Perfecto

2/15/09

            Where to begin with this glorious weekend…

The boys went off to ski in Andorra, so originally we thought we would just be jealous of them and have a regalar type weekend here. We ended up having a great time in Barcelona.

            Things did not start off THAT great, Chessie had some friends visiting and the first night they were here, right after we left them to go to a dinner at our RA’s apartment, one of the girls got her purse stolen. Womp womp. What a nice welcome to the city. But she was a trooper about it and didn’t let it ruin her time.

            We also met up with more intercambio’s on Friday. This time Chessie and I met with young Spanish University students, one girl and one guy, Jordi and Marta. We went to a café and talked with them for a couple hours, they were both really great and we like them a lot.

So Saturday we decided to try going out to a new place, one that was really close to our house, right up on Tibidabo (the mountain behind our apt) It was a great place, very class class, and since it is embedded in the mountain it had a gorgeous view of the city at night. I wish I brought my camera, but o’course, I did not. We sat at a table by one of the windows overlooking Barcelona all 5 of us ordered one over-priced cocktail. We sat and chatted for a long time and thought we had better make it an early (3am at this point) night since three of us wanted to go to the Gothic Cathedral for mass in the morning. Before we left we went downstairs to go to the bathroom and that is when the music drew us in… none of us can resist dancing when we like the music so we ended up staying a couple more hours. What was really great about this place is that it was NOT a tourist spot. We were the only Americans in there. It also seemed to be an attraction for the middle aged crowd, which was fine with us because there were less of the creepers we usually encounter… though the creepers that WERE there were middle-aged… There was one group of younger, attractive Spanish chicos but they, like us, only seemed interested in dancing in a circle with each other this night, which was both hilarious and awesome to see.

So Sunday morning rolls around, I (like always) seriously consider not waking up when I planned to and just going back to sleep for hours. Somehow I managed to roll myself out of bed and made it to mass with Chessie and Meg. The cathedral was beautiful and we spent a while in there after mass to look at all the art. Then, as we’re leaving we hear this band and procession of people in the street, so we go to look at what it is and we see all these people with these matching outfits on. We weren’t sure what they were doing, and we were walking in the opposite direction of them, but luckily Meg saw a label on one of their shirts that said “castellers” which she had learned about. These are the people that make the human towers (as shown in the picture). We went and watched them for about an hour, it was so amazing to see. I was most terrified for the littleun’s who had to be like 4 or 5 years old who would just scale these peoples bodies to get to the top like no big deal. I don’t think I ever possessed that kind of fearlessness, def. not at the age of 4. We were just really excited that we happened to walk out of the cathedral at the perfect moment to see them, we had heard about them before and always wanted to watch it but didn’t know when it would happen. I still don’t know why they were there, there is definitely some sort of festival going on but I have no clue what, Carnival isn’t until next week.

After we watched them we went and got Hot chocolate and churros, which is just never a disappointment so no surprises there.

And then, we had the cake topper. As we are walking back to the metro we were thinking, the only thing that could make this day more perfect is if we run into those break dancers again. Lo and behold, there they are, performing in front of our metro stop. Clearly this was fate that brought us together ONCE again. So after the show, we really felt that we had no choice BUT to go and talk to them. So we went and asked them about how they all met (seeing as they are all from different countries). I guess there is a break dancing gym nearby where they all go to practice and that’s how they got together. So we finally talked to them and felt incredibly accomplished afterwards, having spoken to such awesomely talented chicos, and I left with their number, so we now really have break dancing friends to call our own. Que guay.