Day numero 8 - 9.5

Howdy from Barcelona! Today I am going to bring you up to speed on the most recent adventures that we have had!

Day 8:
Yesterday we started off the day by going to Monsouratt, a mountain monastery just outside Barcelona. We took a 40 minute train ride and ended up in a completely different terrain than we had experienced yet. We saw mountains that stretched as far as the eye could see. Perched at the top of one of these mountains was the monastery. It was placed in such an inaccessible place that we had to take a 5 minute  gondola ride to the top. The view from the monetary was incredible. I took several pictures and I know they are worth more than just 1000 words.

After we looked around the monastery, we headed back to our hotel for a siesta  (which are becoming more and more frequent) before heading out in search of a Jazz club.

Jake found a small club near our hotel that had jazz musicians almost every night. We looked up the times and met down in the lobby to call the club for directions. Unfortunately, the club was not open because of a strike against the high taxes on musicians  (at least that is what we gathered from the convorsation). So we decided to just find a cheep place to eat.

We found a small family owned bar that served cheep food such as fries, wings, and Tortilla Espanola. When I walked in a black man caught my attention and asked me, "Do you speak English?". Until this point I had never been asked that question. I told him that I did and he replied, "Ok, would you be interested in joining the cannabis club?". I promptly said no, but was shocked because i have never been offered marijuana. By the end of the night three of the guys out of our group (including myself) was asked if we wanted weed.

After we ate our cheep and cheep tasting food, we headed down to the Rambla to see if we could find some interesting stores. When we got there we realized that the Rambla that we had seen in the day time was not the one we saw that night. Street vendors galore flooded the streets trying to get us to by knick knacks or to lure us into their restaurant. It reminded us of how we felt in Paris at the Eiffel Tower. We also saw lots of homeless people begging for money and adding to the overwhelming  darkness of the Rambla. After we saw that a lot of the stores were closing and were sick of being nervous about pickpockets, we decided to go back to the hotel for the night.

Day 9:
Today was beach day! That meant we got to sleep in and relax before we left at 11:00 to go to the beach by bus.
The bus was crowded, and we got a lesson on how real the pickpockets are here. Like all of our group, Dr. Philibert had to stand in the isle of the bus because all of the seats were talken. As we approached a stop, she noticed that her bag was moving a little. She looked toward her bag and realized that a man was trying to unzip it! She smacked the man's hand away from the bag and he quickly got off at the stop. Thankfully even if he was able to get into the bag, he would have only gotten her sunglasses because they were the only contents of that pocket. From then on out all of us were very concerned about our valuables.

When we arrived at the beach we were amazed at the beauty of the Mediterranean Sea. The sun was shining on golden beaches and reflected off of the dark blue water. The only problem with the beach was that it was pretty chilly. It was about 75 degrees today and that is pretty cool st a beach. We sat down and sunbathed quite a bit, but none of us did any swimming.

After grabbing some quick Chinese for lunch, we went back to the beach and laid in the sand for a while longer, but found that the wind had picked up a lot and was blowing sand in our faces. After about 5 minuets of getting pelted with sand, we decided that we would just go on back to the hotel for a quick siesta before we go back out for dinner this evening.

After we eat, we will probably go to a water show just down the street from our hotel!

I will catch up with you guys later! Adios for now!