Después del programa vol. II: Barcelona, París y Praga

I'm hoping that I can remember all that I've done in these places because it seems like this month has just been flying by. After leaving Spain a bit ago it feels like I've been a different place every single day and it's incredible, but also incredibly tiring because you want to make the most of every place while you're there. Don't get me wrong I've been extremely fortunate to be where I'm at, doing what I'm doing, but it can be quite a tiring experience keeping up with different cultures/customs/foods/things to see and so on. With that, I'll jot down some of the main things that have stuck in my head since about a week ago and we'll go from there.

Barcelona: Segunda Vez

So, if you have been keeping up at all on these blogs or have been in contact with my family back in the States you will have already known that I went to Barcelona once. I loved it, but the thing is it's damn near impossible to visit that size of a city in one day and I think we missed out on a lot that makes this Mediterranean city so special.

We arrived at the hostel on el Passeig de Grácia that Maggie recommended we stay at and it was easily one of the best hostels I've stayed at. In fact, it may have been nicer than some of the hotels I've stayed at. But I didn't come to Barcelona to stay in the hostel so we got all of our things together and went to grab some dinner and find out where we could watch the Super Bowl and boy did we find it.

The sign outside looked promising haha.

So we got ourselves a couple liters of Spanish beer and watched in disgust as the Super Bowl proceeded to be one of the least interesting football games we've ever seen. It was so bad that we actually just played pool the second half because the only interesting part was the huge, drunk Seahawks fan that would scream after every first down/interception/touchdown so we still got our updates. 

The next day we woke up to the sound of construction at 8AM sharp and momentarily decided that this was the worst hostel in the world. But we then got free breakfast and all was right in the world. We bummed around a bit and decided to go to Parque Güell, a park designed by the wonderful Mr. Antoni Gaudí. We didn't actually pay to get into the part that has some of his craziest buildings, but we took a nice stroll and climbed on top of the mountain to soak in how awesome and massive the city is.

On top of the hill overlooking the city.

We then made our way to Camp Nou, or FC Barcelona's home stadium. I had gone there once before with my family so that Pete and Charlie could see it, but we decided to walk through it this time. It was such a cool experience and made me want to go to a game really bad, but unfortunately that doesn't appear to be happening anytime soon. We got to walk through the press room, press box, on the pitch, one of the locker rooms and other parts of the stadium. The amount of trophies and the whole culture of the team was pretty insane to look at and the only comparable thing in the States is college football I would say. I wish I could make it to a game, but it just wasn't in the cards!

After getting pushed out of the hall we went back to the same bar and met Katie and Michelle before they went home. We just talked and shot some pool and then made our way back to the hostel once again.

The next day we went to the old city and saw the old gothic cathedral and the beach. We walked along the beach for a while and I couldn't believe how warm it was in the middle of February. It have to imagine it wasn't much less than 65 degrees, sorry everyone at home that has to read that haha but it was fantastic. After that we basically just hung out for our last couple hours and made sure we had all of our plans together for the next parts of the trip.

Paris 

Before I talk too much about what we did in Paris I have to issue a disclaimer of sorts. I don't know why, but I didn't really have high hopes for this city. Maybe it's because it was one of the first countries in a while that I wasn't able to communicate with anyone or maybe it was just because Paris is such a huge city, I don't know what it is. And on top of that it kind of reached those low expectations, not quite surpassing them. I felt like sometimes I found myself doing things to say that I did them rather than actually being interested enough to do them. This is one reason I didn't see the Mona Lisa. YES I KNOW IT'S THE MONA LISA, but to be honest art doesn't interest me enough to get packed into a room with a thousand other people to take a picture of a little painting after paying $25. I don't know, it could just be me, but I find other things a bit more important to me than just catching a glimpse of the Mona Lisa, for example.
Aaaanyway, following this beautiful day in Barcelona we touched down in Paris where it was chilly and just moments from raining at any given time. We tried to get some bearings of where we were so we walked around a bit by our hostel and then took a nap because we were a bit tired and a touch sick. We decided to only do one thing that night and that was going to the Eiffel Tower. It was one of the things I really wanted to see while there and we actually ended up going on top of it to see the whole city!

Changing the selfie game every day. Also, yes, the Eiffel Tower is sparkling.

I'm not going to lie, for some reason the whole time that we were going up this thing I just thought about Rush Hour 3 when Jackie Chan slides down the Tower at the end. I don't even know. 

