Second of all it's IS Monday - congratulations to all the Wooster seniors who don't read this blog so don't really care. Third of all the real point of this blog post was to talk about my weekend! IES had a trip planned that gave us Friday off - so I organized my own little trip around the Costa Brava area (seacoast Catalunya). The plan was as such:
Friday: Day trip to Tarragona.
Saturday: Visit Girona, stay the night in order to get up for:
Sunday: Train to Figueres to catch a bus to Cadaques, reservation at Salvador Dali's house (converted to a museum), train back to Barcelona.
Not TOO complicated, right? Here's how the plan worked:
Thursday night: Up 'til 3am. Not for any good reason, just cause.
Friday: Alarm at 9. Look at alarm. Go back to sleep. Wake up eventually.
Decide to stay in Barcelona (Note: I've been freaking out about how little time she has left in Barcelona for the past week/month/century) Explore a nearby park and do some reading for class. Go home for lunch, and then decide to wander around Gracia (The neighborhood next to mine, and home of much fewer old people). Luckily, being a child of the 20th century and by definition addicted to facebook, I posted a status and another girl who was around on Friday came with me, and had a MAP (a novel idea) of Gracia with a bunch of cool places marked on it. I got what is rumored to be the best Gelato in Spain - and it was on par with my Italian gelato, I must admit (yes, I know I should just change the topic of this blog to be all about Gelato but it's just SO DELICIOUS). Nice, fun day. More into Barcelona than I was before. Which pretty much happens every day.
Saturday: Wake up and take the train to Girona. See the Cinema Museum and then meet up with my Intercambio (Language Exchange) for lunch. He has an apartment in Barcelona but is from Girona and goes there most weekends, and so showed me around the old city. It was beautiful - apparently the best preserved Jewish Quarter in Catalunya (which is a big deal cause they kicked the whole Jewish population out in the late 1400s. I think. I should know, because he told me, and then I went to the Jewish Museum. Ah well). It was VERY cool - all sorts of tiny streets and twists and turns, and there was a wall around the old city that you could walk on and see the whole thing. Very gorgeous. Stayed the night in the best hostel I can hope to stay in the rest of my time here (I can tell the accommodation is just going to go downhill).
Sunday: Wake up, eat breakfast, hurry to the train station. Get there, can't find the ticket I want on the machine, go to the ticket counter to ask the guy.
He informs me of what I SHOULD have known. Spanish phones, you know, my source of time-telling, don't change automatically for daylight savings (or the phone I bought was cheap enough not to change). So I missed my train by a good hour and decide get the next ticket to Figueres in the hopes that there will be another bus. It doesn't leave until 1:30 and takes a little over an hour. My reservation for the Dali House needs tobe picked up by 2:30.
I get the bus ticket just in case. Walk around some in Figueres, where there's a 10 euro Dali museum that I figure I just might be seeing more Dali soon anyway, so I don't go in, and then after my little stint wandering around a town that really doesn't have anything that any small spanish town wouldn't have but the Dali museum and a cute cathedral (I got the appeal of the town in ONE picture) I get on the bus in the hopes that it'll go super-fast. I obviously don't make it in time.
The only thing that made the trip worth it is that Cadaques is very similar to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, if Portsmouth was the most beautiful city(?) I've seen in my life.
I want to post EVERY picture I took. Again, I'll try to tone it down. Also, when I was wandering around, taking so many pictures it was probably embarrassing, I noticed it was pure tourist candy, but, as I learned in class (I learned something in an abroad class - whoa) it's spanish tourism. Cadaques is where Dali and his family would go for summers to go and be wealthy and laze around (thus his house being there...). There were groups of Spanish teens running around taking just as many pictures as I was (and being more annoying cause they're teenagers :) ) 
I even trekked the road to the house (I made the picture big so it was easier to see) so that I didn't TOTALLY miss it - and now I know how to get there if I go back. Then back to Cadaques, where I was wandering around saw this pitch black cat running toward one of the bright blue doors that were all OVER, and I started creeping so that I could get a picture. It ran away, but I ended up realizing that it was walking along with this older woman and her even older dog. It then started walking with me, and her and I started talking. She put up with my awkwardness and crazy inability to speak clearly in Spanish, and even in those four minutes I talked with a 50 year old woman about cats I felt more comfortable and at home than I may ever have felt in Barcelona. After a couple of hours I've seen at least 2/3 of the center city and a lot of what's around it (that's how tiny), and my feet HURT, so I hope back onto the bus and make my way back to Barcelona, where there's a cheese sandwich waiting for me. At the residencia, dinner would have been closed already. :)
I'm HOPING such ridiculous things will not happen during the stressful - wow I cannot think of any words to describe my spring break that do not have swears in them. Well then, pardon my french but - clusterfuck of traveling that will be Semana Santa (EVERYBODY in Europe's spring break), but apparently with my luck SOMETHING is guaranteed to go wrong. So, look forward to THAT post, and I'll leave you with some words of wisdom from a German lady living in Cadaques:
Los gatos de Cadaques no son como los gatos de los Estados Unidos, o de Alemania.
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