Barcelona!

So I apologize that I won`t be able to attach any photos when I blog over my break, but I promise that I will put some up when I am back in Nantes.
After a slight airplane delay, my two friends and I made it safely to Barcelona on Friday evening. Our hostel is pretty chill and we have a room to ourselves, so that is nice. We went out for a walk on the first evening to Las Ramblas, the pedestrian strip in the city. It was pretty lively. In some ways it reminded me of Rome because of the people selling ridiculously cheesy things.
Yesterday, I woke up earlier than my travel companions so I went for a quick walk down to the port. We met in the lobby at 11am for a tour of Montserrat, a mountain near Barcelona. Our hostel organized the tour and it was really great. Only two guys (an Australian and an Irish) showed up along with our tour guide, so we had a pretty relaxed day. The view on Montserrat is absolutely incredible. I can`t wait to post pictures! We had to take a cable car to get to the top, and I was slightly terrified but we made it up in one piece. We got to do a bunch of hiking around and checked out the view as well as a monastery for a few hours before heading back down to the catch the train. We had about 45 minutes to kill, so we went to this sketchy looking shack on the side of the hill, which was actually a little cafe and was pretty cute. I mean, it was rustic. We all got some hot or cold drinks and the Irish guy ordered a tapas (appetizer) and beer combo, except he didn't know was the tapas was... and it turned out to be snails. He ate them all though! I tried one and they were pretty good.
We were pretty wiped from all the fresh air, so we crashed on the train ride back. We had originally intended on grabbing dinner out, but decided to save money and make our own meal in the kitchen; we`re going to eat out tomorrow instead. Our hostel organizes bar hops every night of the week, but we weren`t feeling up to it last night, despite everyone telling us to come because apparently they were going to the best dance bar... 5000 people and 6 different rooms with different music in each one. But there was no way we were going-- they weren`t leaving for the bar until midnight and then not going to the big dance place until around 2am!!! I guess the Spanish party pretty hard... not quite my style. Now I know why "siesta" is a Spanish word! We stayed in, played some cards, chatted with some people, and were in bed before midnight. Solid.
This morning, we all woke up to find some churches. Jody and I went to an International English church and Siobhain went to a Catholic cathedral. Our service was awesome... quite the international crowd, but there were a lot of Americans. The service was in English and the music and speaker were both awesome. It was a really great way to start off the day.
After that, we met Siobhain outside of the Santa Maria Familia cathedral, a famous cathedral by Gaudi which is always under construction. I actually need to look him up, since I don`t know anything about him other than he was incredibly talented. After the cathedral, we spent the rest of the day wandering around the Parc Guell, another creation of Gaudi`s. It had some really fantastic architecture. We spent quite awhile in there, especially after the sun came out and it warmed up a bit.
To end off, I went for another walk down by the docks since it was sunny and I wasn`t ready to head back to the hostel. There were lots of people out and it smelled like an ice cream store... I loved it.
Tonight, we are going to go out for dinner and then maybe meet up with some friends from Nantes who are also visiting Barcelona.
Bye for now! Hope everyone had a great weekend !