So I've got something short to share really quick because I was convinced that Paris was out to get us when we went on our walking tour the following day. We stayed in the Oops! Hostel in Paris which is a strange name in general. No worries, the beds were comfortable and whatever but when your tour guide is then named Onno...oh no. You just can't make that up. Regardless of all this and the rain on top of that, the tour was great. I saw a lot and learned a lot about the city and actually my initial feelings changed and began to like it a lot more. We saw the Louvre, the Latin Quarter, the Notre Dame, and a ton more but were pretty soaked by the end of it. Nothing that a little Chipotle didn't fix though.

Inside the Notre Dame

 Lock Bridge.

The Louvre with the guys.

After the walking tour, Robert, Aleks and I headed up to meet Mauro and Tyler and we made our way to get a better look at the Arc de Triomphe. The weather finally cleared up and we started to dry out as well.

The last thing we did was go to the older part of the city and we climbed up to see Sacre Coeur, an old cathedral on one of the highest points of the city. We took the metro most of the way there and went in side this gorgeous, white church. The inside was just so crisp and clean because of the white stone and was just as impressive as Notre Dame in my opinion, possibly because of the fact that it was on top of a small mountain. 

Prague

Prague was one of my favorite cities I've gone to since being to Europe and I would highly recommend it. Katilee talked about it to me before I left and I have to admit she couldn't talk it up enough. The bars, the castles, old city, opera house; the place has it all! We arrived pretty late at night so we didn't do much but eat dinner which was muuuuch different from what I've become accustomed to in Spain. I had roasted pork knee with mustard and horseradish with a nice half pint of a local stout called Kovel. On top of it being hearty it was cheap (like $7 total!) and extremely filling. Right away I could tell I was going to like this place.

The following day we set out on another free walking tour with a fantastic guide who I'm going to call George due to his impossible Czech name. He took us all over the city and gave us cool anecdotes about everything we saw. Most were making fun of Nazis and no one can resist those, so we had to tip him a bit more than our other "free" tours.

The Charles Bridge, also a car and a presumable Czech Family.

Neo-Gothic Church in the Prague Castle

The Astronomical Clock

Some of these pictures are actually from the following day when we went through a few of the parts of the Prague Castle on a tour but who really cares, right? Anyways on this same tour we were shown a statue of a few men that I wouldn't have noticed unless our guide said something and to be honest, I kind of nerd-ed out it for a second.

With no help from the lettering underneath the two gentlemen, this is Tycho Brahe and Johnnes Kepler. I don't know if you've ever heard of them, but they were some pretty big-name astronomers that lived in the 16th and 17th century that did a lot of their work in Prague. Actually Brahe's buried in Prague somewhere but due to time constraints I wasn't able to go see the grave. I completely forgot that they were in the Czech Republic and to be honest I think that I was the only person in our tour group that had any idea who they were. This was made kind of evident when I asked the tour guide some questions about him and everyone just kind of just called me a nerd. No matter, I was pretty pumped for some reason. 

I know that every post on this one is pretty short, but it took me forever to write these because I've been putting it off/traveling/watching Netflix instead. I've actually been to two other cities since writing about these three and at this rate we'll see if I even post about those ones before I get home. It maybe that I'm just forgetting a few things or just being lazy but I just ask me sometime if you want to get bored by my stories here haha. I'm missing home and it's crazy that I'll be back in like two weeks. Looking forward to seeing all of my family and friends again and I hope that everyone is doing well. It's so bittersweet leaving some place I've called home for the last six months, but it will be so great being in a place that I've called home for the last twenty years. Let me know at all if you want to skype or something soon but otherwise bundle up and keep warm in the Polar Vortexes and I'll keep trying to get by in the 60 degree weather haha. Look for some possible posts about Munich and Venice coming soon enough!

Chau!

Después del programa: Santiago de Compostela y San Sebastián

            I told you I was going to try to post a bit more so here’s my first post on my one month trip all over Europe. I promise that these posts won’t be as long and will have more of my favorite pictures that I took. Again, I’m traveling with my friends Mauro, Aleks, Tyler, and Robert and they’ve been a joy to be with the whole three days of our trip. We have some high hopes for the next three and a half weeks here and here’s just some short posts of our past two day trips.

Santiago de Compostela

            So we took a RyanAir flight (really cheap discount airline) up to Santiago de Compostela on the last day in January after sleeping the night in the hotel. Needless to say we were pretty tired when we arrived there at eight in the morning. We walked about around the city and got a quick breakfast because we couldn’t check into the hostel but didn’t really see much. We checked-in and took a nap before anything else because the flight just really killed us.

