I met a girl from Mexico and a guy from Sweden in the hostel, and I convinced them to come swing dancing with me that evening even though they had never been before. The girl from Mexico, Vane, was meeting up with a local Couchsurfer named Danny, so he came with us as well. Anyways, the four of us got to the venue and had a great time. I taught Vane and Danny how to swing dance and they really enjoyed it. Since the place was pretty small, I actually ended up teaching everyone there how to dance East Coast style (in Spanish), since in Europe they only really dance Lindy. Everyone wanted to dance with me the whole night so I felt like a star. Even the Bartender came out from behind the bar and asked me to dance. At the end of the night I said my goodbyes and we headed back to the hostel.
That was the good part of the night, now starts the bad part.
Danny had been drinking quite a bit at the swing dance and was rather drunk when we arrived at the hostel. It turned out he lived 30 kilometers outside of the city, and the trains had already stopped running. Apparently he was expecting to be out the whole night with us, but Vane wanted to go to bed. The Swedish guy just went straight into the hostel and went to sleep but I stayed outside with Vane to make sure everything turned out ok. In the end, he started saying very vulgar things to Vane and threatening to get violent, so Vane and I just ended up going into the hostel and leaving him outside with some cash for a taxi.
Vane turned out to be really happy I stayed with her since she was scared, and I decided it would probably be best if we Couchsurfed together for a bit since she was afraid of doing it by herself. Apparently she hadn't checked out his profile on Couchsurfing and other people had left bad references about him. Anyways, we are going to try to stay with the same host in Florence (where I am going after Nice, France) and go from there, and then hopefully she can regain her confidence in Couchsurfing.
The next day was really rainy and thunderstormy, but luckily I can forecast the weather and I knew it would be less rainy in a city about an hour away called Tarragona. Vane and I used our Eurail passes to our advantage and spent the day in Tarragona instead.
Unfortunately, it turned out to be a Monday, and everything in the town was closed on Monday for some reason. We still attempted to wander around and take some good photos even though we couldn't get into the Roman amphitheatre and the ancient passageways beneath the city :(
Yesterday I went out and explored Barcelona by myself. First I hit up the Sadrada Familia, a famous church designed by the architect Gaudi, who is very popular in Barcelona. His stuff is everywhere. Literally. I ended up accidentally standing on one of his pieces later that night.
The next stop on my itinerary was the Picasso Museum. It was actually really good, and I found it funny that they kept EVERYTHING that Picasso did. They even had stick figures that he drew on some pieces of paper when he was a kid. Anyways, I thought it was neat that Picasso experimented and changed his style around so much over the course of his lifetime before he found what he really liked at the end, and thats what he became famous for. For most of his life, Picasso didn't paint what we think of as Picasso-like paintings, he did a lot of realism, and he even did other art like sculpture.
I got kicked out of the museum sometime around 8 and took the metro to a park with a great view of the city (and naturally lots of Gaudi stuff) to do some night photography. One of my photos turned out especially one and captured the essence of the park rather well:
This morning, I left Barcelona on a train bound for Nice. Or actually a train bound for Figueres to catch a train bound for Valence to catch a train bound for Nice which I am currently on without a reservation.
Even though I have a Eurail pass, some trains still require you to "reserve" a seat and pay extra, but they only only have a few spots for Eurail pass holders. If they run out of those spots, they expect you to pay the whole fare. The good thing is most of the people working for the train companies think this is ridiculous so as long as I show them my Eurail pass and say I couldn't get a reservation I am fine.
I thought it would be fitting to end the post with a picture of a shop I saw in Barcelona that would probably be very sketch or illegal in the US:
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