Reunion 2007 in Barcelona

Update: 12.07.07
Video update: 08.07.07

by Vesna
by Jens

And the official Barcelona-Trip Friends episode is:
804 - The One With The Video Tape
Vesna, thanks for reminding me :)

Yesterday morning, on my way from the airport, I ran into a neighbour. When she saw me, with my shoulders bright red, my hair a mess, my clothes slightly dirty and very wrinkled, and limping with both feet - in short, looking like I just ran away from a vicious band of kidnappers - she exclaimed: "Oh, my God! What happened to you?" I shrugged and replied with a tired smile: "Oh, just a vacation with friends".

So here's the first report (hopefully, one of many). And, I think you know this about me already, it will be long and very detailed. I'll try to leave things out, so that others can add something ;-).
Let's start at the beginning. I was the first to arrive to this wonderful Catalonian city, late last Thursday evening. I spent that first night in a dorm room in a tiny and cute hostel in the city center (aka Barri Gotic). Not a big fan of sharing a room with five complete strangers, I left as soon as I woke up, and called Andre.
Andre is the owner of the appartment, which we found totally by chance on the internet and rented - that proved to be an excellent move. The appartment was huge, and very nice, but its best feature was definitely the 30 sqm large roof terrace! Once I saw it, all my plans to do some "preliminary" sightseeing fell through, I barely managed to explore the neighbourhood and buy some... erh... refreshments (ok, it was 5 bottles of wine) for the evening. The rest of the afternoon I spent sun-bathing on the terrace. At least I read the complete Barcelona guide :-).
People started arriving at 19h and this "arriving", and waiting for it, continued through most of the evening. But, finally, by 1.30am we were all there: Laura, Jens, Filip, Tomasz, Lars, Tobias and I. And since we still had some wine left, we stayed right where we were - on the adored terrace, under the (almost) full moon.
I just wanna add our sandwich story, because booze goes bad w/o food. So, Tomek and I volunteered (due to our unrivaled Spanish mumbling skills) to take care of food and therefore went for a loco taxi ride around midnight. Long story short: We couldn't find food nearby so we took the yellow pages grabbed a taxi and told him to drive us to a fast food place which we found in the yellow pages and which was still open (we tried a home delivery service first but it was closed, Tomek and I weren’t anyway looking forward to ordering food in Spanish via phone… hehehe). We didn't know that it would take like forever with the taxi... When we arrived at the other end of the city we luckily ordered 9 bocadillos although the place was about to close down. The way back was not less exciting. We were super lucky finding a free taxi in that area to drive us to the next metro station. From there we went by metro back to our place. Tomek the super controler came up with that idea... I just say budget constrains need to be kept.


Next morning, we were more or less all awake by 11h, and Christian had arrived. After a hearty breakfast (with Coke instead of coffee), Tomasz took us to Montjuic - one of the two hills over Barcelona. We were joined by Filip and his three friends (they are travelling together all over the Iberian peninsula, but Filip mostly ignored his buddies and hung out with us) and climbed very slowly all over Montjuic. At one point we took the cable car and went all the way to the top, to the Castell de Montjuic. Having admired the view, we took another very steep and very high cable car, which took us all the way down to the beach. Ah, the wonderful beach, which Tomasz is lucky enough to see every day. We had sweet cocktails and compared sun-burns, and I think we could have stayed there forever. However, we had plans for the evening and all of us could use a shower.





That evening we first went to see the Font Magica (not the magic font, but fountain) - a show of water, colours and music. It's sweeter than cotton-candy, but still quite nice, so the eight of us and two friends of Tomek had quite a nice time there. We had dinner in a nice restaurant - at midnight, as the rule "when in Rome" demands. As I was somehow very tired, I went home after that. What the others did - well, let them tell you :-).
And then it was already Sunday - the last day. The boys had some troubles waking up, so Laura and I took care of grocery shopping and around noon we finally had breakfast together. Around 14h Andre came back, to take the keys and his appartment, by when Laura and Tobias had already left for the airport.
Jens, Christian, Lars, Filip and I went to see the Sagrada Familia - this Gaudi's masterpiece being probably Barcelona's most recognizable "sight" we figured we might as well. But it was more a "veni, vidi... playa" kind of deal, as pretty soon we were back on the beach, sipping cold drinks.



And, boy, so soon it was time to say "good-bye" again. The Germans left, Filip went back to his neglected friends (We said good-bye to Filip in his hotel room. When we left he said he would take a short power nap. Totally reminded me of Filip sleeping all thru our Moscow city trip. *evil laughter*), Tomasz was preparing for yet another party of his hard business life, and I went in search of my next hostel.
When I reached the building I almost didn't go in: it looked awful! An old, decreipt building, and a simple door on the first floor with the words "Pension" printed on regular white paper stuck on it. A moustachioed old woman opened the said door, and I felt like I was in a horror movie. However, I soon had to see how wrong first impressions can be. The room was very nice, with A/C, a fully stacked mini-bar, and a complete toiletries set in my en-suite bathroom. I guess it was cheap because of the horrible state of the building. Well, fine by me.
On Monday I decided to see as many beautiful sights of Barcelona as I could. So I walked. I saw the fantasy-like Parc Güell (created by the architect Gaudi), and La Pedrera (another famous Gaudi building), walked through the amazing old Barri Gotic, through the very charming district El Born, had my lunch break in the pretty Parc de la Ciutadella, walked along the coast and saw the Columbus monument and walked down Las Ramblas, the "main" street full of tourists, street performers and stands with souvenirs, flowers and birds. Even though I had quite comfortable shoes, they were apparently not comfortable enough, as by the end I could barely walk.
Around 21h I made my way to the airport, with the last remains of strenght left in my feet. My check-in time was at 4h in the morning, so I hadn't booked a room for that night, I figured I would just spend it at the airport. I wasn't aware that the designers of the Barcelona airport had little regard for the sleepy passengers - the floors were tiled, cold and hard and all the chairs had arm-rests, so one could not lie down over them. So, I spent the night reading, watching TV-shows on iPod and chatting with a 50-yr old American cowboy (ok, I don't know what he does for a living, but he was dressed completely in jeans, with cowboy boots and a cowboy hat).
At 10h I was home. And met my neighbour.

End of report :-). There are other photos here. Altogether - it was fantastic. Each of us commented at one point (very originally, but I guess that also means that it's true): it's amazing how we just continued talking and joking around as if no time had passed since the last time we met (The reunion's theme song could have been the theme from Cheers "Where everybody knows your name...". That reminds me of the London Friends ep where Joey is missing NY and the Cheers song starts playing...). Yes, the magic is still there :-). We already decided to continue reuniting. I just hope that next time there will be even more of us!


p.s. it's only mine and Tomek's photos, but it was fun playing with them :).