The Last Couple of Days

Wow, what a couple of days it has been here...

The last couple of days in Barcelona have been quite exciting although without class yet it still feels like I am on a vacation and not going to be here for 4 months.  I will recap the last couple of days for you guys.

The day after arriving my roommates and myself all decided to explore the town.  We took the Metro over to find where our classes will be and walked around the downtown area.  The Metro is quite crucial around here especially to get to classes and to bars which aren't close by. We did some shopping and got a Spanish phone, walked around the streets, and ate a two interesting restaurants one serving fish and the other pizza.  Things have been quite expensive around here, but alcohol has certainly not been.  Except for high end clubs which could cost over 10 euros (or more in dollars), the markets have dirt cheap prices.  We have been getting 6 packs of beer and bottles of wine for as low as .99 euros.  At around 1:30am we all decided to head over to a high end club called Sutton.  We all got in free to the club and after a while things started to pick and get more and more crowded.  After a little while we decided to go next door to a local bar to get cheaper drinks and had a real fun time interacting with the bartender and she ended up giving us free shots.  We soon headed back to the club, watched a very interesting show of girls dancing on stage, and called it a night around 4:30am. On the walk back one of my roommates decided to hop in a cab and go downtown, and I learned the next day that he ended up getting a knife pulled on him for various reasons.

On Friday we had a bit more to get done.  I spend the morning at my orientation session, however I ended up at the wrong one.  It was cool though cause I met some amazing people and made many friends so I guess it turned our for the best. The weather that night was pretty lousy and while we tried going out, we only stayed at this bar called Fira for about an hour and then headed home quite early but not before stopping at near by gas station for some food.  It turns out that we actually ended up meeting three real cool American guys who live pretty close by. Later that night before bed, I ended up blowing out all the electricity in my apartment, and I had to wake up my RA who luckily was able to fix it. 

Saturday was quite a day.  We spent the entire day on buses traveling to two cities Besalu and Vic.  They were pretty cool, but we spent too long doing nothing.  The day went from about 9am to 7pm.  We chilled at the apartment when we got back and got ready for what we didn't realize would be a crazy night.  All four guys that I live with and myself met many people earlier that day and decided to throw a huge party at our apartment.  Most people that we have met live with host families so they were happy to have a place to come and drink before going out. Around 11pm people started showing up.  The party consisted of myself, Ben, the three guys we live with, about 13 girls, and the 3 guys that we met the night before. However, because of the rules with our program we aren't alound to have parties in apartment that last too long, so after a while our RA had us head out.  We took the Metro over to a local bar called the Black Sheep which was amazing.  The only way that I can describe would be to compare it to a very large cafeteria with tons of people.  On the way over I had about a 10 minute conversation with a group of 4 from Barcelona, all about 21 years of age.  They were real cool and it was nice to use my Spanish for really the first time since I have been here.  When we got to the bar I met this gorgeous Spanish girl and she loved that I was American.  She spent some time in New York and fairly good English but I tried to communicate in Spanish.  We talked for a while, and will hopefully meet up at some point again.  I then rejoined my friends and we all drank pitchers at the bar for a while and then headed over to this club called Razzmatazz.  This was probably the biggest club I have ever been to and consisted of multiple levels.  It was 15 euros to enter and they give you one free drink, and after failing to sneak in we paid and danced the night away.  We ended up losing some people from our group because they left and went home, though no one is exactly sure how.  We  ended up leaving the club at around 6am and Blumenthal was quite entertaining.  Although he did not top some of the nights in Champaign, he had some funny moments.  We got back home at around 7am, passed out, and woke up today at around 4pm.

So far my time here in Barcelona has been great.  It has taken some time to adjust to some differences between Spain and America, but I am learning new things everyday, and have made many great friends.  My roommates are all awesome guys and we have been getting along great. This is only the beginning of hopefully an amazing semester.