Barcelona

Hola amics (that means "hi friends!" in Catalan, the official language of Barcelona)!

I visited Barcelona this past weekend, and I have to say that it was one of my favorite cities thus far :) Best way to describe the city? Sevilla on roids (roids=steroids abbreviated). Sevilla has the Guadalquivir river, Barcelona has the beach; Sevilla has the world's largest Cathedral, Barcelona has the Sagrada Familia; Sevilla has heladerías everywhere, Barcelona has legit gelato...I could go on & on! As much fun as I had in Barca, it was also one of my most stressful trips—I got to the city with no place to stay for the weekend! As you can see I'm still alive & well so the living situation was taken care of ASAP. Here's my weekend in pictures!

Instead of flying to Barcelona I took the AVE train, which goes about 180 mph! Although the trip took 5 hours (a flight is 1.5 hours), the convenience highly overshadowed any lost time.

Upon arriving to the big ol train station in Barca, I was reunited with my travel partners for the weekend, Sarah & Katie! We're so cute.

We walked through the Boqueria off of La Rambla for some healthy snacks in the middle of the day—a giant container of strawberries only cost me 1.5€, talk about a great deal. Here's a picture of all the smoothies they sold.

Highlight of the trip: La Sagrada Familia. Construction for this church began in 1882 & is predicted to be finished around 2026! The overall structure is enormous & beautiful, with so much detail that cannot really be captured in photos. Antonio Gaudí is credited for the majority of the building.

Side 1: Stations of the cross. The crucifixion of Jesus is in the center, and above that is a statue of a golden Jesus, resurrected (not shown).

Inside the Sagrada Familia: the ceiling. The columns are meant to look like trees, spreading with their "branches" in order to support the building.

The glass mosaics were so beautiful!

Side 2: The life of Jesus. Super ornate.

When visiting the Gothic Quarter we stumbled upon some sort of dance thing...I'm still not sure what went down! Basically older couples started dancing in a circle together. We visited the area 30 minutes later only to see that more people joined in on the dancing & the circles started to combine!

We visited the beach (Barceloneta)! It was kinda chilly but still really pretty. We ran into some people doing gymnastics on the playground, weird. They brought some straps & made their own strap bar on the jungle gym—talk about giving me a heart attack!

Park Güell! This park, also designed by Antonio Gaudí, was outside of the city about 30 minutes by metro but gave such a great outlook of the Barcelona city. This is actually the last picture I was able to take in Barcelona because my camera soon peaced out a minute later :(

Barcelona was an all-around success, & now I'm back in Sevilla working on some homework before my next trip...PARIS! I cannot believe that I am over halfway done with my study abroad experience in Spain, what a bittersweet feeling. I will definitely be taking full advantage of the next 50 days I have here in Europe :) Sending muchos abrazos y besos, B