Paella, Playa, y Sangría

First off, last night: tapas were delicious and flamenco was incredible. Flamenco isn't a Catalonian thing - it's from Andalucía, which is all the way across the country - but there's still a little bit here, mostly for tourists I think. At least, the place where we went had drunk British guys and lots of flash photography. It was still absolutely incredible and it was really interesting to see first hand the Muslim influence on Spanish culture. The flamenco singing is an obvious reference to Islam. The whole thing is really beautiful and there's a lot of clapping and whirling and hip moving and feet tapping and it's easy to get caught up in it. After the flamenco show we all went out to a bar and I ordered drinks legally for the first time in my life (yay?) and we all had fun and I ended up getting the very last train back to my homestay. The metro closes at 2 on Fridays. I realized that all of my clothes reeked of cigarettes, but Angela washed them and they now smell like scented laundry detergent, which I usually hate but greatly prefer to cigarettes.

Then after a whopping five hours of sleep, I woke up and we went on a Cava tour and tasting! Cava is Spanish champagne that they're not allowed to call champagne because champagne is French. We toured the storage caves and our guide told us that the wooden barrels down there were purely for decoration because people like to get married there and even though the process has been modernized for 30 years they still like to keep the relics around for fun. Then we got on a train to explore the biggest wine cellar in the world and it was kind of like a roller coaster in that we almost died multiple times and it was great fun! The tasting was amazing - we had two, a pinot noir and a dry one whose name I can't remember that is apparently one of their best. I liked the dry one the best. I do think it was silly to give a bunch of hungover college students two full glasses of cava (I know of at least two people who were still drunk from the night before) but I enjoyed it.

The world's biggest wine cellar! It can hold 100 million bottles, which as it turns out is a lot.

After the tour we went to a little town called Sitges, which is around an hour outside of Barcelona. Sitges is the kind of town that you imagine when you hear the word Mediterranean. It's on the sea like Barcelona is, but it's a lot more quaint and the beaches are cleaner. City beaches are never really the best, I've learned. There's a huge church overlooking the town and it's incredibly picturesque. A friend and I wandered around for a bit and explored and then we hung out with some people on the beach and then we ate paella and had sangría and it was absolutely ideal. The weather was perfect and the food was delicious and it was a little expensive, but worth it for the experience of eating right on the beach.




Sitges might actually be the most beautiful place I've ever been.

And then we tried to find the train station and we finally did (after first finding the train, which was not as helpful as we had hoped) and then our train stopped and we all had to get off because something terrible happened (I have no idea what) so then we got on a new train but it was really crowded and we weren't really sure where it was going so we got off and then got on another train and that ended up going where we wanted to go but we got off at a weird place so we wandered around until we found the Passeig de Gracia and then I realized that I know the metro better than I think I do.

Anyway, getting lost with someone is much better than getting lost by yourself. Samantha and I are nomads now.

Angela's daughter loves Bon Jovi and we listened to all the random slow dance 80's songs we could find at dinner today and I listened to Angela tell me all about how tomando el sol is good for your health because you absorb vitamins that way (which is true) and how you can't avoid cancer anyway so you might as well not wear sunscreen (which is not true). Now she is trying to further my cultural education by making me watch Robert Redford and Meryl Streep movies dubbed in Spanish.

As of yet, any efforts to find Firefly in Spanish have been unsuccessful.

It's midnight on a Saturday and I think everyone I know is drunk and watching the World Cup (or celebrating, or bemoaning) but my bed is very comfortable and I walked around a lot today and I can't seem to bring myself to get up to go out. I'm lame but I think I like it that way.

Oh, and the biggest mistake of my life was leaving my camera at home. It's sitting on my bookshelf right now. I couldn't find my USB cord so I forgot entirely about the camera and now I'm kicking myself. Everyone else is taking pictures and a million are going to end up on Facebook and I'm going to steal them for my own, but in the mean time I'm posting pictures here from Google Imágenes España.