Spring Break: Day 7, 8
Barcelona, Spain




           Hello everyone! Day 7 and 8 of our spring break adventure took us to Barcelona, Spain. Although it felt like we were never going to get there and we had lots of problems getting to Barcelona every step of the way, we FINALLY made it and we both decided that is was probably our favorite part of the trip. 
         After getting back to Paris early that morning and having to wait for the afternoon train, we finally made it to Barcelona that night. We got to our hostel just fine, had dinner at a chinese restaurant (rather interesting to hear a Chinese accent mixed with the Spanish language...) went to bed when we got there and were up and ready for breakfast and the beach early the next morning. We headed to the grocery store to buy some snacks for the day and clearly we were tourists because I felt like I was naked walking down the street. I had a tank top and skirt on and every other lady on the street had jeans, boots, scarves, huge coats and sunglasses. They looked at me like I was literally walking naked down the street. It was extremely uncomfortable! We quickly got what we needed at the grocery store and in comparison to prices in Paris and Birmingham, they were much much lower!! We got what we needed and headed for the beach. 

A view from the beach. 

          Once we got to the beach, we set up camp...which was a sheet that we stole off of one of our beds. They did not provide us with towels, so we improvised and used sheets. When you travel, you become really good at improvising :) By this time it was roughly 11 in the morning and 70 degrees, completely beautiful. We sat and soaked up some sun for a while when I turned over and I thought I saw a naked man. Blinking and looking again, now I saw two naked men and naked children. Getting "snoozies" attention he finally rolled over and couldn't see that far because he didn't have his glasses on. So I tried to sneak pictures on my iphone so I could show Tym. Sure enough, we made camp on a nude beach.

Not the clearest picture but no one wants to see that anyway!

          The more I looked, the more naked people I saw. Looking at the entire beach, everyone on my right hand said was naked. Roughly 40 or 50 people? On the left side, there were maybe 25 people and even though they were mostly covered it was not uncommon for women and girls to not be wearing tops. There were all kinds of girls my age sitting in groups with bikini bottoms on but no tops...they looked at me funny because I was wearing my top and I looked at them funny because they weren't wearing tops!! After the shock slightly wore off, we walked down to the beach to see how cold the water was. Yep, absolutely freezing! Cold enough that after standing there for 20 seconds anything below my ankles was bright red! Enjoying the view by the water, I happened to turn to my right and see a dad and his probably 6 or 7 year old sun playing in the sand together. Naked. Nothing like building a sand castle with your son, naked. So weird. 

          Besides these shenanigans, we just laid on the beach through the afternoon and then set out for the shopping district for Tym to practice his Spanish! We looked around for several stores for a soccer jersey that we were going to buy Logan for his birthday. We found one and Tym was so excited because he got to practice his Spanish so much in all of the stores we stopped in. Surprisingly enough, people in Barcelona do not speak very much English so Tym got to practice a lot! After "shopping" for a while we headed back to the grocery store, got ingredients for fajitas and courtesy of Tym we bought two Coronas, and went back and cooked at the hostel. We spent the rest of the evening skyping with Tym's family and registering for fall semester classes at ISU. The next morning, we walked back down to the beach to fill up our two Corona bottles. We picked up seashells and filled them up with sand before heading back to get our bags at the hostel to ride the train back to France at noon. 

Layin' on the beach. 

I got sand in my shoes when we were filling up the bottles. 

          Although we were only in Barcelona for a day and a half, it was nice to just relax and spend time on the beach! We had a great time in all of the other places but the weather was beautiful in Spain and we didn't have to rush anywhere or be on time for anything. It was a really nice part of the trip!