As promised, here is the first of several posts about what Brad and I did while we were in Europe. Barcelona started off with a bang…
Adventure #1: Imagine you’ve just been on planes and in airports for over 15 hours. You’re tired, grouchy, and have only eaten awful airplane/airport food. You’re in a country where they don’t speak English. The first thing you need to do is get your luggage. Thanks to my mad Spanish skillz (and the English translations on all the signs), Brad and I followed a sign to “baggage reclamation”. It was sort of weird that it was so far away, but we kept walking, and realized that we were all of a sudden about to be outside the terminal. About to turn back, we see another sign pointing to the baggage claim, saying that it was one terminal over. At this stage of sleep deprivation and jet lag, that sounded reasonable. After frantically running around for 20 minutes, we asked a nice lady at the info booth (thank heavens took pity on my broken Spanish and spoke in English to us). For some reason, we had to go back through security ask another person where to go (he only spoke Spanish, but we managed), and finally got our bags. This leads us to…
Adventure #2: Having gotten our bags, we now needed to find a taxi. Long story short, taxi drivers in Barcelona are crazy. Not crazy like NY or London taxi drivers who weave in and out of traffic like nobody’s business, but literally crazy. We showed him the papers that said our hotel’s name (”Husa Wilson”), and he said “Oh yes, I know this hotel, the Hilton”. I said “No, Wilson, Husa Wilson”, to which he replied “Oh yes, I know this one”. 30 minutes later, we end up at the Hilton, and he insists that we’re at the right place. We had to fight with him in broken Spanish to get him to take us to the right hotel. Even so, he insisted that it was called the Hilton, in spite of the name plastered across the front of the building.
The hotel is best described as “modest” or “a little down on its luck”, but it was certainly spacious, there were no bugs, and the electricity worked… most of the time… And it had a nice view of Avinguda Diagonal, a main street that cuts Barcelona in half (you guessed it) diagonally.
We went to the net cafe across the street to let our parents know we were alive, and went to the only open restaurant we could find - one that called itself “Italian”. €8, several feeble attempts at botched Spanish, and some really bad salad rabbit food later, we decided to try to go to bed.
Adventure #3: Unbeknownst to us when we were planning our trip, but… knownst… to the people of Barcelona, the night we arrived was the start of the festival for Saint John’s (Sant Joan) Day. What do the do in Barcelona to honor good ol’ Sant Joan? They light bonfires. In the middle of the city. And lots of fireworks. Which was great and pretty and wonderful, except we were jetlagged and exhausted, and Barcelonins stay up way late. It seriously sounded like we were being shelled, there were so many explosions.
Posted on Friday, July 7th, 2006 at 11:03 am. Categories: Adventures, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can also leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
One Response to “Barcelona - Day one”
Marissa Says:
July 8th, 2006 at 12:26 am
Dag. I . . . would have cried myself to sleep. And gone to a drugstore for chips and chocolate.
Once my luggage was lost at Philadelphia International, and it took almost an hour just to get it to the point where they would call me if they found it. I cannot IMAGINE dealing with luggage stuff in another language.
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