Hotel Days

All right, so as you can see according to my "Disclaimer" blog post, I suck at blogging.  My mom even had to send me a text telling me to blog.  So here it goes. 

This has been a crazy week, words can't describe it.  It's been a roller coaster to say the least.  There's times when I love it, there's times when I hate it and just want to go back to America.  It's ungodly hard to communicate with people here.  That whole line of "oh, you don't need to know how to speak Spanish, it's fine", yeah, that was false.  Believe it or not, you do need to know how to speak Spanish.  It's exhausting try to communicate and my brain physically hurts by the end.  

Anyways, Monday night was our first day in Barcelona.  We slept for so long from the jet lag that we didn't wake up until 2pm.  So over 14 hours of sleep and it was magical.  We managed to miss breakfast though and woke up in the middle of their "siesta", aka there was nothing open since all the restaurants and shops close for lunch and a mid-day nap, something we were definitely not use to.  We manage to find ONE restaurant that is open.  I think we must have looked so desperate he let us in even though technically it was closed.  We ate spring rolls with pork and after not eating for almost 24 hours, it was heaven.  I naturally had a glass of wine with it.   

 After dinner we decided it was necessary to explore the night life.  We went to this local bar and met a ton of people from all over Europe and even some who had studied previously in America.  We met a group of people from Finland who showed us this bar where you can walk right out onto the beach of the Mediterranean Sea, which was amazing.   

The next night was New Year's Eve and we went to one of the many plazas they have here to watch the fireworks and water light show.  I can't even explain what really happened because they have this HUGE stick man with people in it all dancing and moving so it looks sort of real.  I don't know, either way it was awesome.  This was me just chilling at the Plaza.  They handed out grapes to us and the first 12 seconds after midnight you are suppose to eat one each second for good luck.  I managed to mess it up....

The next day (Wednesday) we honestly stayed in bed because I think we hit rock bottom at this point.  It was too hard to try to communicate with people anymore and I just wanted a break from having to speak Spanish for the most simple of things.  We did manage to leave the hotel for food, but that was it.   

That summed up my time before orientation.  Add in a few frustrating conversations and starving because of their weird eating schedule and that was my life for 5 days.  See some pictures below from the area around the hotel.  Everywhere you go is so beautiful!