Adios Spain...Day 4

Finally…I have arrived at my last days in Spain. The 4th and 5th days in Spain were much more low-key. They were still fun, none-the-less. Day 4 started with sleeping in. Janhavi, Luis, and I got some much needed sleep after our fun-filled night in Ibiza. We wanted to sleep from when we got back to about 11:30am or so, but we didn’t wake up until after 1pm. That was ok, we were exhausted.

When we finally got up and moving, the three of us headed out to see Barcelona. We decided to just walk around and see if we could find a nice café to eat at on our way to see La Sagrada Familia. We found one café that looked decent…the rest were closed for siesta. We had some decent pasta and tapas. The tapas were delicious. My favorite thing there was the potatoes with a spicy tomato sauce and sour cream on them.

We then went to see La Sagrada Familia…which is Gaudi’s masterpiece if you didn’t know. We didn’t go in because we had a lot to do that day and the lines were incredibly long to get in. We just walked around for awhile and took pictures. It was amazing to just look at. I can’t wait to go back and see it when it is finally finished. That will be awhile, but I plan on going back when it is done. It has been under construction for so long that you can really tell the old from the new parts. The architecture is like nothing I have ever seen before. It just blew my mind seeing what he came up with…and that was just the outside of the building.

After La Sagrada Familia, Luis didn’t feel very good, so he headed back to the hostel. Janhavi and I headed to Parc Guell instead. Parc Guell is the park Gaudi designed. Right when we walked in, we felt like we were in Candyland. The buildings and design were just so crazy…really weird shapes and so many colors. We just started walking. We walked around for a few hours. You never get bored there. Every path led to something new and amazing. We took a lot of side paths through random parts of the park. Even spending that much time in there, we still didn’t see over half of the park. It is just so huge that I would need a whole day or more to go through it all.

Janhavi and I then headed back to the hostel to meet up with the rest of the group. They had gone to all these things the day before when we were in Ibiza or that morning, so they spent most of the day at the beach. We all lounged around for awhile, and then headed out for dinner. Two of Gina’s friends from Oregon happened to be in Barcelona the same time as us, so they joined us for dinner as well. Some of the girls had a club they wanted to go to after dinner, so we tried to go to a restaurant near there. We ended up walking forever before we got there…thanks to Stephanie’s lovely map. We were definitely in a part of Barcelona that wasn’t popular. There were hardly any restaurants, or anything for that matter. They found the club first, and found out that it was closed that night. We had walked all that way so we decided to just find a restaurant in that area anyways. We went to some Mexican restaurant. It was alright. I had a quesadilla. It definitely did not compare to anything back home, but did make me miss home Mexican food even more.

After dinner, we all walked back to the hostel. Some of the group went out to a bar called The Dow Jones, but I decided to get some sleep because we had to be up and out of our hostel by 5am. Our train was at 6:30am the next morning and I was still lagging from the rest of the trip. I only got about 3 hours of sleep since we had dinner so late, but it was better than nothing. The rest of the crew showed back up around 4 or so. They didn’t sleep at all since our alarms were set for 4:45am anyways.

After the early morning wakeup call, we all headed to the train station. When we got there, we contemplated whether or not we wanted to continue sneaking Stephanie onto the trains without her railpass. It was really risky today, because if she didn’t make it on one of the trains, she would miss it and be late getting back to the ship. We asked her what she wanted to do, and she didn’t want to buy more tickets, so we decided to try our moves again. This time we switched up how we would sneak her on. We had Ariana go first. Once she got her ticket scanned, she acted like she was fumbling through her wallet to get her tickets in order. As she did that she held her railpass at her side with her other hand and I took it out of her hand. I gave the railpass to Stephanie and they never noticed. We were becoming masters at this game. Once we all got to the train we celebrated again that we had successfully got Steph on the train.

I slept on the train almost all the way to Madrid. Once we got there, we had to switch trains to get to Cadiz. When we got off the train and looked at the monitors, we saw that there was a direct train from Madrid to Cadiz. The one we had reservations for stopped in Seville, and then we had to switch to another to get to Cadiz. We had about 30 minutes until both trains took off. Luis decided that he wanted to see if we could get switched to the direct train. We all went scrambling through the train station with barely any time before the trains left trying to get them switch. With about 15 minutes to spare we got them…and got money back…and made it to the gate. We were all strategizing how we would sneak Steph on to our last train. We had it all planned out and headed to the gate to find out that we were late enough that the lady didn’t even ask for our railpasses. We all ran onto the train and started celebrating again that we had gotten her all the way through Spain without her railpass.

I again slept almost the entire way to Cadiz. The trains were so comfortable and I was so tired that it just put me to sleep. When we got to Cadiz, we tried to find a grocery store to stock up on snacks for the ship, but arrived at the beginning of siesta so we just headed back to the ship to make sure we got on before ship time. If you don’t make it on by that time you get “dock time”. For every 15 minutes that you are late you have to stay on the ship 3 hours after the last person leaves in the next port. If you are more than 2 hours late, the ship leaves you and you have to find your own way to the next port. We made sure we had plenty of time to get to the ship.

Well I am finally done filling you all in on Spain. I will be splitting up Morocco into 2 blogs in the next few days before I arrive in Ghana. Then I will hopefully keep up the rest of the trip. Also, send me your home addresses to gmnagaki@semesteratsea.net if you want a postcard. I plan on picking a few up in Ghana. Take care!