Barcelona with Lamees!!!

So many palm trees!

Port Olympic

The Beach!

Our dessert place!

Sangrias!! :)

Biking through Barcelona.

The water fountain show.

At Park Guell

The Cathedral in Barcelona was massive!

So last weekend, I met Lamees in Barcelona! It was so great to see her and it felt like more of a vacation since we were there for 4 days. We both arrived Thursday night and amazingly made it to the hostel all on our own. We each flew into different airports, so we were on our own getting to the hostel, but nobody got lost :) Our hostel was in a really good location because it was only about a 5 minute walk from Las Ramblas, which is the main street in Barcelona. We were also right next to the coast, which was great, and only about a 20 minute walk to the nearest beach! It was so weird seeing everyone out on the beach in swimsuits! The weather was sooooo nice all weekend! It was in the 70's during the day and it was so nice to have a break from the cold!

On Friday morning, we went to the Picasso Museum, which I loved! The museum was huge and it was fun to see all the paintings! After that we found this HUGE market with all kinds of food. We tried these smoothie fruit things that were really good, just pure fruit juice.

On Saturday morning, we took the metro to Park Guell, which was a really neat architectural park done by the artist Guadi. It was really cool! Saturday night there was a really cool water show that we went to; it reminded us of Disneyland :) The show was in this big plaza, with huge fountains that were illuminated with lights and they had all kinds of different music. After the show we went to Las Ramblas to have dinner. We had Tapas, which are really good and kind of like omelettes with potatoes or veggies in them, and we also had our first Sangrias which were delicious!

On Sunday we decided to rent bikes to bike around the city since we had done so much walking the past few days. It was definitely worth it! We rode all along the beach for a few hours. We rode through Port Olympic, which is where the Olympics were in 1992. After that we decided we had to do a little shopping! There was another market on Las Ramblas with scarves, jewelry and bags. That night after dinner we found a really cute little dessert shop with real hot chocolate (not like the chocolate syrup kind in Italy and Paris!)

It was pretty hard for me to get used to speaking Spanish instead of Italian, especially since they are so similar. The whole weekend I was saying 'grazie' instead of 'gracias', but then when I got back to Italy I started saying 'gracias' instead :) Luckily the Spanish didn't mess my Italian up too much, which is good, because I had my Italian final exam on Tuesday after I got back :) Yes, my final exam! It's kind of hard to believe that one of my classes ended in the middle of November!

Well, I can't believe I am coming home in 3 weeks! Time sure flies! On Tuesday we have our last cooking class and we are making Chocolate Salami, which is sooooo good! I guess it is really easy to make and all you need is chocolate, biscotti and butter. They call it chocolate salami because it is shaped like salami and the pieces of biscotti make it look like salami. Then on Thursday we have a big Thanksgiving dinner! It is at one of the restaurants we usually go to, but they are cooking traditional Thanksgiving food for us with a turkey and everything! We'll have to see how the Italians do at making mashed potatoes, stuffing and apple pie! :) Hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving!! Talk to you soon!