Before bed I
left a note for my roommate telling her my plans for the day. Then I went to sleep and woke up early so I
could go with my friend back to La Sagrada Familia right when it opened so we
could go inside. We ended up leaving a
little later than we wanted, but still with plenty of time for us to go, come
back, eat with everyone from the group, and then go to a beach down the coast.
We made it to
the cathedral on the metro with absolutely zero problems. Then we waited in line for a little and
walked in with open mouths and wide eyes because of how beautiful everything
was. So worth waking up early. We set a time to get out, snapped as many
pictures as possible, and got out and on the metro. This time, we used a different entrance but
we still found our train back to our stop and we said those famous last words,
“We just beat the subway system! We own this city!”. So wrong.
That is almost as bad as saying, “It can’t get any worse” or, “What could
possibly go wrong?”. We got on the right
line and everything, but in the wrong direction. By the time we realized it was too late. We were lost in Barcelona, in an area we had
never even heard of before. For an
entire hour we went from subway line to subway line and stop to stop before we
finally made it back to El Poutex, our final stop. We got out of the station only to find that
we had missed breakfast and to put a cherry on top of that, everyone was on
their way to the beach up the coast! We
were devastated, not to mention hungry.
We told them to let us know which beach they stop at, and we would be
five minutes behind. Ambitious after an hour of wandering around the Spanish
undergrounds, but still a noble attempt.
We ran back to
the hotel, saw our professor, got some directions to the separate train needed
to make it to the beach, changed into our suits, and ran back to the station. We followed the directions, but as we are us,
we got lost. Again. For four and a half hours!
We asked so many people for directions, but everyone told us a different
answer. Even when we asked two police officers, we got different directions
from both. Finally, we decided to stop
at a Subway and grab some sandwiches to eat on the train because we still
hadn’t eaten and we had been walking around with our backpacks on our bellies feeling
like pregnant women for hours. We
eventually made it to the airport completely bewildered and angry that the
others didn’t just tell us to go to the freaking airport and make it easy for
us. By this time it was cold, cloudy,
and drizzling, but we were determined to make it to the beach and have a damn
good time.
We finally got
on the right train, attempted to eat the worst Subway sandwiches of our lives,
and got a text saying to not bother coming, it was too cold anyways and they
were leaving. At that point we had no
choice, so we just kept going. We made
it almost to our stop, thought we were there, and got off the train. We looked around a second and realized it was
actually the stop right before the beach they had supposedly left. Quickly, we ran back to the train as the
doors started beeping shut, I almost got left behind, and we plopped down ready
to cry at our luck.
We went one
more stop and made it to the beach very sad and cold. My friend and I wandered along the damp sand
and decided to go back when we saw people from our trip! We were beyond happy and ran to them as if
they were the only people we had seen in years.
We decided to stay a bit longer before going back. Then the sun came out and we saw even more
people! No one had left yet! We all waited for the train home together and
took the hour train back to the metro station, and the half hour metro back to
our hotel (standing the whole time due to a lack of seating). On the bus, we asked how their day was and
although it wasn’t quite as bad as ours with the amount of getting lost, they
said it was still a pretty bad day. It
wasn’t even warm enough to take off their beach cover-ups. We were secretly happy, but we kind of felt
bad about that.
Then everyone
else decided to go to the Ice Bar but my friend and I were so exhausted from
our day of getting lost that we stayed in her room and ate cold pizza with a
few other lazy people. She left and got
locked out, by my roommate and I were too busy talking to notice her knocking
at the door and she didn’t get back from the lobby getting a key for another 30
minutes. Oops. Then my roommate and I went back to our room,
talked for a long time, and went to sleep so we could be ready to have a
typically busy day the next day. Oh
well, at least the beginning and the end were pretty good.
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