Barcelona Part One

Barcelona Part one (Thursday)
Let me put this into perspective for you….right now I am sitting on the window sill of my open kitchen window, looking down four stories at the Piazza Roma. The sun is shining and the air smells like spring. It is Sunday afternoon so the usual crowd of old folks have gathered in the center of the piazza to casually sit around the palm trees and chat. Honestly, this is the perfect way to spend my Sunday afternoon after such a hectic but exciting weekend.
This weekend was my trip to Barcelona. I was looking forward to this trip since I planned it with my friends about a month ago (ok a guy just walked by in ridiculously neon colored Nike’s….John and Alf, you guys would fit in so well here….). We left for Barcelona last Thursday. Of course I had classes, so I had to sit through two hours of Italian and an hour and a half of History before I could leave to go to the airport.
Most people would think that going to the airport is as simple as jumping in a car or taxi, but traveling is not that simple here in Ascoli. There is no airport in Ascoli, so we have to travel to one of the three airports in Ancona, Pescara or Rome. We were flying out of Pescara to go to Barcelona. In order to get to the airport, we left our apartments at 2:40pm. We walked the 20 minutes with our luggage to the Ascoli train station, and grabbed a train to San Benedetto at 3pm. The train to San Benedetto is about 40 minutes long. From the station in San Benedetto, we had to take another 40 minute train to Pescara, but we had an hour and a half layover. When we got to Pescara, we had to take a 25 minute bus ride to the airport. So, by the time we got to the airport, we had already traveled a little more than three and a half hours. We had to get to the airport two hours early because we were on an international flight, so by the time we actually boarded the plane, we had been traveling for a little over five and a half hours.
We were flying Ryan Air to Barcelona, and everything was fine and dandy until the last girl from our group of 7 went to check in. We were meeting two other girls from our program in Barcelona, but they had flown out of Rome earlier that day and missed their classes. The last girl that went to check in booked her ticket later than the rest of us and made a last minute decision to fly out of Pescara instead of Rome. Unfortunately…..she booked the ticket for Rome by mistake. She had to make the choice to either travel the three hours back to Ascoli Piceno and lose 100 euro on her ticket, or buy another ticket to fly from Pescara to Barcelona and spend 220 euro on a new ticket, plus 100 euro on the old ticket.
She ended up buying another ticket to get onto our flight, but we all felt so badly for her. She dropped about 350 euro after fees and charges and wrong tickets when we only spent 35 euro. That’s a weeee bit of a difference.
After check-in we headed to security. Apparently, we are all idiots because ALL of us packed liquids, razors or tweezers. I don’t know what we were thinking. Maybe we thought European security was a little more relaxed?? Needless to say, we got many a thing confiscated. When the security guards started to throw out our things, we had the brilliant idea to check a bag of toiletries. I don’t know if any of you have flown Ryan Air…but you should NEVER check things. We should have just let the guards throw our stuff out because Ryan Air lost our ONE bag anyway. It’s a good thing that we all brought carry-on luggage.
The flight to Spain was pretty much uneventful aside from the continuous speeding up and slowing down and rising and falling of the airplane. It was definitely obvious that I paid 35 euro for my flight.
So we reached Barcelona and then figured out our bag didn’t, and ran to grab the bus from the Girona airport to the center of Barcelona. When we got out to the bus stop, there was the longest line stretching out of the bus. By the time people filed on and we reached the door, the bus driver said…”four more” (in Spanish of course). That meant our group would get split. We didn’t want that to happen, so I broke out my Spanish for the first time in FOREVER and finagled us onto the bus. The bus ride was an hour and 15 minutes long (THERE IS A MASSIVE MULLET OUTSIDE OF MY WINDOW RIGHT NOW!) and it was filled with Italians….go figure. When we hit the bus station it was after 12 midnight, and the metro had closed. We hailed down two taxis and they brought us to our hostel, but not after charging us 15 euro PER taxi….what a rip off for an 8 minute ride.
We stayed in Centric Point Hostel right in the center of Barcelona on Passaje de Gracia. We checked in and rented out sheets and blankets (yes…..RENTED….PAID EXTRA FOR….) and went upstairs to our room. We were staying in a 12 person room and there were only 9 of us so we shared a room with three other strangers. When we met the first “Stranger” I was a little sketched out at first, but that didn’t last long. The first stranger’s name was Norman and he was from Northern Ireland. Talk about accent! Haha. He was really cool and helped us plan out what we were going to do in Barcelona and in Dublin when we go there in a week. The other strangers were out with the two girls from our group who arrived earlier that day so we figured they were cool too.
At the end of the day we traveled from 2:40pm until 1am…10 hours and 20