SAS and Spain!

June 27, 2010

Oh baby, this is going to be a long one!

Living on the Explorer with over a thousand other people has been an amazing experience. We’ve really started to form our own little community onboard, and I’m starting to recognize people from various activities, finally! OK so this ship is absolutely amazing, super clean and friendly… but the food, oh it’s killing me! I mean I have to give the chefs props, cooking for this many people 3 times a day is quite a feat; but being the veggie that I am (though I still eat fish and eggs), I’m surely struggling! Sometimes when they offer meat they don’t offer any fish, so what do I eat? SALAD! And it may be years before I eat a potato again! It doesn’t taste bad, sometimes it’s quite tasty, but there’s little variation…. I mean what else could they possibly do with a potato?! They MUST have something up their sleeves!

Anyways, the first few days aboard were a struggle for a whole different reason. Who would have thought that a ship crossing the Atlantic would rock from side to side the whole time?! Walking through the already narrow hallways is a challenge, the only way to survive is to let the ship move you where it wants to and not fight it! Some people were getting very seasick, and they gave out medicine, which I took as a precaution… it made me extremely tired. What do they put in those things?

Everyday, our steward Crispen comes in and makes our beds, cleans the bathroom, and gives us fresh towels if needed. This freaked me out a little bit at first, not that some dude was in our rooms, but I’m used to cleaning up after myself (yes Madre, I am and you know it!). And after almost two weeks, I still make my bed before he comes in! He couldn’t be nicer, and is absolutely hilarious so it makes the whole thing much more comfortable. The professors and faculty are equally entertaining. The Assistant Executive Dean, Tom, does all the announcements, so we call him “The Voice,” and he has the greatest humor ever. Almost everyday he tells us a “special question of the day,” that is something stupid he’s heard on the ship… Some of my favorites are, “Will we be crossing the Atlantic on the way home?” “Where is the Leaning Tower of Pisa?” and “When we’re in Italy and we want Italian food, do we just have to ask for food?” I hope stupidity doesn’t rub off in such tight quarters! My professors are fantastic as well. Everyone is required to take Global Studies at the same time, so we’re scattered throughout the classrooms on the ship. Our professor is Dr. Bowler and he is extremely hilarious, which he kind of has to be to keep all of our attention at 9:30 in the morning (now 1:30 am in CO!). His humor is extremely immature and he always references movies, usually bad war ones, in his lectures, which I’m sure you all know keeps my interest!

On Thursday we woke up in Barcelona, Spain. Such a weird thing to say! We just woke up and we were docked and Barcelona was right there! We weren’t exhausted from taking a plane, we were just pumped to finally be there! I had a SAS trip at 1, so we went into town for a bit before I had to be back to the ship. The major tourist spot here is called La Rambla, and it kind of reminded me of 16th St. in Denver, with the walkway down the middle of the street, but it was a lot busier and there were a ton of vendors. You could buy anything from a painting to a rabbit there… it was crazy! If you turned off La Rambla in either direction, you could easily get lost in the little shops, cafés, and endless towering apartment buildings; and while it was really busy and crowded most of the time, it was still so nice just to experience the culture. I liked the more non-touristy streets, where you can sit at a café or restaurant and hear only Catalan (a mix between Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Italian, and is the main language in the Catalonia region) and Spanish… but this didn’t surprise me. Anyways, my SAS trip that first day was a Gaudi tour that took us to Parc Guell, La Sagrada Familia, and La Pedrera, and it was AMAZING! Seriously, you should Google these if you’ve never seen them before they’re fantastic… so is his Batillo house, which we were supposed to see also, no idea why we didn’t though because it’s one of the more famous of his buildings… My friend and I went back to the Batillo house and paid the entrance fee, which we think we already paid with the SAS trip so we’re going to try to get our money back for that part of it… and our tour guide was a complete psycho and kept yelling at us and not let us wander around… I mean she wasn’t going to let us on the roof of La Pedrera, which is the reason why you go to see that house, FAIL! I digress… Thursday night was an adventure as I went out with four other girls, with no idea what we were doing. We wanted to find a place to watch flamenco or salsa, but had no luck… so we decided to walk to the beach where we were told is a strip of clubs and bars (full of SASers, oh joy!) so we headed that way. It was dark and a little scary, so we decided to go to a restaurant because we were also hungry. The waiters ushered us upstairs and started bringing us plates of food, which we were scared to eat in case we would get charged, but this one girl just started eating the stuff and opened the fancy, glass bottled water... we thought we were going to have a huge bill! There was about four waiters helping us out, one spoke English very well and the others were OK. (One of them spoke Italian so I got to practice a little!) Two of them were younger and asked us to go dancing with them the next night, Friday, but they were pretty creepy so we didn’t ha ha! They walked us out of the restaurant (oh and we didn’t get charged for all the food either!) and took some pictures with us, probably because we were all dressed up for a bar and not a restaurant… uh yeah. But besides the creepiness, it was a pretty good night.

