Merci, Barcelona!

Hey, there :) it's been a while.

 I know I haven't wrttien a post in what feels like ages to me, but I've travelled a bit over the last 2 weeks. So now I wanna recap you on life over here.

I went to Barcelona last weekend (10/5) with 6 other chicas from my school here in Sevilla. 5 of us were from the US, the other 2 are from Canada. I had a great time in Barcelona, but it made me very sure that studying abroad in Sevilla was the right choice for me. I had initially wanted to study in Barcelona, but my wonderful study abroad adviser recommended that I check out other Spanish cities, namely Sevilla. I'm sure glad she did. First of all, everyone in Barcelona speaks Catalan primarily. I originally thought this wouldn't be a problem because I was under the impression that Catalan was just a Spanish dialect. Wrong. Catalan sounds more like French than Spanish (for instance, you say "merci" instead of "gracias"). So I would have come out of this semester abroad speaking less Spanish and more French-ish. Second, Barcelona is a lot more touristy than Sevilla. It was sometimes frustrating because there were so many people EVERYWHERE, and I feel like that made me enjoy some of the spots a little less.

In general though, I still had a great time.

Here are some of the highlights from the trip:
- went to la Sagrada Familia, a huge Cathedral built by Gaudi, who is a really popular artist in Barcelona
- Park Guell, a park that is also Gaudi-themed. We went there and saw a nice view of the city. LOTS of tourists there, though.
- on Sunday night, Barcelona's futbol team played Real Madrid. This was pretty much the whole reason for us going to Barcelona that weekend, we wanted to be there for the game. We weren't sure where to watch the game though. We wanted to be around Spaniards (more authentic experience, ya know?) but we didn't know where they'd watch it. So we were walking around looking for a bar and we saw these two Spanish girls in Barcelona jerseys walking, like.. with purpose, and we decided to follow them. We wound up following them to this bar that had tons of Spanish people :) we watched the game there. It was a lot of fun.

I know I normally write much longer posts, but I wanna get to my post on Italy :) so this one on Barcelona is getting cut short.

Nativity scene over the entrance to la Sagrada Familia. Thought of you, mom!

Me in la Sagrada Familia

Kaley, Katie, Me, Gabi at the bar for the futbol game.

K! On to post about Italy. Stay tuned :)