Gymkhana

1/12/09

            I must have walked thirty miles today.

            We had our first Spanish class, which went fairly well. Apparently Fabrizio was just our teacher for orientation, our actual teacher is named Laura Vazquez. I really like her and I understood everything that she said.

            After class, David, Shane, Chessie and I decided to go to the market (which is actually called La Boqueria) for lunch. I got a piece of pizza bread type thing for 2 euro, Shane got another baguette sandwich, and Chessie and David hit up the vegetarian stand for vegetarian tacos picantes. We walked down to la plaza real to eat outside because it was a gorgeous day today.  It was very sunny and warm enough to just wear a light sweatshirt. La plaza real is pretty, it has palm trees and a lot of little shops and cafes around the border and a fountain in the middle. It also doesn’t have quite as many birds as plaza catalunya, where if you fall over it’s like genocide to the pigeons.

After lunch, Chessie and I decided we wanted to try walking home. So far we had only used the metro so we really didn’t know where we lived in relation to plaza catalunya and we figured we better know in case we were ever out after the metros had closed. So we consulted our map and thought we would have enough time to walk home and take the metro back for our Gymkhana (scavenger hunt) that was at 3:30. So a little after 1:00 we left David and Shane and started heading home… 2 hours later… we finally arrived only to turn directly around and rush to meet our group for the Gymkhana.

The Gymkhana was another 3 full hours of walking around Barcelona. We had different destinations we had to go to with different tasks to complete at each one. It was supposed to help us learn more about the city, but we really only had 3 leaders of the group and the rest of us were just kind of along for the ride. We have to answer questions with a certain number of points attached to each of them and if we win then we get a free field trip (one of the optional field trips that they offer) to Montserrat. There are 36 groups though so I aint about to get my hopes up for that one, really not banking on it.

Finally after the Gymkhana we took the metro back home, my legs and feet are really tired because we were walking for at least 6 hours today. When we got back we had another dinner waiting – this time it was a soup with rice, lentils, chicken and some type of sausage, bread with tomato and oil, and a really good kind of light colored melon. 

I'm real tired, I think I'll go to bed early tonight cause we got a whole 'nother Gymkhana tomorrow.