Courtney Barcelona

parc guell

Two Sundays ago, my friends and I went to Parc Güell, a famous park in Barcelona that was designed by Gaudi.  The last photo that I reblogged is from the entrance of Parc Güell.  We got lost, what’s new?  It seems that anywhere we try to go, we somehow end up in the wrong place.  Apparently we got off the metro one stop too late, which put us on the other side of the mountain that Parc Güell is on.  Instead of getting on a bus or taking the metro back a stop, we decided to hike up the mountain and down to the other side.  It was SO HOT outside that day, and so the hike was not very fun.  

However, when we got to the actual park, it was SO worth the walk.  We walked around the park and took pictures.  Gaudi is the most amazing designer.  Here are some pictures, but they don’t even begin to do the park justice.

Our hike up to Parc Güell…

More of our hike (downhill though!!)

The view from the top of Parc Güell.

A hallway/tunnel in the park.  It looked like a wave!

The view from the top of the stairs at the entrance of the park.

A ceiling in the park.

Famous mosaic lizard in Parc Güell.

And there you have the story of our day through pictures.

long overdue.

I haven’t posted in a week and a half! Whoops!! This is long overdue, but I will try to recap every day as thoroughly as I can.  This past week and a half have been full of lots of hookah, sangria, wine, and beer (maybe a little too much)!  We discovered the hookah bar scene in Barcelona, and I believe that we will soon be regulars at the little bar close to our house.  Not only is it a relaxing atmosphere, but we are now no longer allowed to have guests at our apartment past 10 pm, so it is a great meeting place before me and all my friends go out!! 

A couple Wednesdays ago, my friends and I went to the beach after work and class and ended up staying there until four in the morning!  I don’t think I will be doing that again before a full day of work…to say the least, Thursday morning was rough.  At one point I fell asleep at my desk, and my coworker had to wake me up!  I guess that’s what happens when someone is tired and is doing completely mindless work.  I have found that the times I have the most fun are not when I am out at a club, but when my friends and I are just sitting at the beach or in a local bar.  It is much easier to talk, and I have learned so much about everyone because of it.  Anyway, here are a few pictures from that night:

The whole group!! 

Joanna, JP and I at the hookah bar on the beach.  

Last weekend was really fun! A bunch of people from Mizzou came to Barcelona for the weekend, so I got to hang out with my friend Thom.  On Thursday night, my friends and I hung out on this little jungle gym type of structure on the beach before we met Thom and his group.  

I loved seeing Thom, and it was so fun to catch up with him.  He is studying in Dublin for the semester.  It was interesting to listen to his stories about his study abroad experience thus far because it sounds like we are having two completely different experiences, but I think they are both fun!! I didn’t get a picture with Thom, though :( Thom and his friends left around the same time as most of the people in my group left, but JP and I stayed at the beach and went for a walk.  In the span of a couple hours, JP and I managed to get lost, retrace our steps and get locked out of my apartment.  I FINALLY got buzzed into the building around 6:45, but then was still locked out of my apartment!  I was exhausted, but I went to the roof and watched the sunrise and waited for my roommate to wake up.  She had work at 9, so i finally hopped in bed around 8 am.  Long night, but it was a blast! 

On Monday, six of us girls went to the hookah bar before meeting up with others at a local bar.  Tuesday, we went again!  Here are a couple pictures from the hookah bar (ironically, Joanna and I sat in the same spots both nights and got almost the same picture both nights!)

The local bar we went to after the hookah bar was fun!  It somehow became known that I am a fan of country music, and apparently I am the only one in my program who  likes it, so everyone had a few laughs as they poked fun at my taste in music.  It always so enjoyable to be the joke of the conversation, right??  It was all in good fun :) Anyway, it is nice to find new places to go to, and it is also really cool to meet the locals from Barcelona!! 

I’ll update more tomorrow, I’m about to fall asleep at my computer!! 

sevilla.

This weekend, eleven of us went to Sevilla.  It was AMAZING.  The city is completely different from Barcelona.  We had to wake up at 3 am to catch our flight on Friday morning, and I didn’t go to bed until 1:30 the night before, so it was rough running on less than two hours of sleep, but it was so worth it.  When we got to Sevilla, we rode a bus from the airport to Kansas City Avenue!  Kansas City and Sevilla are sister cities, and it was cool to have a little piece of home halfway across the world.  