            We woke up and tried to wade through the rainy city to la Catedral de Santiago de Compostela. This is an ancient church that was constructed after the pilgrimage of Saint James. If you’ve ever heard of el Camino de Santiago this is the ending point to the path and is where a lot of pilgrims end up. It’s situated in the center of the city and without a doubt is the most important part of the city. There’s a gorgeous plaza outside of it with a hotel (I have to imagine extremely expensive) and town hall right nearby. It’s an old Roman-style church so it is pretty but it can be kind of boring as well and to be honest I was a little disappointed with it. That being said, I was blown away by the inside and the gold-plated altar area.

Unfortunately, it's undergoing maintenance.

  

            Unfortunately, there wasn’t much more to see in Santiago. The city reminded me a lot of my times in Ireland and England because it just seemed to continue raining and everything was ridiculously green. It may also be that way because Cáceres is quite possibly the driest climate I’ve ever lived in so anything that gets rain more than six times in 6 months seems wet. I will say that the seafood here was absolutely phenomenal. Tyler and I split this delicious plate of steamed mussels and another plate of calamari. It was super fresh and it just was succulent, no way around it. I really enjoyed it here, but I will say that I’m glad I only spent one day there. 

San Sebastián

            After a ten-hour train ride through the mountainous northern coast of Spain we arrived at the beautiful Basque city of San Sebastián. And yes that is 10 hours, let’s just say we made due playing euchre and hearts and it didn’t seem to be that long. We arrived and couldn’t quite find the hostel after forgetting to write down any kind of information to find it. On top of that it was raining and pretty dark. Not one of our better ideas. We finally got to the hostel, dried out and headed out for some pinxos (pronounced "peenchos", tapas essentially). The pinxos were phenomenal: cod cooked with honey, mushrooms and raisins and cod with ali-oli, caramelized onions and toasted bread. We went and checked out the beach quick but didn’t feel like getting rained on too much more, so we decided to go to bed.

            This is a quick sidebar before the continuation of my time here. San Sebastián is part of Basque Country which is a region of Spain that also wants independence from Spain; so much so that they had a terrorist group until a few years ago. Actually some of the convicted terrorists have recently been released from prison based of off some European human rights law that says that no one can be kept in prison for more than thirty years, even if they killed hundreds of innocent people and were convicted for multiple life sentences because that just not humane. It’s kind of a big deal here, but regardless they’re still a bit nationalistic and they like speaking there own language, blah blah blah.

            There was a bit of rain in the morning when we went to the sea and we noticed that there were was a lot of caution tape up. We didn’t think much about it and continued down a side road to get a better view of the Ondarreta Beach.

My friend Robert and I at the side of Ondarreta.

            We headed toward the Old City where there was also a “mountain” to climb to get a viewpoint of the whole city. Here again we found a lot of yellow tape and a ton of people. One of the bridges was closed off due to the amount of sand and the fact that one of the walls facing the ocean had fallen into the river. After talking to a few locals and looking up on the news what had happened. There apparently was a huge storm that had waves just slamming different parts of the city and wreaking havoc on the man-made structures. There were many streets in the old city that were closed down and a lot destruction from the eight-meter-high waves that were crushing the shore.

           

            We climbed the Monte Urgull to one of the ancient costal batteries. The view of the city was, once again, indescribable. We could see both Ondaretta Beach, la Playa de la Concha and all of the snow-capped mountains that surrounded the city. With the sun-shining, blue skies, and the mocha-colored white caps I knew that I had fallen in love with Northern Spain.

            We walked the long path back down to the hostel and watched the crashing waves as close as we were allowed due to the closing of the street. The waves were still splashing meters into the sky and they sounded like a jet rolling in. I tried to capture the sound with my camera but I don’t know if it was possible. We honestly sat there just watching waves for like 20 minutes, it was just so beautiful.

            We grabbed some great burgers with goat cheese and blueberries and headed off to the train to Barcelona, which is where we currently are. I loved San Sebastián and I wish we had one more day to see some of the other parts of the city and get some more pinxos, but I can always come back. I would definitely recommend coming here if you’re in Spain, especially in the summer.  With that I will bid you adieu and hope you enjoyed a shorter post. I’m having a great time and I hope you’ll look forward to my coming adventures in Barça and Paris.

Adiós!