Tastey Travels - Barcelona and Venice.

I have returned from my week long trip to Barcelona and Venice.

We arrived in Barcelona in the early evening on Saturday night. Our hostel was like a fancy hotel for traveling young adults. We got dressed for the night, and had our first experience of Spanish food. Needless to say…it is disgusting. Sorry, Spain… you’re no Italy when it comes to food. Maybe I’m just spoiled with the amazing cuisine here.. but… ew. The weather was nice. Pretty chilly at night but like in the 60’s during the day. Barcelona kind of smelled bad.. but I guess that’s part of its charm?

Anyway, after dinner we headed into the center of Barcelona to a street called La Ramblas. It is like a big main street with lots of shops, resturants, clubs, bars, etc. We walked around for a while, and got our first taste of Spanish hot chocolate. It’s basically like melted chocolate in a cup. With a waffle. DELISH!

Then we met up with some friends of ours from Rome to experience the night life. People in Spain are crazy. They don’t start partying till like 2 am and don’t stop till like 9 am. We went to a cool club that had 3 floors, the bottom one being a salsa dance floor. It felt very Spain-like.

The next day we woke up early to see the Gaudi churches. La Sagrada Familia is Gaudi’s most famous and uncompleted church.

Then we hiked up a huge hill to Parc Guell, or Gaudi’s park. It had a beautiful view of Barcelona as well as a lot of other interesting architectural sites.

The next day we walked to the harbor to check out the water, and walked along La Ramblas in the day time. We had an amazing and cheap 3 course meal at this fancy restaurant. We visited the gothic quarter, seeing the Barcelona cathedral and lost ourselves in the little streets of Barcelona.

The day after that we ventured to the Picasso museum. It was nice to see all the pre-cubist portraits and paintings. After that, we wandered around a little more.

We spent the night in our hostel with the Dutch field hockey team, Turkish/sweedish people, and the boys from Austria who told us we pronounced Arnold wrong. One of my favorite parts about traveling is meeting and talking to people from all over the world.

The next day we began our journey to Venice. We were meeting our roommate there and stayed with her boyfriend who is in the US army. We got in pretty late and spent the night watching dvds and eating American food. Pure bliss!

The next day we headed out to Venice. It was as beautiful as I imagined a perfect little Italian picturesque town. It was small, but I liked that. It was freeeeeeezing, but we expected that. San Marco’s square was really pretty and all the canals were filled with decorated gondolas.

We spent the next couple days relaxing and hanging out around Venice until we had to head home yesterday.

Getting back to Rome was so relieving. It is our home now and it feels good to be back. I start core classes tomorrow, should be fun!

Till next time!

Ciao!