End of England...Beginning of Barca

So once again, the blogging has begun.  This week is exam week/last week in Alcalá, so I figure I should probably inform all the folks back home what happened in the month of April.  First to end Semana Santa finally!!!

Day 7:  Last day in London

Our last morning in London, we got up early to walk around.  We saw Kensington Palace, Hyde Park, and Notting Hill.  I vowed that I would see Notting Hill after watching the movie so so long ago, and it was cool to see and I wish that we would have had more time to explore this section of town.  We also found where most of the embassies are located in London, and they were pretty impressive.  It was fun to see all of the different countries, like Russia, Turkey, and other smaller countries that I've only heard of once or twice before in my life haha.  It was pretty rainy though, so we weren't too thrilled to be walking around in the rain once again, but hey we were in London so we were going to make the most of it!

After collecting our stuff from the hostel, we headed towards the center of town to take a bus to the airport. Before departing, we wanted one last attempt at a British guard picture (Neville was just too lame/awkward).  So we walked to Buckingham one more time to see if we could find a guard to get one more London pic with.  Mission fail.  No guards were out.  Sad day.

So we headed back to the bus station, got our tickets, were informed by the ticket lady that we were "wasting her time" because we all paid separately when we were going to the same location.  Sorry but it's more convenient for us to pay separately.  Needless to say, her English accent was not so nice at the time.

So off we flew to Barcelona.  It was sad to leave England and I'm hoping to go back sometime in the future because there are so many more things I would like to see and do in and around the city.  However, for a first visit the city definitely exceeded my expectations and this was definitely the funnest trip that I've taken.

¡Barcelona!

So our plane actually arrived in Girona, a small city located about an hour outside of Barcelona.  It was sunny and warm, and we knew we were indeed back in Spain.  It felt good to finally see some sunshine!  We hopped on a bus and made it into Barcelona pretty easily.  The city looked huge as we snaked our way through the tiny streets, and I was hoping that we'd be able to find the hostel.  We took the metro to get to the hostel and were reminded instantly that we were not in "Spain" anymore.  Barcelona has this thing that they want to separate from Spain and be an independent country, partly because they speak a different language in Barcelona.  They speak Catalan, which is literally a mixture of Spanish and French.  It was a little shocking to look at the street signs and not be able to understand them completely.  But we managed to find our hostel, and we met up with two of our other friends from our program.  Reunited at last!

That night we walked around Barcelona a bit, super tired from the traveling, but happy to be in Barcelona.  Barcelona is definitely a different type of city.  It's the most modern city that Spain has, and it's very different from Madrid and Alcalá.  We got kebabs for dinner, thus beginning my kebab addiction.  After dinner we crashed due to exhaustion, vowing that we would hit up more of Barcelona the next day...