Sunday June 13

Sorry that it's been a week since I've written. Since it's a beautiful morning here I figured I could sit outside for awhile and update you guys on what's been happening over the past week.

Last Sunday, by some luck, Matt and I happened to be on gmail at the same time so we made plans to meet up for the day (since neither of us had cell phones). We meet in between our houses and just walked around the city all day. We started out on one of the largest streets in Barcelona, Avenida Diagonal. It is a very busy street with lots of shops and large buildings. Next we made our way down to the Passeig de Gracia (the street that my host family lives off of). This street is HUGE and is sort of like the 5th avenue of Barcelona. It has a lot of really expensive stores (Gucci, Bulgari, Rolex, etc), but it also has two of the most famous buildings in the city : The Casa Batllo and La Pedrera. Both of these houses were built and designed by Gaudi and they are absolutely beautiful. We walked all the way down the Passeig just looking at stuff and people watching. We finally made it to the Plaza Catalunya, which has a giant fountain and is beautiful. We took some pictures there and then made our way towards the ISA office to see if we could find it.

We couldn't, but by then we'd been walking for so long we figured it was time for lunch, so we walked a little further to a park that is right by our school. The park is called Parc de la Ciutadella and is constantly full of people of all different ages just hanging out. People bring blankets and picnics and just spend the whole day lounging in the parc enjoying the sunshine. We ate our lunch on a park bench and then explored the park for a bit.

The park has a couple of really cool things inside of it. At one end there is a huge beautiful fountain called the Cascada. It has a lot of statues of ancient roman gods and goddesses on it and the water flows out of the top and just "cascades" down a series of levels until it hits a large pool at the bottom. It's really pretty and you can climb up some stairs to the top and look down from a huge arch and see the park below. Right next to the Cascada is the Mamut (mammoth). I have absolutely no idea why it is there or what it represents, but it's like 10 times the size of a normal person. We watched this kid pitch a fit over having to take a picture sitting on it's trunk.

There's also some very old building in the park, such as the Catalunya parliament building and an old castle that was constructed for the 1888 Universal Exhibition. And last, but not least, there's a zoo!!! We didn't go in the zoo, but we saw a peacock just wandering around the park. Nobody else seemed really concerned with it and we've just kind of assumed that they don't enclose their zoo animals here as well as they do in the states.

After that we saw our school, the beach, some random little side streets that we wandered down, and then headed back towards our respective houses. I had dinner with my family that night and then googled our path for the day. It was 1o miles long. So not too surprisingly, I passed out asleep that night.