Andorra La Vella-Barcelona Day 19

April 18, 2010

Day 19 Andorra La Vella-Barcelona

We shared a lovely breakfast with Kristin this morning.  And then it was time to separate.  Kristin was heading back to Toulouse that day and we were heading to Barcelona.  We said our good-byes and off we went to catch our bus.  The bus took 3 hours and cost us money, but we were happy not to head back into France because of the issues with the train strike.  The bus ride was uneventful.  When we got into Barcelona we had an interesting time at the train station.  We needed to book the next part of our trip, but it turned out that not only were there problems with people trying to get into France, them having issues due to the "indefinite" train strike, but apparently there were also flights cancelled due to the volcano erupting in Iceland, so there were ridiculous line ups for people trying to buy that day's train tickets.  I would say there were probably somewhere around 300-500 people in line.  To get a train for another day, it was a different line up (thankfully), but first you had to line up to get a ticket (a number) for the actual line up.  That took 30 min.  It took us another 2 hours to actually get to the window to talk to someone.  It was insane!  We helped some other travelers with contingency plans because apparently their whole trip had been mucked up due to flight cancellations and the strike.  Apparently every flight they had planned to be on had been cancelled.  Thankfully they were able to get their tickets to Madrid for that night after a little help from us (we let them into the line up to get a sooner number).  After the insanity, we headed to the hostel where we would be spending our night.  The street that lead us to the square where our hostel was located was really neat.  There were all kinds of street people dressed up as crazy things.  There was an invisible man, lots of statue people, a guy in a fruit stand that would move if you paid him, a guy dressed up like a ghost in a bed with a skeleton and other crazy things.  It was actually really fun.  After getting to the hostel, we headed to the Picasso Museum.  We lucked out because the museum was free that day (apparently it's free on Sundays).  It was actually a really interesting art gallery and you could really see the change in his painting.  It was very cool.  After the museum we walked around some of the narrow streets and headed toward the beach.  It wasn't very warm and the closer we got to the water, the cooler it got, but I was desperate to see a beach.  Along the way it was interesting to hear the people's conversations.  It felt a little like Rome in the sense that everyone seemed to speak English.  Very few people were speaking Spanish or even looked Spanish.  It was crazy.  We made it to the water and walked along an area that was like a market, right next to the sailboat docks.  And then we finally made it to the beach.  It was lovely to see the Mediterranean Sea and the sand beach.  At the beach we saw a few cool sand castles, like the ones you see on those chain emails.  Once we got a little too cold, we headed back for the hostel.  Apparently if you were at the hostel at 20:30, they offered their guests free dinner.  So we managed to get some free food!  It was good too.  After we ate, we decided to get some water and on our way we figured we would get ourselves a pitcher of Sangria.  When in Rome, afterall.  It was awesome!  Then we headed back to our 10 person room for the night.  Barcelona, in my opinion, feels like the party town.  It felt like Cancun Mexico, except less American and better.