Free As We'll Ever Be...: Ally Amanda Barcelona

Well we didn't film a Woody Allen film, but we did go to Barcelona :) Haha, maybe that was lame, but I thought it was pretty clever! On the 23rd of October, Ally and I left Aix and took a train over to Barcelona, Spain. We arrived that night and checked into our hostel very centrally located right on La Rambla - the main street of Barcelona. It was weird and very sad to leave such a homey place in France, but we were back into traveling mode and ready to go. It was also very hard to switch from speaking all our French to Spanish! Ally took Spanish in high school, so that helped a bit, but we often found ourselves saying merci and then forgetting how to say thank you in Spanish... oops!

We didn't do much the first night because we had a long day of traveling, so we checked into our room, made a great dinner of popcorn and iced tea (without the ice of course), and quickly fell asleep.

The next morning we were so excited because our good friend from home, Lindsay Bracken, was joining us! We met her in the city and took her back to our hostel. We chatted and caught up talking about all of our Euro adventures thus far. Lindsay is currently modeling in Milan, so she has her fair share of adventures! We soon headed out for the day making our way all around Barcelona including the beaches and other hot spots!

The time frame in Barcelona is quite different than we are used to; and we thought France ate late! We had dinner that night around 10:30pm, and we had some seafood-ish paella which Lindsay enjoyed more than Ally and I.

We got back to our hostel just before midnight - perfect timing to shower and get ready for the evening (like I said, everything is much later in Spain). We ended up heading out around 1:30am and the streets were very much alive with people everywhere. We had no idea where to go, so we just walked towards the beach. Along the way, we were lured into one bar/club because they offered us a free drink, and who are we to turn down a free drink!

The bar that we started at would close at 3, then they would take us to another club. We decided it was kind of lame and walked around a bit more, only to find ourselves back where we started from. So we got another drink and sat down and were soon joined by some local guys who worked at the place. After a while, the time quickly passed and we had some new friends who took us to another club. In all, I think we went to 4 different bars/clubs and only had to pay for drinks at the first place! Score! We did a ton of dancing and had a great time just being girls and being together! We had a blast and before you we knew it, it was past 6am (which was really like 7am, because we had the time change) and we escaped back to our hostel!

After sleeping in well past noon (like 4pm HA!), we slowly woke up lounged around for a good part of the day. But it was great to rest and hang out! We were planning on going to park Guell, but it was getting dark, so we decided to do that the next day. A friend recommended a great place for dinner that was near our hostel so we ate there that evening. We shared some tapas and some yummy yummy sangria! We decided when we get home, we will try and perfect our own recipe of sangria! :)

Still adjusting to the time change (my bad!) we woke up an hour earlier than expected, so when we wanted to wake up at 7am, we were actually up at 6am! Since we got a little bit of a late start the day before, we decided to wake up early (extra early!!), grab some fresh fruit from the huge market and walk to Park Guell before our train left for Sevilla.

We wandered around the park for a while and saw a ton of amazing things created by Gaudi. It was really great! Then we walked around a bit more admiring all the architecture and sights.