ready for Lisbon!

Hey everyone!

Man! We are ready to leave Barcelona! I never thought I would say or think that, but we haven't had the best time here. For starters our hostel was awful and by awful I mean people are screaming right outside your door, music is thumping until 3am, ear plugs don't do anything! Blehk! It was just awful, the staff wasn't friendly. The only good thing was that they had breakfast and dinner, we would make sandwiches with breakfast stuff. The dinner wasn't that great, but was a nice option. One night was tuna salad, woof! Tory had my helping! :) our hostel was in a good location, but it was just way too touristy. Right off La Rambla, a really busy street, just shops and over priced restaurants, tons of people. I think if we come back, we will have to do airbnb and try to get out of the tourist areas. Once we were out of the tourist areas, it was fine and good, but you would have to walk like forty five mins to do that. Alright, enough complaining!

Tuesday we got to Barcelona, walked along La Rambla. Went to a restaurant on the street, worst idea ever! It was around 46€ for just two paellas and two sangrias! That's a suuuuuper expensive meal for us! I got chicken paella and tory had a mix of seafood and meat. It was okay, not as good as it should've been. Needless to say, we didn't eat on this street again! Afterwards, we tried walking around to find somewhere else to go, but it was pretty expensive so we just went back to the hostel. Talked with a chick that had been there for a few days, it was her last night and she was pretty happy about it. She said that she hadn't gotten any sleep, etc. she said that Madrid had been loads better. We went to sleep around 12 or so. I slept awful, people were talking/screaming right outside our door for a few hours, music, blehk! It was awful. It was so bad that the next morning Tory was looking into how expensive it would be to switch hostels, switch cities, etc. we decided to stay just because it would've been more expensive to do something else.

Wednesday we walked around the city a long time. It was good to get out of the tourist parts. We walked to the gaudi cathedral and park. Tory said that they had been working on that cathedral for a crazy long time, and it's not supposed to be done until 2030 or later! It wasn't all that pretty either! After the park we walked around a bit more trying to find a place that was open for lunch is hard! Everyone was taking siestas, which is pretty funny! I wish Americans were allowed to do that! Turns out the work ethic in our country sucks! We work longer days and weeks and get less vacation. Grrr. We finally found a place and split a pizza and a bottle of wine! The wine was only 8€! Much better! We had dinner at the hostel, it was pasta, it was okay but free! Afterwards we walked the alleys behind our hostel, they were really cool! I'm glad we had those to walk around. Lots of cool shops, restaurants and bars. We found a cool bar called Bahia, got two glasses of wine for under 4€, so that was amazing and we were able to sit outside so even better! We were leaving and I put our glasses on the bar so she wouldn't have to come by and get them and she filled them up again! Too funny! They also had pinchos or individual tapas for only 1€ each, so we got crab, anchovy, chorizo, and salami. I tried all of them! Didn't like the crab one bit but the anchovy was okay. Didn't have more than one bite though, hehe. I asked the bartender for day trip ideas and she told me to go to the beach the Tory had already planned, haha, but I didn't know and thought I was really cool at asking her. Oh well!

Thursday we went to Sitges beach! It took us a while to get on the train though! We accidentally bought a metro pass trying to get a train ticket too, hehe. Oh well, it was an adventure as Tory said. It was about a 40 minute train ride and was really pretty! Beautiful small town, pretty touristy but it was okay! We got to the beach and laid out and then got in the water. It was freezing! I had to run into the water because going slow made it worse! No matter how long you stayed in, you never really got used to the coldness! We didn't stay in too long! We left the beach and walked along the boardwalk looking for a snack! We got awful calimari but then awesome nutella gelato! Mmm! We got back and had dinner at the hostel- tuna salad, blehk! I got a falafel bowl, it was tasty! We had gotten really bad sunburn at the beach, a tube of sunscreen was 9€ and by tube I mean travel size! I was wearing a dress and when we were walking down the street people were laughing at me!! I had to put on jeans :( We met up with our friends from the bay area Erin and Christina, I invited our roommate Carolina to come with us too! We hung out at Bahia for a bit and then went to a club. It was awful, haha. Soooo loud and everyone was so drunk and bumping into you. We stayed for maybe an hour? Blehk! Leaving there we had all lost hearing. It was bad. We stayed out until 3am!

Friday we were dead from our sunscreen so we took the metro to Camp Nou which is barcelona's stadium. It was crazy, sorta like Disney world! You had to pay like 23€ to do the tour, we deff didn't! Later we walked around a huge market, got Tory's favorite, Wok to Walk, the noodles in a box place! It wasn't as good as the one we had in Amsterdam. After that we got churros and chocolate! Mmmm!! Soooo yummy! The chocolate was Really thick sorta like syrup! Afterwards we went to a bar to watch the Barcelona game, they won! We went to sleep pretty early and by early I mean 12-1am. We had a new roommate Rodrigo, who sucked! He brought back a chick in the middle of the night and was super noisy. Grrr.

Saturday we went to Montserrat! It was a beautiful monastery at the top of this mountain! It was beautiful! We walked around there for a bit and then went on a hike! It was a hard one! My legs hurt today! Once we got back to the city we went and walked around the alleys. We stumbled upon a church and some street shows. The street shows were crazy. There were people climbing on too of each other! It was crazy! I have pics, I'm not good at explaining. :) we walked around the alleys more and went to local bars, it was good!

We're getting ready to board, so I better go! We are ready for Lisbon! We are looking forward to going home soon. We sure miss our little doggie! Hope you all are doing great and having an awesome weekend!

Love and miss you all!
Jenn