Bienvenidos a Barcelona

Que tal amigos? So it's our third day here in Barca, and the last three days have been unreal. The trip began on Swiss International Airlines flight 9. There were like six IU kids on the flight, which had free booze (yes, free booze), on demand movies in your seat (check out Zombieland, it's hilarious), FREE TETRIS (I was Trissin' hard), and some dece meals. This got the party started early, about 30,000 feet above the Atlantic. After about an hour or so, though, it was just cramped and we realized we had seven hours left, which sucked. We got into Zurich late, and almost missed our flight to Barcelona, but they held it for us and we got in without any problems.

So far in Barca, we've been getting settled in pretty much. Dothboy Fresh and I live in a homestay with our senor, Jaume Reguant. He's a cool guy... cooks twice a day for us and does our laundry twice a week. It's pretty hard so far to find our way around the city, so we've been taking a lot of cabs, which is a real good way to lose all your loot. Fortunately, we know how to get to classes, and a lot of good bars and stuff are within walking distance of our apartment.

Now to get down to business. What have we been doing at night? The first night we got here, we were told by all the other IU kids that are here to meet up with them at Murphy's Irish Pub. Doth and I googled it, and no such place exists in Barcelona. So after about twenty minutes of looking for this place online and not being able to talk to anyone cause we had no phones, we decided to just get in a cab and hope the driver knew it. He knew the place we were talking about, but it is NOT called Murphy's. It's called the George Ryan, and for a little while we had no idea if we were in the right bar or if we were just two Americans looking to get beaten up and robbed. All the other yanks were in the back, and we found them and had a great night. This old Spanish guy kept on coming up to us, absolutely obliterated, and like touching the girls' faces and singing to them in Spanish. Huge time creeper. I had been wondering for a long time what the Spanish beer is, like their equivalent to Budweiser, and I got my answer on Thursday. It's San Miguel, and if the most interesting man in the world knew about it, he'd never touch a bottle of Dos Equis again. A lot of people had class in the morning, so we just went home when the bar closed at like 2 or 3 or something. I don't really know, I have no concept of time over the last few days.

Thursday at Murphy's was a cute little preview of what last night would be. Last night was epic. We first went out to dinner at a little Mexican place around the corner from our apartment. Good food, good margaritas. This is where the night got interesting. We thought it wouldn't take that long, so I told ZK to meet us at the bar we were going to half an hour after we left for dinner (his senora cooked for him so he didn't eat with us). After we ate, we walked to the bar. It's called La Bolsa, which is Spanish for Stock Exchange. There are stock tickers above the bar, and they display the prices of drinks. The prices change based on demand, so if I ordered five shots of vodka, the price of vodka would go up. So you buy whatever is cheapest at the time, which leads to drinking a lot of different types of alcohol and getting really drunk for relatively cheap. Long story short, there was a lot of singing and dancing at La Bolsa, where they really like to play 80's music and show reruns of Walker Texas Ranger on TV. The Spanish bartenders were crazy hot... one of them looked exactly like Sloane from Entourage. So we hung out by the bar and hit on them in broken Spanish all night. Tipping isn't customary here, and we gave them a 1 euro tip at the end of the night, and they gave us like ten free shots. They loved us. Sloane told me she had two kids (at least I think that's what she told me), to which I replied "lo no creo, eres demasiado bonita para ser madre". This means "I don't believe that, you're too beautiful to be a mother." My Spanish must have been working in high gear, cause she then turned around and showed us her tramp stamp, and then I called her my novia, or sweetheart.

After the bar closed at like three, we went to this club called Razzmatazz. It was completely insane. Five floors of pure grindfest, fist pumping, and bass. I can't even really tell you what happened there, I don't remember. I somehow ended up in a cab home by myself, which is like the one thing they tell you not to do, go anywhere alone at night. Whatever. When the cab pulled up, somehow Dothage and our roommate Charlie were just strolling up to the door with some hot grub... que delicioso. We mealed, snoozed, went to orientation, snoozed again, and that brings me here. Sorry for the novel of a blog post, just a lot of stuff to talk about. The next ones will be shorter. Adios por ahora, amigos.