Barcelona

Today, I began my long journey to Barcelona and, as such, added Spain to my list of travel destinations. I am unsure how long I will be staying in the city, but shortly after I arrived at the hostel, I was sure i was to extend. The hostel is very social, it has a bar attached to it with cheap food and drink for guests, and organise walking tours and pub crawls, as well as welcome drinks every night to let new people meet. Not only this, but it was very clean and organised, with comfy beds and, above all else, a decent pillow. Truly a heaven sent after this long travelling. I had only booked for 2 nights, as it is all I could afford, but my parents and I have been able to work out a temporary financial situation in which I will be able to continue travelling. For which I am very grateful. However, I really do hope that soon my car sells or my inheritance money comes through to remove that burden from their shoulders.

Either way, my morning was mostly focused on getting myself packed and ready for a long bus trip. It was about 6 hours that turned into 7 quite quickly, with your standards bus delays and traffic. But after arriving, I checked in, dropped my bag off, and re-walked the path I had just taken to get to the hostel. Along the walk, there were some really nice areas that I wanted to see without lugging a bag around. This includes pigeon square, where pigeons are reguarly fed to ensure there are hundreds there at all times - for what reason?! I do not know. Going on, my journey started at the Arco de Triunfo de Barcelona and continued along the path named Passeig de Lluís Companys. At the end was a zoo, but I wasn't overly excited about that and chose instead to wander the following streets to see what I could find. There were some amazing buildings, which I couldn't even find a name or description for. I think the architecture in the city just makes every building look important. I then stumbled upon the parliament of Catalonia before heading towards the Port to walk along the water. There wasn't much exciting stuff here, just a column / monument at the end. I then popped into the Gothic quarter of the town, which is kind their old town. The main attraction here was the Barcelona Cathedral, which was closed, but even seeing it from the outside was impressive. It was at this point that I wanted to check out MACBA or the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, but it's likely not for the reasons you're thinking. Barcelona is well known for their tolerance for artistic expression in many different forms, which I will outline in tomorrow's log where we wander through the street art of Barcelona. But this museum is the Mecca of street skating. EVERY decent skater has made the trek to Barcelona to skate the ledges, stairsets, and manual pads out the front ofbthe museum. So i was incredibly curious to see what it's like on a daily basis, and it was awesome to see. There were some incredible skaters doing some insane shit. People drinking, chatting, and skating it reminded me of a regular skate park but right out the front of Barcelona's most significant museum. In classic skater fashion, people were also smoking weed and doing coke while they skated, something I rarely saw in Australian skate parks, but it seemed quite standard here. This was my final stop before I headed back to the hostel.

I was tempted into the welcome drinks, but I could already tell that my weekend was probably gonna be quite busy with drinking, and so I let myself sleep and figured I would do Friday and Saturday. So, it was a relatively early night and a decent sleep in to prepare for a big few days in Bareclona.Read more