Bikes are the bueno in Barcelona!

You’re probably wondering how we got by in Spain, language wise. On the plane to Madrid, I started racking my brain for the three years of Spanish I had studied. Sadly, very little was remembered. I got really excited when I remembered a simple word or phrase like “shoes”, but I also remembered some useful things like “where is…” and “How much” etc. and I obviously understood a lot more than I could speak. So between my limited Spanish, our French, and English, we made do.



The next morning, we planned to take a tour on bike of the city. Malheuresement, (Unfortunately), this was also the day I let Leah be in charge of the map : ) Every other day I had been leading us around, pointing out which metro to take, which street, etc., but that day I decided to take a break from it and let Leah have a go. We discovered she is not quite as direction savvy as I. We ended up going in the wrong direction and the wrong line before finally reaching the right metro stop. After that, we still had to find the street where the tour was to meet, but we were already quite late. So, we literally sprinted through the streets of Barcelona, with “Toro!! Toro!” running through Leah’s head, she later told me. Sadly, we missed the tour, but we rented the bikes anyway and did our own tour of the city, which had its pros and cons. We could go where we want and stop where we wanted, but we had no idea what we were seeing. So we’d see a large building on the map and say, “let’s go there, it must be something cool!” So we traversed from one end of the map to the other, weaving in and out of little streets, having no idea where we were going half the time, and no idea what building we were seeing when we got there, but having a blast.
We rode along the beach for quite a while, stopped and took a zillion pictures, and then decided we needed to see what one more thing was on the map before returning the bikes. The Arc de Triomf. As I’m sure you know, there is something by the same name is Paris, but we’d never heard of one in Spain. We got lost on the way there, thought we were going to miss it, but finally found it. Voila! It was pretty cool.


We had dinner at an amazing vegetarian restaurant before heading back in the direction of the hostel. On the way, we passed the theatre that is right around the corner from where we were staying, so just out of curiosity we stopped to see what was playing. It was a comedy, but that was about all we knew. Despite the fact that we knew virtually no Spanish to make the play comprehensible, we decided to go anyway, just for the experience. It was really fun; I think it was a funny play anyway, but it was even funnier since we couldn’t understand it so we made up our own commentary about what was happening.