So this weekend I went to Barcelona with Nicki, where we met up with Nich and Vickie. We took a night train to Port Bou (on the French-Spanish border), and then took a local train to Barcelona. The night train was pretty nice. I’d had the brilliant idea of buying a sleeping bag that I could use as a pillow on the train, so I slept pretty well on the train. That is, until 7:00 am, when the kids in the compartment woke up and started walking way too much. An hour later, when we were almost in Port Bou, their dad finally told them to go outside. Sigh. Once we got into Port Bou, we waited around for an hour, and then hopped onto an absolutely packed train to Barcelona. The train was pretty much a glorified subway, and there were so many people on it that the seats and all of the aisles were full.

We got off at the wrong station in Barcelona, but it turned out to actually be closer to our hostel than the one we planned to get off at. It ended up being only a few minutes by subway from our hostel, not that I would have minded a longer ride because the subways in Barcelona are actually air-conditioned. When we got off the subway, we ran into some girls from McGill who were going to the same hostel as some as our friends. I don’t think I’ve had a single weekend in Europe without talking to some Canadians.

Nicki and I checked into the hostel, where we discovered that Spanish is pretty much useless in Barcelona because everyone says they only understand Catalan. Nich walked into the hostel just after we checkied in, which was some pretty amazing timing. After he got settled in, we decided to go to the beach. We walked to the beach, and ran into some people from GTL who had a way better hostel than us. It was called Seapoint, it was right on the beach, and it had a bar downstairs. It was cloudy and windy, so we ended up sitting on the terrace of Seapoint drinking some incredibly strong Sangrias.

After we got tired of the Sangrias, we headed back to the hostel to get changed for the evening and then went to the Chris Columbus statue (apparently the Catalans claim he was Catalan instead of Genoan) to meet up with a bunch of other GTL people for dinner. We went to a place called, I think, Ciberon. We all got Paella, and everyone but me got a ton of Sangrias. The Paella was delicious, and there was a live band that was pretty good. It was pretty much a perfect evening. Good food, good company, good music, and a nice view of the sea. The waiter gave me the bill at the end of the evening. I kind of gulped when I saw the total (over 200 euros), but considering that that was for 10 people and the food was incredibly good and plentiful, that wasn’t bad at all.

After dinner, Nicki and I went to meet up with Vickie, who had just taken a train all the way from the Czech republic to meet up with us. Then, we went to a club called Fiesta, which felt pretty much like being in a club in the US, except that the crowd was way younger (like some people who were obviously under 18).

On Saturday, we hit up the beach. On our way to the beach, Nich and I were looking for some cheap food. We finally gave and and grabbed sandwiches, only to find out that half a block later there was a place offering what looked like really good Paella for only 5 euros. Sigh. The beach was pretty nice. The water could have been a bit warmer, and we could have done with fewer people walking along Shouting “Hola. Acqua. Fanta. Cerveza” or offering us messages. We did see one cool vendor who ran around with a tray of donuts on his head while playing a triangle and singing donut songs. We stayed at the beach for most of the afternoon. I kind of got burnt.

After the beach, we went back to the hostel to get changed, where Nich met a girl called Penny who went to school somewhere in DC. We ended up going to dinner with her. The place we went was really nice. They had good food, but the waiter was unhappy that we weren’t spending a lot of money, which is understandable. Of course, he probably shouldn’t have said it to his manager while standing right in front of us and assuming none of us could understand. After dinner, we grabbed some ice cream, some aloe for my sunburn, and then headed out to find a really good bar Nich had heard of. We never found it, so I ended up heading back to the hostel because my sunburn was really started to get to me.

I woke up nice and early Sunday morning to the loudest snoring I’ve heard in my life. There was a big Spanish guy in the next bed over who I swear had sleep apnea, because he would snore incredibly loudly and every 30 minutes or so it sounded like he would choke a bit, after which he’d shift around and start snoring again. To top it all off, he was wearing nothing but bikini briefs.

Most of Sunday was spent doing tourist type stuff. We checked out one of the main parks. We went to the Picasso museum, which was pretty cool. On the way there, we ran into some kind of public performance in Placa San Jaume. We weren’t sure exactly what it was, because it was all in Catalan, but it involved a princess, a giant preying mantis, and a caped guy on stilts.