We walked to our hostel, called Oasis, and it was in the perfect location.  We had a 12-person room in the hostel, and so it was the 11 of us and one random guy named Arthur.  Arthur was a year younger than me and traveling around Europe alone for three months.  He was a nice guy, but it’s fair to say that he was not so fond of our group.  Anyways, from our hostel it was only about a 10 minute walk to all of the cool sites in the city, and there were great stores and restaurants right down the street from it.  After we checked in, we went to a little breakfast restaurant.  My friend Joanna and I shared an omelette with lots of different types of chorizo in it.  It was delectable! After breakfast, we walked around the city aimlessly before stopping at a Spanish chain restaurant called 100 Montaditos.  They have little sandwiches for really cheap and tinto de verano, which is a drink kind of like sangria.  The sandwiches were so yummy.  We went back the next day to try more.

After lunch, we went into the cathedral and La Giralda.  They were both so beautiful.  I read somewhere that the cathedral in Sevilla is one of the most beautiful cathedrals in Spain.  My favorite part of the trip, though, was Alcazar.  Alcazar is a castle in Sevilla, and the gardens in the back of the castle were amazing!  Diana and I walked through a labyrinth on the castle grounds, too.  Here are some pictures of Alcazar:

After we wandered around Alcazar, we went to the hostel and took a nap and then we went on a pub crawl with everyone from our hostel!  It was really fun to meet people from all over the world, and to hear their stories.  The bars were fun, too!  They were different than the bars in Columbia or in Barcelona, but fun none the less.  

My roommates and I on the pub crawl.

Day 2 of Sevilla was a bit more laid back than day 1.  We all woke up late and walked to 100 Montaditos to grab some lunch.  After lunch, we continued to roam the city, but then we decided that we wanted to relax, so we went back to the terrace of the hostel and played euchre!  I was so excited because the only time I ever get to play is during the holidays with my family, which is not very often.  My partner, Bryan, and I won the first round, but lost every other round of the weekend.  After euchre, we played Kings, another card game, and then relaxed on the terrace for the rest of the afternoon.  Here is the view of Sevilla from our terrace:
We went to a Flamenco show on Saturday night in Sevilla.  It was amazing!  The woman dancing was so passionate and emotional.  I can only hope that I find something in life that I can be equally as passionate about as this woman was about the flamenco.  The Flamenco show ended around midnight, so a few of us sat at a bar and the others went to a club.  Ironically, we ran into each other when we were coming home and the others were walking to the club.  Let’s just say they had all had a few too many drinks, so the confrontation was interesting…
Before our flight back to Barcelona on Sunday, we went to the Plaza de Espana in Sevilla.  It was a beautiful plaza.  Here are a few pictures:
The weekend was a success! 

“it is good to feel lost… because it proves you have a navigational sense of where ‘home’ is.  you know that a place that feels like being found exists.  and maybe your current location isn’t that place but, Hallelujah, that unsettled, uneasy feeling of lost-ness just brought you closer to it”

costa brava.

This past weekend, all of the IES programs took a bus trip to Costa Brava.  It is a large portion of the coast in northern Spain and southern France.  We went to La Jonquera first, a small town in Spain right on the Spain-France border.  There we stopped for a few hours to go to the Exile Museum.  It was a small museum, but really explained the reign of Franco, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II from a native’s point of view.

This was my favorite picture of the museum.  I don’t know if you all can tell, but inside were a bunch of mirrors along with a video depicting the war.  The video reflected off all of the mirrors, which made it chaotic, but illustrated the war more appropriately.

Another picture of the Exile Museum.
After La Jonquera, we rode to Collioure, a small town in southern France, where we visited Antonio Machado’s grave.  After that, we spent the day wandering around the town, shopping and sightseeing.  It was an awesome, colorful, little beach town, probably my favorite stop of the weekend! 





