Scottish Adventures: BCN part dos.

It's weird to think that just last week I was in Barcelona and now I'm back in the states. But here I am, blogging away about my visit to the capital of Catalonia and the second largest city in Spain. Whoot.
So our second full day in Barcelona brought even warmer weather and almost no wind, so it was a good thing we were going to be hitting up the beach later in the day. However, we started our day by walking to Montjuic, this large hill close to our hostel that is home to lots of cool stuff. Our first stop was the Olympic Stadium from the 1992 Summer Olympics! It was so neat to see the actual stadium; we were allowed to walk into it, but couldn't go down on the field or the track. Still legit to see it and such. I love the Olympics, so anything related I go crazy for. =) After we ventured around there, we continued on our way to see the magic fountains and the beautifully architectured art museum building. Sadly, the magic fountains weren't even on. I think we got there too early to even see them on. Their magic is only on display in the form of a light show on Thursday-Sunday nights...so none of the nights we were there. Of course. Whatever. The art museum building was insane; it was art in itself. We didn't go to the museum, just oogled at the massive building. We then decided to go see this supposed castle that was somewhere on the hill. Little did we know it was quite an uphill trek to get to said castle. After spending a semester in Scotland, this Spanish castle if you could call it that, wasn't that cool. It did have a nice garden. There was also a little food/drink cart thing, so we got water as it was a hot day and we'd just been out walking for at least 2 hours and uphill. Tiring. Once we hydrated, our energy was back and we left to go to the beach! Somewhere in there we had lunch...oh yeah! We went to see the Barcelona Cathedral and got baguettes from a little shop there. So French...in Spain. Ha. After that we made our way to the beach! Whoot. I'm actually not a huge beach-goer, but it'd been years since I'd been to a real beach, so I was kind of excited. Even though neither of us had brought swimsuits to Scotland, we still had a good time just relaxing on the beach; we did go down to the water and walked along it for awhile, but the water wasn't exactly warm so it was enough to just get our feet wet. There were a bunch of Indian men walking around with coolers and bags with drinks trying to sell them to people and there were others selling massages, tattoos, and wraps...kind of annoying because they just kept coming back, but I perfected the art of not making eye contact and when they asked, "Beer, cerveza?" to respond with a quick "No gracias!". Nonetheless our time on the beach was quite relaxing; we walked up one of the piers and I ate my first Magnum bar after hearing about them from friends back in Texas and how amazing they are. Personally, I wasn't blown away, but it was pretty good. We left the beach and made our way back towards our hostel and then went to dinner later at this place we had seen when we were eating our baguette lunch by the cathedral. We sat outside and I ordered tapas and once again we had sangria. My tapas were amazing. I had potatoes bravas, pork barbeque on toasted bread, and fried Camembert cheese with a dipping sauce. Potatoes bravas were diced potatoes fried with a spicy tomato sauce [thanks Wikipedia!]. I ordered them not knowing what they were, but having seen them on many of the tapas menus as a popular choice, so I figured I should go for them regardless of what they ended up being and it's hard to go wrong with potatoes. We walked back to Las Ramblas after dinner and got ice cream like the previous night too...yeah I know I had ice cream twice in the day too, but whatever, treatin' myself! Ha.
The next day we had a little bit of time before we had to head to the airport, so we hit up La Boqueria again for one last juice drink and walked to the other end where there was a big plaza area and some fountains and loads of pigeons. My favorite. Not. We took the metro then to the train station to catch the train to the airport. I used a bit of my Spanish skills to ask where the train was located and the lady responded to me in English which was common every time I talked in Spanish. Barcelona, I guess is more English than I thought...or rather touristy? It was frustrating because I was kind of excited to have to use Spanish and then I didn't even need to. I'm sure we could have gone to places where it would've been more necessary, but didn't end up anywhere like that. Also, a lot of people in Barcelona speak Catalan, which is more based out of Latin. Some of the stuff sounds and looks Spanish, but most is crazy. Haha. A lot of the little food vendors and such, and signs around the city were first in Catalan then Spanish. I did think that was neat. So anyways, we got the train, but not after almost taking the wrong one! The lady had told me platform 9 so we went there and there was a train there so we hopped on, not thinking to see if it was actually going to the airport. Thankfully, as we sat there, feeling like we were on the wrong train because it seemed a lot nicer and not many of the other people with suitcases on the platform had gotten on, a guy spoke to another guy in Catalan and we were able to understand it as this train isn't to the airport. So we got off quickly before it started moving! The next train took us to the airport and was jam packed and the same musical guys were playing and walking throughout it. Interesting. We had to wait in a lot of lines at the airport, but we had plenty of time, so it was fine and we made our flight in the perfect amount of time. Getting back to the Glasgow bus station after we made it into the Glasgow Prestwick airport was another story. For some reason, the bus we had to take was having a busy day so the bus we planned to catch was full and then the next one that followed didn't stop. We didn't have a ton of time to catch the bus and then our next one home to Edinburgh, so we were getting nervous, but finally the next bus wasn't full, and we barely made it onto our bus to Edinburgh, but praise the Lord we did, or else I'm not sure what we would've done. Not exactly the most relaxing travel, so it was a really lovely time when I spent the evening up on the Salisbury Crags near Arthur's Seat and watched the sun set. So peaceful and absolutely beautiful watching the day end over the city.
That ends my travel adventures, but don't worry, I have probably one more blog coming to wrap up this study abroad time. I'll try to write it tomorrow because if not, I don't know when it will be as I am starting my summer camp job soon! Off and running into summer, it's a good thing I wasn't affected by jetlag really!