Major Tourists. Time to be locals.

On Sunday Natalie and I decided to buy tickets for the hop on hop off barcelona bus. Major tourists, yes we know. So, for the past two days we spent our afternoons exploring the city by bus. My favorite stop was the Sagrada Familia. It is absolutely amazing and even more impressive than in pictures. I think I could spend hours sitting outside of the Sagrada Familia looking at it and still would miss some of its beautiful detail. I wanted to post photos but for some reason blogspot isn't letting me at the moment.

We also had a chance to walk a little bit around the barri gotic, the old part of the city which is made up of hundreds of small winding roads decorated in gothic architecture. Its amazing to think that almost all of the buildings were built before the 15th century. When you walk through these streets you feel like you are going back in time and are apart of a different era. I'm definitely going to spend a lot of time exploring these streets.

Goals for the next few weeks:

1. Speak more spanish
I would love to arrive back to the US fluent in spanish. The problem is that I've been hanging out with a lot of americans and we are constantly speaking english with one another. In addition, because this is a city of many different nationalities and plenty of tourists locals will often converse with you in english. I need to make it a priority to speak in only spanish with them and meet as many spanish speaking students as possible.

2. Stop planning each day
The way of life here is much different than at home. We are used to scheduling and planning our days. Each time I wake up in this city we usually have a plan of the places we want to see during the day and the bars/clubs we want to go to at night. But the reality is that they live differently here. During the day we see plenty of locals sipping coffee together in the park or strolling slowly along the streets. At night they seem to hop from bar to bar and sometimes even party on the road or in the plazas. It doesn't matter where they go necessarily but who they are with and if they are having fun or not. I think one day we need to just walk into the city without a plan and explore. I'm sure it would be worth it to see where we end up.

3. Cook better food.
Saturday night our spanish roommate invited some of her guy friends to come over and cook dinner for us. They made gazpacho, tomatoes with goat cheese, and chicken. It was delicious. Unfortunately, we don't have these kinds of resources every night. So far our specialties include pan tostado con tomate, yogurt, frozen food, and salad. I think we need to work on our spanish recipes!! Perhaps tonight we will look one up and attempt to make it. I'll let you know if we don't burn down the apartment....