Saturday in Barcelona

Saturday started out with beautiful fall sunny weather walking down Las Ramblas, the main street, to Plaza Pi where we found and had heard about "The Bagel Shop". I swear the only place in Spain that sells bagels. We saw this great huge menu with all different types of bagels and toppings and everything, then we go up to order and they completely tease us with only three types of bagels and a few toppings,but no matter, they are bagels! So I ordered a cheese bagel with feta cheese and pesto. An interesting combination I have never had before, but thought I would try it since I was craving cheese (they don't really cook with cheese here, they usually just eat really good pure and fresh cheese for dessert or something). It was the most amazing bagel I have had in a long time! We ate it at at little park next to a art market with a bunch of independent artists. Barcelona is a very happening place for artists.

So then we walked around and went into this store called Happy Pills (they are not all in english I promise we just happened to run into these stores). It was set up like a store that gives prescriptions out to people in little plastic clear bottles with labels, but instead of pills you put all sorts of different candy inside. They had labels in Spanish, English and Catalan (the local language) with funny sayings like "against the cost of living" or "against imaginary friends with no imagination". I think they are funnier in spanish, but the idea was very clever. A lot of the stores and restaurants, and bars actually are very small because of the old architecture and huge amount of them everywhere, so Happy Pills was like the size of a walk in closet.
Then we walked around some more and found this free art enxhibit, after going into the Dali Museum store and browsing around, that has local artists work. After shopping a little more and walking everywhere we were craving chocolate con churros. We went to the best place in Barcelona, which was absolutely packed.


Then, surprise surprise we walked around the gothic neighborhood more and stopped at a beautiful old gothic church with a great little local food market outside in the square. After walking around in the church, which had beautiful rows and rows of candles, we bought goat and sheep cheese, honey, wine and bread for dinner.


Contently eating out cheese and bread back at the hostel, and watching a soccer game (since no matter what team they are always playing) we meet a French guy from Paris who spoke english pretty well. That is one downside about Barcelona is that it is not a good place to practice spanish, since many people speak english or italian or french, but it is very cosmopolitan. So he gave us great tips for Paris sightseeing and we had a good conversation about politics, since that topic always seems to pop ip somehow. This is Matt talking to him about places to go in Paris, he is the guy with big hair and in the red:

So also ended up talking to an Argentinian young guy who worked at the hostel we stayed at for a while too, then eventually went out to some gay clubs, since Matt was sick of us girls by then. That was very interesting. I have never really had any experience at gay bars or clubs, but it was nice to go to a bar and not be checked out by every old guy in the place for once! It wa sa good night, and we ended up leaving Matt to get his groove on and walking around Las Ramblas. After walking for an hour or so trying to figure out what to do and see if any bars or cafes were open to hang out, we stopped two young people to ask if they knew of anything. They said no they were looking for a place too, so we ended up walking together and talking in spanish. We finally found a place to sit and talked for a couple hours, until about 5ish in the morning. This is completely normal for them, to stay up until daylight! This kinda describes the people in Spain and how open and friendly they are. It was a great day and I was surprisingly not as tired as you would think since we walked forever! okay next blog entry: Sunday...