Barcelona

Sunday, June 24th: Day 1

Pues, chicos and chicas, my mom, my dad, my idiot brother and I landed in Barcelona, Spain today after about 18 hours of travel, 26 hours later than we set off. Upon arrival, we discovered that Brogan and I's bag did not arrive in Barcelona, and had likely wound up in LA instead. We received the wrong baggage tag, which had the name Flint Austin on it. It really wouldn't have been hard to mix them up, as there were literally four or five other groups at the kiosk we were at. In any case, we reported the baggage loss and visited the place we are staying at to drop off our baggage. Of course, it was the middle of the night at home, but we couldn't stay at the room because the previous resident had just left at Barney was cleaning it. So, we rambled about Las Ramblas and the Gotic, getting endlessly lost and finding ourselves again, eating breakfast at a small place with amazing fresh-squeezed orange juice, and wearing ourselves down until we had no energy left. When our room was finally ready at about 2:00, we returned, but not until we found some gellato. This turned out to be difficult. Everyone says that gellato places are four feet apart and more numerous than people. Naturally, we picked the day after a festival where everyone stays up all night to arrive and next to nothing was open. Eventually, we found one just in time to head back to our apartment on the third floor and crash for a five hour nap. My parents  had a room, I had a bedroom that was a side room to theirs, and Brogan willingly slept on a couch that was shorter than him. When we awoke from our siesta, we wandered a bit before encountering the Bar Lobo, a place that had been recommended to us by Mike Adler and Molly Newcomer. The food was delicious, particularly the seafood paella and the rocket salad. Something to note: At nearly every restaurant we had been to by the end of our first week we were served bread with tomatoes, though you can specifically order them without. After we finished our meal, we met up with Deb Grant, though it took a few communication errors, and watched Italy beat England in penalty kicks. By the time we left it was one o'clock and we were still basically wide awake.