Tuesday, August 21, 2012

midnight in barcelona


I'm so bad at being a social media junkie because I can't ever actually seem to keep up with social media. I abandon Twitter accounts, start new Tumblrs that never seem to take off, and when faced with writing something more cohesive than a one-liner for a micro-blogging platform, I stumble through three posts and flee. (Cough, this blog, cough.) This whole blogging-over-the-course-of-my-semester-abroad idea was definitely more of an idea than a reality. I thought I would have had more time to keep up with an up-to-date chronicle of my experiences since the schoolwork is definitely less demanding abroad, but I guess I was too busy traveling and eating when I wasn't studying--for which I have no regrets!

Obviously now the semester is long over and I've even completed an internship back in New York City over the summer. I'm now sitting comfortable on my mother's chaise in Texas, contemplating over the past few fairy tale months where I took a hiatus from the real world (which is synonymous with "New York" in my life) before returning to the City in a week and pushing my life forward again with internships and academics. Even though I should be researching professors and buying furniture right now, I want to also take these last two weeks of summer to mull over my Spring semester in Europe and finish up this project. The posts may or may not be in order of trips because my memory often times fail me, so good luck to me! Here we go...

Barcelona was the first trip my friends and I took outside of Italy. I think it was sometime in February, so we were still freezing our tushes off and will continue to do so all the way until April. I don't remember what we exactly did in Barcelona because it was so long ago, but I do remember a lot of risotto, paella, sangria, and (strangely enough) British boys all over the place. Compared to later trips in London and Paris, Barcelona was the most relaxed. We went out at night, wandered around the neighborhood during the day, and didn't really worry too much about museum closing times as much as we did in other places. 

Me, wearing: Stella McCartney sweater, leggings (x2), leather jacket, raccoon fur scarf, leather combat boots, Longchamp bag


I think the only tourist noteworthy place we visited was Gaudi's bro-pad Sagrada Familia. Circles kind of freak me out, so it was entirely pleasant... But we also freaked out because we thought we lost our 20-year-old friend because we left an area, thought she was following, but when we turned around she wasn't there. In a nightmare-inducing fiasco, we even tried to get security to help us while other tourists laughed. But it was ok. We found her trolling around behind the gate in the back... 



Vintage Celine
That night, my friend and I wandered through the city by ourselves between the hours of 11pm and 2am. Neither of us really wanted to go out to bars or clubs that night, but we wanted to explore Barcelona after hours, so while our other friends slept, we creeped through the curves of the city and ran into a really strange group of people in costume rollerblading around 1am. Unfortunately, I left my camera in our hostel, so I wasn't able to get any shots of that. 

The next day, we went to the Picasso Museum. I don't have any photos of the art itself because I'm a really big fan of following museum rules about no photos. (There's a reason they have those rules, y'know... Respect the art, folks.) During the visit, our group somehow got separated, so while we waited for the others to catch up, we had a mini photo shoot outside on the balcony. (You can imagine how many people were just staring at us... but no shame!)


And then we wandered around and found this, but we didn't eat here... which was sad:



In the evening, we went to the W Hotel on the water for dinner and drinks. The restaurant was filled with people, but the ones who weren't our party were all part of the same Spanish social scene, and I'm pretty sure they kept talking about yachts the whole time. It was kind of awkward, but we left pretty quickly and went upstairs to their lounge for drinks before hitting up Placa Reial for the rest of the night.