Where did the last two hours of my life go??

Crap! It happened again…I got sucked into the black hole of knitting goodness

And there went two hours of perfectly good sleep/study time!

The Barcelona Marathon (which is also The Longest Entry Ever)

First, I will write about how wonderful Barcelona was. It really really was quite wonderful. Why was it wonderful? Because a certain wonderful man just happened to show up there! On Friday, February 22 I got up at 5am after sleeping horribly for an hour. I was too excited to sleep properly. Conchi drove my friend Ashley and I to the airport where we caught the 7am flight to Barcelona. After waiting around in the airport for our friends who took the 9am flight, we ventured out into the unknown. The VERY first thing we did was go to the statue of Christopher Columbus (la plaza de colón). I am only mentioning this now because it comes up later and it should be known that I SAW THE PLAZA DE COLÓN! We walked around las ramblas for a bit and eventually veered off the main drag to find some lunch. After a lovely and delicious lunch (which included APPLE TORTE, which was more of a smushed croissant with delicious apples and caramel sauce on it) I left the group and went to pick someone up at the airport.

Picking Sparkey up was the best part of my trip to Spain so far. I miss that man quite a bit when I’m away from him for too long. Anyways, we took the bus into town and then commenced The Finding of a Place to Sleep, which wasn’t as nearly as painful as it sounds. We only walked around for about an hour and a half and finally some guy at an overpriced hotel told us of a nice hostel (not hostel, hostel…a hostel is a place where they make you sleep in dorms with 10 other people, a hostel is a place where you get your own room and have to share a bathroom) close by that would cost about the same as any hostel. We walked there, took about 10 minutes trying to figure out where this place was (floor 1 is actually 2 flights of stairs up) and managed to book the last room in the place for the night. OH HAPPY DAY! I can’t tell you how relieved I was that we had a place to sleep. I had visions of us sleeping on the street with pidgins guarding us for the night. It was horrible. Our little room was just fine though, a bit sparse (think dorm room, minus anything your dorm room might’ve actually had except for a bed and a closet), but we had a nice little porch just outside our window with a view of a cute courtyard. Were I the thinking type, I would’ve taken a picture when we first arrived, but alas, my brain was so clogged with the excitement of seeing Sparkey that I did not.

We settle down and then head out to explore the city for a bit before meeting up with friends for dinner. We went to a sweet market and ate some delicious strawberries (they were RED inside! Not white!), and wandered around for a bit. It was nice; we’re both very easy going and many times we’d look down a street and see something interesting, give each other this look and then just start walking. We found a nice church or three, some interesting stores (we wound up in the antiques section of Barcelona??), and then met up with friends for dinner and went home and crashed.

The next day was more or less the Barcelona Marathon, which included seeing most of what there is to see in the city in one day. We started with Parc Güell:

It should be noted that this place really IS like Wonderland, except for the lack of talking cats and playing cards. Actually, come to think of it, we did see a cat in the bushes…

Anyway, one of my favorite things in Barcelona was the “floor” as I accidentally called it (about five billion times). It was just so pretty and when I saw it at the Parc, I just had to take a picture!

Isn’t that the most beautiful, welcoming, interesting floor you’ve ever seen in your life? I think so too.

After the Parc, Sparkey suggested that we head down to Sagrada Familia, the sea, and the plaza de colón. It was then that we had a 10 minute debate on whether or not I had already seen this place. I tried to INSIST that I had, that my own eyes don’t lie to me, and that he was WRONG. I even showed him pictures of it ON MY CAMERA. Don’t ever try to argue with this man when he’s jet lagged. He tried his hardest to convince me that I hadn’t seen it until finally I decided to strike the pose of the statue at the top of the monument, in the middle of Parc Güell, in front of hundreds of people, in the same area as Tyra Banks shot some of her stupid TV show. This produced a fit of giggles that lasted quite a long time and Sparkey finally admitting that yes, maybe I had in fact already seen the plaza de colón.

After the plaza debacle, we headed down to La Sagrada Familia and took some awful pictures, didn’t go inside, and generally were relatively disappointed with the building (at least I was). It would’ve cost us 7 euros each to get in, and then another two to take the elevator up to the top of the spires. The stairs were “closed for security” so they were forcing us to pay to take a stupid elevator for which we would’ve had to pay 2 euros and wait an hour and a half. This didn’t really seem like a great idea as we were hungry, so we skipped it. I did, however, take some not so great pictures of the outside, just to prove I was there!

The rest of the day was a hazy shade of full, tired, and pretty. We ate at an all you can eat sushi buffet where I ate nearly DOUBLE what Sparkey ate. This is quite a feat, actually as he is a good bit larger than I am and eats a lot. I told him I was hungry! After our stuffing, we waddled ourselves down to the sea so I could say that my feet have touched the Mediterranean and then went to see the Arc del Triumf. I am pretty sure that this is just a small scale replica of the one in France, but I’m not sure as I’ve never been there.

Aren’t we cute?

To end the day we went for a walk in the park and then got some snacks for the bus ride home. We were NOT hungry at all for dinner, as lunch pretty much left me in a food coma for three straight days. You can’t see it here, but there is actually a small sushi baby forming in my belly.

At around 10 we headed to the bus station in a fit of exhaustion and sat around for an hour waiting for the 7 hour bus ride back to Bilbao. Luckily, this went pretty smoothly and I slept on Sparkey for most of it (because I am a professional sleeper. Really, I think I could win a sleeping contest if that contest were “fall asleep as quickly as possible in the most uncomfortable positions and most awkward of places” because I do that ALL the time. I fall asleep so quickly that Sparkey is convinced I’m some sort of freak of nature. This probably explains why I don’t understand how it takes him HOURS to fall asleep and only on the EXACT TYPE OF BED THAT HE LIKES).

Finally, here is my new favorite picture of us ever. As his mom said we look “very relaxed, very much ourselves”

p.s. sorry for such a long entry…