barcelovin'

hola!

it's been a while since I've blogged about just being in Barcelona, and while I have a blog entry all typed up about all of the famous sites we've seen, I think I'll save it for another day and just talk about some of the fun things I've been doing this week!

On Monday morning Maggie and I finally got the famous Spanish breakfast Churros con Chocolate. It felt kind of like eating dessert for breakfast, and while I had a stomach ache for a good part of the day, it was delicious and totally worth it! It's essentially just a coffee mug filled with hot, melted chocolate, and a plate of freshly cooked churros to dip into it. yummm!

I went into the Sephora here a few days ago to buy some new mascara, and I'm SO glad I did. They should put this store in all of the tourist books as one of Barcelona's top attractions! (That might be an exaggeration, but it was pretty cool!) You walk in on street level to what looks like a normal Sephora, but then when you go down the escalator, all of a sudden you're dropped onto a huge red carpet and into the biggest, most amazing Sephora I've ever seen!

I've purposefully tried to leave out what I've been doing at night here so that I don't worry any parents who may be reading this (you're welcome!). But the other night, we realized that there are some really cool bars in Barcelona that we hadn't seen yet, so a few friends and I set out to check them out. This one was called 4 Gats (like cuatro gatos, or 4 cats) and was the bar where Picasso was discovered! Apparently he and his friends used to hang here when they were 16 or so, and Picasso was asked to design the menu. It's a bar and a restaurant, but we didn't venture back to the restaurant. It was sooo cute and quaint and all of the waiters were wearing suits! It was a nice change of pace from the usual Barcelona nightlife.

Other than these things we've just been exploring and loving Barcelona. Life with Rafaela has been great as well. We finally started gossiping with her tonight - she wanted the scoop on everyone else's homestay's. I love a good gossip sesh...ISA must have known that when they paired me up with Rafaela! She pulled out the list of everyone in the program and where they lived and proceeded to give us commentary on all of their neighborhoods, and loving every second of some of the horror stories we told her about our friend's senoras. We told her we were lucky to have been paired with her, and she replied by telling me I should tell ISA how much I love her house. She asked me to tell them every 2 minutes for the rest of dinner. Oh, Rafaela!

Tomorrow (Friday) we leave for Rome for the weekend! I'm going with Maggie, and our friends Morgan and Mallory, two sisters from Texas. AND, even more exciting than that, Reghan is meeting us in Rome! I can't wait to see her, can't wait to eat pizza and pasta and gelato, and to experience "the eternal city!"