There are a few pictures from Collioure.  Those do not even begin to illustrate how amazing the town was.  I wish we could have had more time there, but it was enough time to walk around, eat a yummy lunch, drink some wonderful wine, and take a few cool pictures.
After Collioure, we headed back down south to Girona, where we stayed the night.  My friends and I all found a cute bar, ordered a few too many pitchers of cava sangria, and chatted all night long.  
The next morning, we took a walking tour of Girona.  It is an old city, and a river runs through the middle of it.  We toured the cathedral, and I think that was my favorite part.  It was a huge cathedral, and the details in the design were impeccable.  All of these old buildings and tourist attractions continue to boggle my mind.  Why are buildings not made like they used to be?  The beauty of architecture sure has changed.

This is the view from the stairs of the cathedral.  Most of old Girona was stone, and I thought it was an overall splendid city.

Then our day took a turn for the worse: we headed to S’Agaro, where we hiked to a sandy beach on the coast, which my have been my favorite part of the weekend if the weather hadn’t been so crappy!  It was cold, and either raining or cloudy, the whole time we were there.  So instead of basking in the sun in my bathing suit.  I sat on a patio…in my jacket…with a restaurant menu over my bare legs.  Fun, huh?  Not at the time.  However, it is funny looking back, because even in the worst conditions, Spain is still wonderful.

Pretty, right?  If all my dreams came true, I would live in that house.
We headed back to Girona after our cold day at the beach, and our night consisted of, once again, sitting on a restaurant patio and drinking sangria.
The next morning we got up at the crack of dawn, packed our bags, and headed to Figueres, home of the Dali museum, which is officially the coolest museum I have ever been to.  I don’t even have the words to describe his art.  And, I don’t know what could have possibly been going on in Dali’s head for most of his life, but he is an artistic genius.

This was one of the first things you saw when you walked into the museum.  After the museum, we went to Cadaques, a small beach town where Dali owned a house and finished many of his masterpieces.  It was an adorable little beach town, as were most of the towns on this weekend trip!  We ate tapas at a restaurant on the beach and shopped all day.  It was a great weekend to go because there were a ton of little sidewalk shops that were selling anything from clothing to bread to kitchen utensils.



Here are a few pictures from Cadaques.  After Cadaques, we made our way back to Barcelona.  It was a lonnngggg weekend, but so worth the exhaustion.

week of work.

I started my internship on June 1st.. a little over a week ago, so this post is long overdue, as are the posts to come.  I am working at a consulting agency called JDQ Serveis.  It is a small company of only about 15 people, and I work in a room with five other women.  Our desks are in a circle, and, if I could understand the language, it would be a great office to work in.  Everyone at work speaks catalan, unless speaking to me, so they could be talking about me the whole time and I would have absolutely NO idea.  

Work is repetitive.  I mindlessly put numbers into an information system…from what I can tell, I am doing the bookkeeping for local restaurants in Barcelona.  It is cool, though, to walk around and recognize advertising agencies, markets, and other store names that these restaurants buy things from.  Otherwise, however, my eyes fall back into my head and my mind is blank.  I do look forward to the daily “coffee breaks”.  Every day, around…11? or so..the lady next to me asks, “Tomas un cafe?”  I say yes, of course, because if I don’t I will literally start drooling on my desk!  So we go to a local bar and have a cafe con leche, the BEST coffee ever, and sit and chat for 45 minutes or so.  This is the part I look forward to most for many reasons.  First, it tremendously helps my Spanish-speaking skills.  Also, I like getting to know the people here.  It is such a different culture, in both good and bad ways.  Work in Barcelona is SO relaxing and stress-free.  If something can’t be finished, there is ALWAYS manana.  No worries or cares.  Two-hour lunch breaks, after a long coffee break.  Siestas!  It’s wonderful, but sometimes I wonder how anything gets done in Spain :) 

I’m learning a lot, though, and I am enjoying the experience.  I wake up at 7 am, get ready, take the metro, and don’t get home until after 5 pm.  It’s like having a “real” job, somewhat.  Well, the hours are like a real job, but the work is not.  But I didn’t expect to learn about consulting or accounting or anything like that, I expected to learn about myself, and that’s exactly what I am doing.