The Prague Chronicles: Meet Me in Barcelona?

You know the feeling after a long summer away from your friends at college? How much you miss them, and the way you become yourself around them? Remember how as the clock winds down to move-in day again, you find yourself immeasurably agitated with excitement? Well, this feeling was magnified in me a hundredfold for the days leading up to last weekend.  After a long month in the Ceské republiky, I was finally going to see friends of mine from UR, namely Alissa, Katie, and Laura. But this time our joyful reunion wouldn’t be on the Phase bridge or at the Starbucks counter, it would be at Alissa’s tiny flat in Barcelona.
To maximize my weekend, I skipped Psychoanalysis and Society on Thursday afternoon and instead headed back to my apartment to shower, pack, and work out my route to the airport, or letiste. For a 5:30 pm flight, I left at 2:30 to allow for travel time by tram, metro, and bus, and to adhere to the universal assumption to be at the airport two hours before an international flight. There was no way I was going to let anything interfere with this weekend with my friends! I regret to say that on this trip I did stick to that other universal travel assumption, which is to ‘pack light’. I lugged a full-sized travel backpack (which was similar to carrying a decent-sized child) and a shoulder bag with my laptop. After an hour and a half, I was finally sitting at my Lufthansa departure gate in the Prague-Ruzyne Airport. On my first flight, to Munich, I was ecstatic as instead of peanuts or pretzels, the sweet flight attendants distributed small Toblerone chocolate bars and humored my coquettish request for a second. It’s the little things, you know?
By 9:30 pm as we touched down on the Spanish runway, I was wiggling overtime with restless-leg syndrome- I physically couldn’t keep still. I checked my watch and two cell phones incessantly, cursing in my head that we were about fifteen minutes past scheduled arrival time. I practically ran out of the gate, my backpack bouncing behind me and nearly throwing me off balance. When I finally saw Alissa’s smiling face and small sign that read, “Welcome to Barcelona Marina!” I let out a yelp of delight and scurried past through the throngs of people to hug her.
After a brief catch-up session, we took a bus from the Aeropuerto de Barcelona, a metro, and walked for about 15 minutes to finally make it to her apartment in the southwestern district of the city. We crammed with my bags into the tiny, clanging elevator and I dashed into her apartment to squeeze a waiting Katie and Laura into bear hugs. It took me a while to keep making sense of the fact that yes, we were all reunited, and yes, the convenient locale for this was Barcelona! Oh, I think I forgot to mention that this was all happening on St. Patrick’s Day. I had been well prepared for the reality that in Spain, people go out much later, leaving their apartments any time between midnight and 2 am and partying well into the hours after dawn. The four of us trooped out to Travel Bar, all in leather jackets which are the city’s style du jour. (Side interjection: as I’m writing this blog entry, my friend Natalie just came in to tell me that if you Google Image our street in Prague, Pod Karlovem, a picture of me comes up. Great….) By the time the night was over, by various bar-goers I had been dubbed a liar, Laura was now the Queen of Condescending, Alissa was chatting in Spanish with a sept-lingual, and Katie was just sitting there chilling with her broken foot, uttering an occasional “No pasa nada”. It was perfecto.
After spending the night in an illegal sleeping arrangement, I snapped an incriminating photo of a peacefully slumbering Katie and nommed on some tostada for breakfast. Alissa was on the ball as usual, explaining our plans for the day which included Plaza de Catalunya, amazing patatas bravas for lunch, a picnic by the port, walking along the beach, and the famous Parc Güell designed by Gaudí. For all you ANTM fans out there, Parc Güell was featured in the last episode of Cycle 7, where the finalists CariDee and Melrose had to run through the caves as ghostly brides, screaming theatrically. All day I relished the sun on my face and the beauty of Barcelona, a very different city than Prague. I tried to brush up on my high-school Spanish, and with Katie’s help I learned a few very useful phrases, the most tame of which was a cheeky “Que pijo!” loosely translated to “That’s so ‘bro’”.
After cooking a huge dinner of chicken, grilled vegetables, salad, and pasta together in Alissa’s apartment, we made plans to get together with some of Alissa’s Spanish friends for a night out. After meeting the boys, we all agreed that Xavi was sweet, but Arturo was sassy. Along with her flatmates, we went first to a bar, where I randomly met an American girl who goes to Nazareth College and is transferring to UR next fall. I forgot her name, but small world right? A smaller group of us broke away and the boys headed us to a crowded club on the beach before wimping out and leaving early. After dancing to our favorite song Barbra Streisand by Duck Sauce and making some new friends we girls hopped in a taxi and zoomed home to pass out.
Saturday we lazed around until early afternoon when we took a funicular up to Tibidado, a mountain with a Catholic church overlooking Barcelona. As I leaned over the stone walls to see the edge, a stunning panorama yielded a view of the land and the sea for miles around. After our descent, we sauntered down Las Ramblas, Barcelona’s most famous street and settled at a sidewalk restaurant for delicious tapas. That night Katie impressed us by making a Spanish dessert dish of special ‘French’ toast and we went to Dow Jones, a bar where drink prices rose slowly depending on the number of orders, and then once an hour crashed to cut-rate deals. Alissa and I tried our hand somewhat unsuccessfully at pool and Katie revealed to us her plan of returning to Granada after graduation and opening a bar. I happily signed on to the project, on the condition that I didn’t have to be the cook— I know I can pick up my Spanish again.
Sunday Katie and I packed sadly but I was happy for the arrival of Alissa’s family, who arrived in Spain that day to visit for the week and her birthday. I had traveled to Italy with them this previous summer, so her parents greeted me warmly and I filled them in on my Prague experience. On our way to lunch by Plaza de Catalunya, Katie and I lugged our backpacks and discussed our housing plans for our senior year at UR. She’ll still be captain of the Mint Chocolate Chip house and I will be hopefully venturing across the Genesee to Riverview. “I can’t believe we’re here, doing this,” I told her. “Being abroad is so different”.
“Granada is amazing,” she replied, “but I’m so happy I got to see you.”
I agreed wholeheartedly. “This was a charmed weekend.”
On the plane from Brussels to Prague, I could almost feel the sunshine of Barcelona slipping away. I tucked my scarf tighter around my neck and grimaced at the French kids snapping obnoxious pictures, clearly on their spring break from l’école. As I prepared to begin the commute back to Pod Karlovem, I assumed the expression most useful for a girl traveling alone at night in Prague: a combination of ultimate boredom and nasty scowl. I had to internally chuckle at that though. I was back.