La Aventura Loca en España (Pt. 1)

Anyone that knows me well enough knows that I have a particular saying when it comes to traveling. “The only way to truly understand a city you must lose yourself within it.” I find myself saying this more and more for just about every place that I travel to no matter where in the world it happens to be but little do most people know where that saying originated. I give all the credit to a single little trip that I took to Barcelona, Spain. The trip was a week long and planned out entirely by an accompanying professor as a day to day art museum exhibition tour complete with the inevitable single famous painting everybody knows, surrounded by tons of people that only love it because everyone else does. Not to say that the artwork wasn’t amazing because it was, and I even got the opportunity to see works by my favorite artist Salvador Dali up close and personal. Which was exciting! Well, as personally as you can get to a work with security staring you down and guard wires, sensors, constant camera flashes, and endless onslaughts of tour groups coming every second causing you to have to back away and look at other pieces from artists you either don’t know or just don’t care for. You get the point, right? Anyway, needless to say, that schedule left little time for exploration of the city and its culture on my own.  Little did I know on my first day in the beautiful city that the crazy journey I was seeking would indeed find its way to me sooner than I had imagined.

Early on in my college career I was able to make friends with some native Spaniards and of course, we had always spoken of the possibilities of myself visiting them in their native country and them showing me how to truly vivir la vida de los españoles nativos (live the life of the native Spaniards for those that don‘t speak Spanish). I was extremely excited and we immediately began to plan our reunion and adventures through the city from the eyes of my great friends. We explored and discussed the culture and history of the city, ate dinner in their favorite native restaurant while watching fútbol where I discovered the Spanish dedication to the sport as we watched the intense rivalry match between Barca and Real Madrid. I am partial to the side of Barca by the way. We swapped life stories and caught up, went to a beautiful beach in the nighttime and they even posed the idea of going to a Spanish nightclub in the “party district” of Barcelona, an idea of which, needless to say, I accepted. After a very fun night filled with strange techno, pop, and dance fusion style jams played and I made a few more cool friends it was time to say goodbye to my old Spaniard friends for now. It is very important to mention, I was able to arrive at this district via specific directions from my friends using the metro system but, the thing that I did not realize before I parted ways with my friends that night was that the metro system shuts down after a certain time so, the fear began to set in as I quickly realized that the metro was in fact closed and with only a little bit of money in my pockets that I had no conceivable way to return to my hotel on the other side of the city.