After the Picasso museum, we went to the Sagrada Familia. It was really cool, because it’s a giant basilica that’s still under construction. It kind of gives you an idea of what people felt like while all the great Gothic cathedrals were being built. Some of those took hundreds of years to build. The Sagrada Familia has only been under construction for around a hundred years, so it’s still pretty young. The church was amazing, even considering that it was a giant construction site. I can’t imagine what it’d be like to go to mass there once the construction is complete. We walked all the way up one of the towers (and they’re really high–lots of steps), which was pretty terrifying at some points because there are decent-sized windows all the way up the tower without bars that really drive home just how high you are.

Once we got down from the Sagrada Familia, we grabbed a snack from a local vendor and then headed back to the hostel to get ready for dinner. We ended up running into some other GTL people on the way to dinner, and they showed us this really good and cheap restaurant they’d found. The place had a great Paella and Sangria deal, so we naturally did that.

Monday was the Fourth of July, which I celebrated on trains. I pretty much spent the whole day getting back to Metz.

The weather forecast in Barcelona:
Friday: Partly Cloudly, High of 28, low of 23
Saturday: Mostly Sunny, High of 29, low of 23
Sunday: Sunny, High of 30, low of 23
Monday: Mostly Sunny, High of 30, low of 24
And almost no chance of rain for the whole weekend. Looks like there’ll be some quality beach time 8-).

We had a giant storm yesterday. And this wasn’t one of those wussy little storms like you get almost every day in Atlanta. This was a serious storm, with gale-force winds. The winds knocked over trees all over the Technopole. Someone’s bicycle actually blew away in the wind. Someone else tried to go outside during it, and actually got knocked over by the wind. The flags in front of the building got torn up. The water was blowing sideways and the wind was strong enough that it was forcing the water in through the doors of the GTL building. It was the worst storm since 1999 according to the locals, making it the worst storm of the millenium! Anyway, the nice thing is that it brought an end to the hot and humid weather that we’d had for like 2 weeks straight (apparently the worst June in recent memory), so the beach will feel like a real break instead of more of the same weather we have in Metz.

So it turns out Blogspot juste added support for images in your blog! Up to 300 MB of images, and it takes care of the layout for you!! Too bad they don’t have support for the snazzy captions that I use. Of course, in Firefox you have to reload once to get the captions to be sized correctly… Now I need to go back and change all my pictures to use the new service so I don’t have to worry about my webserver going down.

I’ve had way too much homework lately, so I haven’t been able to write about everything that I’ve been doing, but here’s a map showing my travels over the last few weeks. The pins with the lines going to them are places I’ve visited, while the pins without lines are places I’m planning on going to. I’m going to most of the places in Italy after the semester’s over, except for Cinque Terre and Milan (the two red pins in Italy). Click for the full-sized view. The photo’s shitty because I used my phone.

Finishing thermo homework at 1 AM that’s due the same day at 9:15 AM. Even in France, some things never change.

We went to the old Arsenal in downtown Metz for a concert tonight. They’ve converted it into a pretty nice little concert hall. It’s probably the perfect size for the kind of music they were doing. I’d call the music chamber music: it was 4 concertos by Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, including a cello and flute concerto. Apparently all those years of music lessons paid off, because during the concert I was thinking to myself, “This really sounds like the very beginnings of the classical period” because it had a hint of polyphony, but much more use of harmony. Turns out CPE Bach is considered the founder of the Classical style. Who knew.

It was really obvious at the concert who had some appreciation of good music and who was there only because they got some sort of credit or something for their HTS class. Oh well. The Arsenal apparently has a bunch of free (as opposed to wildly cheap at 8 euros) concerts this summer. I’ll have to stop by again, hopefully next time I’ll have more time to hang out in downtown Metz after.

This weekend I’m off to Spain to meet up with Melissa (a friend from Atlanta) and hang out in San Sebastian. I’ll have a long layover in Paris because the TGV to spain leaves at 10:30 pm and I’m planning on rolling in around 6 pm.