and I unpacked our bags, repacked our bags, and immediately went to sleep because we had to wake up at the truly unfortunate time of 3:45 a.m. in order to catch our flight to Barcelona.
Before I start describing the trip itself, let me explain our terrible schedule. Every decision that we made was based on cost, so we ended up taking the most horribly-timed buses and flights in the interest of saving money. For example, taking a night bus that went from 7:30 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. Retrospect: MISTAKE. I learned a valuable lesson this past week: always throw down an extra 20 euro to avoid huddling on a bench with a homeless man for hours. (More on that later.)
Monday: Take 6:30 a.m. flight to Barcelona. Spend the day in Barcelona, then take the 11:45 p.m. night bus to Avignon. *No sleep*
Tuesday: Arrive in Avignon around 8:00 a.m., sleep in Avignon.
Wednesday: Spend day in Avignon, leave Avignon at 7:30 p.m. on night bus. *No sleep*
Thursday: Arrive at 2:30 a.m. in Barcelona, sleep in Barcelona.
Friday: Spend all day/night in Barcelona.
Saturday: Spend all day in Barcelona, stay up until 3:45 a.m. to catch bus to airport. *No sleep*
Sunday: Arrive in Sevilla at 8:30 a.m.
As someone who has trouble sleeping anywhere but a dark room on a bed in complete silence, the night buses were less than a good idea (hence the *no sleep* markers). Even as I was looking at our itinerary before we left, I knew that this was going to be miserable. But heck, I'm young and dumb and poor! Let's do it!
Barcelooooona!
How to describe Barcelona? I'll throw some adjectives out there: lively, unique, metropolitan, artsy, bustling, liberal, weird, and above all, fun. It's extremely different from the rest of Spain. For example, the regional language is Catalan, an unholy French-Spanish hybrid that I couldn't understand in the slightest. There's no flamenco dancing, there's no bullfighting, there's no Cruzcampo, their clothing is bizarre, and tapas aren't a big deal. Plus, there are pictures and drawings of topless women just about everywhere you look (you get used to it surprisingly quickly).
We arrived in Barcelona around noon with absolutely no plans for the first day. We wanted to save all of the big, important sights for our return trip, so we spent the majority of the afternoon ambling into random museums. First up: the Maritime Museum! Barcelona used to be Spain's main trading port, and as a result they have tons of old boats and boat-related artifacts.
We all live in a... wooden submarine? What the what?! We were incredulous but it turns out that yes, some of the first submarines were made out of wood. I'm going to make an educated guess that they were also probably not very fun to ride in.
My word, it's the most fancily-decorated boat I've ever seen! It's 50 feet tall, covered in gold leaf, and has actual paintings on the sides. I want to take it on Lake Travis sometime. Motorboats? Please.
The first underwater diver's suit. It looks terribly uncomfortable and I'm not sure that it was designed with actual humans in mind. First of all, the suit is about five feet tall and doesn't look as it would fit an adult male. Second of all, there are only three fingers on each glove. Third of all, the shoes are solid metal... isn't that how they "whack" guys in Mafia movies?
After leaving the Maritime Museum, we were a bit hungry so we decided to try something a little more edible: the Chocolate Museum. No, seriously! It's a museum all about the history of chocolate and the process of making chocolate. However, the best part is all the crazy sculptures built out of chocolate.
The outside of the museum. Note that chocolate is spelled "xocalata"-- in Catalan, the x makes a "ch" sound and is at the front of tons of words. Keep this in mind, Scrabble players.
A Roman chariot and horses all made out of chocolate. Honestly, whoever makes these has the best/most delicious job ever. I could never do it, though, for two reasons: A) no artistic talent, and B) inability to refrain from eating sculpting material.
We were pretty tired after the museums-- lots of walking mixed with four hours of sleep is a dangerous combination. Since it was a beautiful afternoon, we decided to go to the beach and rest there. Alas, we never made it: we ran into a patch of grass that looked reasonably inviting about halfway there and immediately collapsed. Here are some pictures taken on the way:
A giant statue of (you guessed it) Christopher Columbus. Basically every city in Spain has something dedicated to Columbus because they all want a piece of him. Hey, Barcelona, did you forget that this guy singlehandedly caused the downfall of your city in the 1500s? Maybe a giant statue is not the way to go?
A picture of Barcelona's harbor.
I'm normally a cantankerous old person muttering "kids these days" but this is some of the coolest graffiti I've ever seen! Well done, Barcelona, well done.
After lying in the sun for about an hour, we noticed that the weather had begun looking ominous. Half of the sky was a menacing dark gray... generally not a good sign. In a few minutes, it started to pour. We ducked into a beachfront mall to dry off, and learned that malls in Spain are basically exactly the same as malls in the US: terrible pop music, gangs of awkward teenagers, and lots of the same stores. They even had a Claire's!
One thing Barcelona does have in common with the rest of Spain: an unhealthy obsession with soccer. You can find literally anything with the Barcelona team's logo on it: stuffed animals, scarves, baby bottles, thong underwear (I am not joking).
The rain stopped after a bit (thank goodness, there's only so much time I can withstand inside a mall), and we went outside to sit on the docks while Ramya called her family. The weather was nice enough that even sleep-deprived me could appreciate it, and I took the opportunity to take some pictures.
A twilight shot of the Rambla del Mar.
We left the docks, ate a quick dinner of pizza, and walked to the bus station. I'd like to note that I am using the word "station" extremely loosely. When you think "station", you think a large area with many workers, a bathroom, clocks, heating/air conditioning, timetables, chairs, etc. Most of all you think a building. There was no building. There was a portable trailer with overflowing trash cans and harsh fluorescent lights and three completely incompetent, listless workers. In Barcelona, which is THE SECOND LARGEST CITY IN SPAIN HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE ARGHHH
The bus station, also known as hell on earth.
Anyways, we got to the "station" about an hour and a half early, because we wanted to see if we could change our tickets. That turned out to be a good idea: there were an insane amount of people at the station who had gotten stranded by Volcano Sdlgahslgkjhdsflkjgzzzzz. Couple that with the half-asleep workers and the line wasn't moving at all. We met a man from the UK who had been trying to get home for a week and waited 3.5 hours just for tickets to southern France. Yikes.
Wait, why did you need to change tickets? The Eurolines website is well-designed but terrible, and I'm about 85% convinced that their webmaster is Satan himself. Why? Ramya and I were buying bus tickets to France at the exact same time. Somehow, the buses that she bought tickets for disappeared as soon as she was finished. Though the buses weren't full, they no longer appeared as options, which meant that we couldn't be on the same bus. I ended up buying the closest tickets available, which were about three hours off.
Ramya's bus was scheduled to leave at 11:45 p.m. and mine at 1:50 a.m., so it definitely wasn't the end of the world if I had to wait. When the bus arrived I asked the bus driver if I could change my ticket. MISTAKE. This lead to the longest hour of my life. I wrote up a giant rant-filled paragraph to try to describe the experience, but it wouldn't make any sense at all to those who weren't there. Let me say instead that the entire bus-station experience was a horrible, bizarre Kafka-esque fluorescent bureaucratic nightmare. To my credit, I didn't cry once, and we ended up leaving for Avignon about three hours behind schedule.
Next post: Avignon!