On Friday, we just sort of hung out around La Rambla and the streets around there during the day. Friday night, five of us girls again decided to go out, and again we had no idea where to go. I wanted to find a cool bar to watch the Spain v. Chile soccer game, but that didn’t happen because the other girls wanted to go on a pub-crawl (but Spain won!). Don’t get me wrong, pubs are cool, and the promoters were two attractive guys, one from Australia (not fair that the sister gets to talk to that all day!) and the other from Wales… but the first bar was packed full of tourists. It wasn’t looking good so one of the girls, Lindsay, and I, decided to find a little place to eat some tapas and drink sangria. What a great night that turned out to be after we split! Maybe harsh, but true! And if you haven’t had sangria, you’re missing out! Saturday was probably the best day in Barcelona, and the last for me, because Lindsay and I spent the day wandering around. We decided to start at the beach were you could get on a gondola type thing that took you from the beach up the mountain. We could see all of the city and far into the Mediterranean from up there, and it was pretty nice to be at a higher elevation again for a while! At the top of the mountain, Mont Juic I think it’s called, is a military fort, the Olympic park with pools and tracks, and the Museu Nacional D’Art de Catalunya, or the Museum of National Art of Catalonia which is housed in a castle from the 17th century. This museum was amazing, very well done, and the castle is fantastic and has survived beautifully through time. In the front of the castle are a ton of fountains, and at night they do shows with lights, so we decided to return later. To kill time we took the metro over to Gaudi’s Batillo house, then had tapas at a little restaurant, and relaxed in a small square somewhere in the Gothic Quarter. Then, we took the metro back up to the castle and found that there was a gay pride rally going on right in front of it. This thing was huge too, with a live band and DJ… so we decided to check it out after watching the fountain show. This was the first gay pride anything that I’ve ever been to and it was so much fun. They started a rave in the middle of this public area… complete with foam. We couldn’t resist, so we joined the soap soaked crowd and ended up surrounded by shirtless, Spanish gay men, and up to our necks in foam! Oh man, it was so much fun! We were still pretty wet when we got back to the ship around 11pm, and were absolutely exhausted from putting in a 14 hour day of adventure!

Today I had an all day SAS trip that took us to Figueres, and Gala Dali Castle in Pubol. Figueres, the town where Salvador Dali was born, has the most spectacular/ strange museums I’ve ever see, completely reconstructed and filled by Dali himself, after a fire burned the original museum. The thing itself is a piece of art, one that I cannot describe if I tried (I promise to upload pictures eventually). Dali is actually buried in the museum and we could go to the marking of his tomb… AWESOME! Oh my little art nerd self was in her element! We went to the town of Pubol after, where Dali’s crazy wife Gala lived, and died. She is buried below the castle in the crypt, next to an empty marker that was supposed to be for Dali, but he decided against it after she died… ouch! But she was a very mean woman I guess! I don’t think I would be able to describe this place either… it’s a castle alright so it’s a given that it is amazingly beautiful! And the town is very small and quaint, and resembles Tuscany. All in all, it was a fantastic day, one that I had been looking forward to for a while. We got back to the ship at 5:45, just in time for on-ship time (the time you MUST be back on the ship on the last day at port, or you get dock time at the next one). And as you can probably tell by my terrible grammar and repetitiveness of words that I am absolutely exhausted… but we only have one day of recovery until ITALY!!!!! YAY!

LOVE LOVE LOVE!