11/5: Study Abroad blog: Weekend in Barcelona
By Doug T. Graham
Every one of us is weary. The bags that I saw under my eyes in the airport’s mirrored columns also graces every one of my friend’s faces. Exhaustion has become a necessary evil to us weekend travelers.
“Are we there yet?” I ask Jack, who has walked into the role of leader on our three day trip to Barcelona on account of his mastery of the Spanish language and his possession of the trip itinerary, a ream of paper barely contained in the folder that he gets out now to answer my whiny question.
After consulting a form, he informs me that the bus ride from Girona Airport to downtown Barcelona is about an hour long, meaning that we are nearly there. That news sits right with me- after sleeping through the two-hour plane ride and being forced to do nothing on the bus but attempt more sleep- I’d much rather arrive sooner than later. To get my mind off of the apprehension I feel towards the urban pickpockets that I am positive I will encounter over the weekend, I gaze out the window at the eerie Spanish countryside, which to me looks like a mixture of a desert and the South Dakota badlands- dry and oppressive, but altogether interesting.
The bus ride through the alien Spanish landscape proved to be appropriate foreshadowing to the city of Barcelona itself, whose Spanish street signs, cramped architecture and wonderful weather screamed “alien” at every turn.
Maybe it is because our weekend in Barcelona had us encountering so many foreign things that the memories of the trip that I hold in highest regard were the ones that would have been just as much fun in Boise as in Barcelona.
The best example of this was the meal we ate Saturday afternoon, a meal assembled not by Barcelonan chefs, but by a group of hungry, cheap American teenagers at a Spanish supermarket.
The three women pooled their money and appetite for sweet foods together and went crazy in the candy and dessert aisles, but the five men were more traditional in our lunch purchases. We bought enough loaves of crispy Italian bread for us all to have one, we had several packets of meat and cheese to split between us and we each picked out our favorite sodas to wash it all down with.
We waddled back to our hostel with our arms overflowing with lunch and after borrowing knives and cups from the hostel’s kitchen, we were out on the outdoor patio overlooking with a great view of the other buildings around us.
As we sat around a picnic table in the beautiful Spanish weather, assembling fine sandwiches that cost less to make than the dozen fried calamari I bought at a cafe for lunch the day previous, I became very happy and couldn’t have shaked the emotion if I tried!
Sure, there was joy to be derived from the weather and the view that could not have been replicated elsewhere, but the core of the enjoyment of the experience for me was the large amount of cheap food and spending time with my friends.
Weeks have past since I first had the thought that the brunt of my enjoyment of my trips came not from the quality of the trip’s destination but from the quality of the trip’s participants and I’ve put much thought into it as my credit card bill comes back heavier and heavier as I do more and more traveling each month. I’ve come to the conclusion that while the majority of my enjoyment here at Harlaxton has come from the people I’ve spent time with, it is while on trips such as our weekend in Barcelona that bring out the best in them. From all the bizarre, unwritten comedy sketches thought up by Trevor and myself while riding buses throughout England to the deep conversations mumbled to one another at 2 am at our hostel in Germany, people have done and said great things that they never would have had we all spent all of our weekends in the manor.
So even though the trips have been expensive and despite the fatigue and sickness that come with it, I wouldn’t trade the experiences I’ve had on them with my friends for the entire world.
Have a nice day!
Doug T Graham