Barcelona, June 12, 2019

Barcelona, June 12, 2019

by Thomas Barton, 10

We walked off the plane after an impact landing on the Barcelona Airport runway then waited a long time according to my patience to get off the plane into the exciting Barcelona air. We walked onto the second airport shuttle bus and rode to the terminals. We were greeted by a long miserable customs line and chose between two different exits. Of course we soon figured out that we picked the line that was eight times slower, so we asked the security man next to us if we were allowed to switch to the faster line and he said that we couldn’t switch lines because we already committed to the long line. Later we got really lucky and was let first into a new line that just opened up in half the time the rest of the line would have taken. If they let the people behind us go into the newly opened line my mom would have probably exploded. We got through customs and went to find our bags at the baggage claim which had stopped going around because it started an hour before we got there and was done because we waited in customs for so long. My dad walked around the baggage belt and found everything but one suitcase so he started to panic. He walked around trying to find it again and we were very relieved that we all just passed by it and we didn’t have to wait any longer. We then walked to the taxi station got into the car and set off too our rental house.

To our surprise the woman that we rented the house from was standing outside the alleyway that lead to the house. She was ready for us with nothing to do do for entertainment. When I saw the alleyway I thought the house was going to be low quality because it looked kind of dirty. Then after that I saw the door which looked like the door of a shed so this was nothing like what I had expected. Then she unlocked the door and we walked up some steps to where the house was. I was very surprised because the house was really pretty, it had flowers everywhere and it smelled really good outside. The lady didn’t speak English so my parents were the only ones that could understand what she was fully saying. That left us to go explore the house by ourselves. The house was very spacious and it had a room for everyone which was really nice because we could do our own thing. My dad set up his workspace and everyone unpacked and settled in to their new rooms.

Thomas at Güell Park.

Thomas at Güell Park.


Once that was done my mom, Margaret and I went down to the Main Street and looked for coffee shops and restaurants. We didn’t find any restaurants but we did find a FC Barcelona shop so Margaret and I both got FC Barcelona mini soccer balls so we could practice our footwork and juggling skills. Before we went home we also visited Park Güell which was beautiful because of the view of the whole city, and the smell of the luscious spring blooming flowers vertically snaking higher and higher up the wall. The architecture was really well thought out and interesting to look at. The architect Gaudi was trying to make a big nature-friendly neighborhood with sixty to eighty houses but the plan failed because the location was too far from the city where everybody worked at the time. The beautiful neighborhood and architecture was then bought and turned into a park instead of a neighborhood. We walked around the park some more and explored the different views, then walked down the hill back to our rental house.

We rested at the house some more until ten when we decided we were going to go eat dinner. We would have eaten earlier but my dad was glued to the fact that restaurants aren’t open at seven or eight when we Americans eat. By then my mom had found a restaurant and we were all starving, the app that you call taxis with was broken so we had to hail a taxi from the street. It was really hard to find a five person taxi so we went in separate taxis, My mom and I in one and Margaret, Isabela, and my dad in one. My mom and I had a driver that wasn’t too nice; he wasn’t rude or offensive but he didn’t like the place we were going because it was complicated to get to. When we paid, he threw the receipts out the window one in a tree and one on the road. The rest of the family got lost in their taxi because there were three restaurants named that same thing, so when they arrived we were all starving. This place was all Spanish food so we ended up getting ten different plates of tapas to share amongst all of us. It was so delicious especially because all of us were so hungry and we hadn’t had tapas since we moved from Washington DC.

We thought it would be a good idea to walk through Park Güell and across the mountain back to our rental house because there was a park entrance by the restaurant. My mom’s GPS was telling us to go a certain route through the park but part of the park was closed so we had to improvise our way through the dark park. We went down a long staircase to this road in the middle of nowhere which made it a lot harder to navigate home. We then found a familiar street after twenty minutes of walking and walked back easily. Once we got home we were tired, full and ready to go to sleep we all settled down, I read then fell fast asleep.

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