barcelona...!

On Friday the 20th, 13 MBAs (members of the fun club!) embarked on a weekend trip to Barcelona! We left Oxford around 1pm, travelling into London and then out to Stansted airport. From Stansted we flew to Reus from where we got a bus into Barcelona. We arrived in the city around 11pm, and made our way to the apartments we has reserved by close to midnight. The apartments were pretty central, and were really nice and spacious, we had two for the group, across the hall from each other. After dumping out stuff, we left at 1am in search of food and fun times. Being Spain, most people don’t even start eating dinner until about 10pm, so most restaurants are still hopping at 1am! Amazing. We ate in a fabulous tapas restaurant that just happened to be on the ground floor of our apartment building! After filling up, we wandered around and found a club a few blocks away where we danced until about 5am.

Saturday we started wandering around in the afternoon. The whole group of us ate lunch together and then we split into two groups; one headed on a sightseeing bus tour, while the group I was in decided to wander the streets. We wandered all around Las Ramblas, the main shopping and restaurant street in Barcelona, we found a neat market with lots of good looking food items for sale, and wandered some alleys with art galleries, coffee shops, etc. In the evening, we met up with everyone again, had some more yummy food, and then went down the the Olymipic pier where there are a lot of clubs. We stayed out this evening until 7am, and a few of us stayed up until 8 just to see the sun-up. Madness. ;)

Sunday therefore started late and most of the people in the group left that day. There were still 4 of us who decided to stay until Monday. Sunday afternoon we walked past some of the Gaudi buildings and made our way to the Sagrada Familia, Gaudi’s famous unfinished cathedral. It was amazing, though there are currently lots of cranes in action all around it, so the photos don’t really do it justice! After the cathedral we took the subway across town to the Barcelona Football Club stadium. We managed to buy awesome tickets in only the 15th row from the field! The game was a ton of fun and we got to Ronaldinho in action (he sure plays to the crowd!!). The stadium holds 120,000 people and was pretty full, so the atmosphere was quite amazing!! After the game we went down to the water again and ate dinner in a seafood restaurant on the pier where we shared a huge platter of seafood (I think we dubbed it ‘the ocean on a plate’). Mmmm, tasty fish. Following dinner we went into a place called the Havana Club, which we just stumbled upon because of the music flowing from it, good live band! Afterwards we wandered along the beach and ended up at another club back at the Olympic pavilion. The evening was a fairly early one for Barcelona, I think we were home by 4am….

Monday we vacated the apartments, then spent the entire afternoon wandering back alleys in the gothic quarter of the city. It was amazing how much of a maze the city is and that you just continuously kept stumbling onto more and more beautiful buildings, and even a chocolate museum!! We eventually meandered all the way back to the Ramblas and the port area, where we witnessed a gorgeous sunset behind the hills. A little more wandering and we ended up in a café in an alley where we sat for at least two hours eating tapas and drinking sangria before leaving at around 8pm to get a cab out to the airport for our flight back to London. What a fantastic weekend... I'm going to miss the cafe con leches!!