So I'm officially the worst blogger ever. I always say I'm gonna make a post soon, and then never do. I guess it's just easy to get distracted around here (not that I've ever had trouble getting distracted anywhere). But here I am, finally sitting down to write a post.
Where do I begin? Last I wrote, I was in Sitges for Carnaval. It's been an action-packed month since then, with a ton of travelling. The last weekend of February, Steb, Zac and I went to Interlaken, Switzerland. It's a small town nestled in the Swiss Alps, right in between two crystal-clear blue lakes. In terms of physical beauty, I've never seen a place like Switzerland. Everywhere you looked was simply breathtaking. That said, we did have a little trouble getting there. Our original flight to Zurich was canceled due to a strike of air-traffic controllers in France. With nobody keeping an eye on the skies in France, you can't fly an airplane over the entire country. And apparently, you can't fly around it, either. Two of the things I hate the most in life (labor unions and the French) conspired against me to try and ruin my weekend. But we didn't let that happen. On Friday, we walked around the city to grab some lunch and take in the sights. We walked around for a while before heading back to our hostel, Balmer's Herberge, to take a nap (we were exhausted from our re-scheduled 6AM flight). That night, we had some dinner and a few beers before turning in early to rest up for the next day. On Saturday, we headed up the mountains for a day on the slopes. I snowboarded while Steve and Zac skied. This being the first time Zac had ever attempted skiing, it was a pretty hilarious day (although he did win the most improved and best attitude awards). Like I said before, I've never seen anything as beautiful in my life as I did that day. From the top of the Swiss Alps, everything just looks unbelievable. Six hours or so on the slopes, though, will make a guy tired. We went back to the hostel, and again, we took a nap (this one well deserved). That night, we ate dinner at Hooters. Having buffalo wings for the first time in two months was, possibly, one of the best parts of the weekend. The only problem was that, when you factored in the exchange rate, our meal ran us about $90. Switzerland is crazy expensive. After dinner, we went to the club on the ground floor of our hostel and had a blast with the locals and some other Americans we had met. The next day we tried to get up early to go paragliding, but some nasty winds came in and we couldn't get in the air... it was a major disappointment. On the whole though, we had a great time in Switzerland, and I'll never forget the experience of snowboarding in the Swiss Alps.
We got back to Barcelona, went to class for the week, and ducked out on Thursday night to go to London. I LOVED London, for a number of reasons. 1: My family was there. 2: My friend The Godfather studies there. 3: Our other friend Zack came in for the weekend. 4: The speak English. 5. The Royal Bayswater Hotel (Most deceiving name ever. Not an actual hotel. Not in any way royal. Not located by a bay, or any body of water for that matter. A pure dump. But, our phat crew managed to turn it into a raging party and it was awesome all the same). We came into London with 7 people... Zac, Steb and I, plus four of our girl friends who are studying in Barcelona and go to IU. London is a truly awesome city... I loved everything about it. The people were nice, the city was beautiful, and everything had a really distinct feel to it like it was royal. They really take that monarchy stuff seriously... everything in London is so regal. Really interesting. We walked around on Friday, and I did some sightseeing with the fam. It was great to see my sisters and my mom and my brother in law after two months of not being able to talk to them whenever I want. After seeing Big Ben, Parliament, the London Eye, and Abbey Road, my family and I headed back to their hotel to relax before dinner. After a great steak (they don't really have our kind of steak in Spain... it was fantastic to have a real stake), I headed back to the Royal Bayswater too meet up with the "Crew" and get things moving on the night out in London Town. Our pregaming skills were really on display here, as we crammed out 15 people into our 8-person hostel bunk room and bumped 90s music and "I'm On a Boat" as loud as we could and sang every word. The Godfather took us to one of his local favorites, and we had a great time hanging out around Picadilly Circus. The next day we did more sightseeing, stopping by Princess Diana's mansion and a place called Camden Market for some cheap food and good people watching. We then went to the Cabinet War Rooms... This is where Churchill and the Brits laid out all their plans for WWII. It's a bunker right in the middle of London that has 6 feet of steel re-enforced concrete overhead to protect from the German bombs during the Blitz of London. It was really cool to see all the recent history and the place where so many huge decisions were made that affected history. We saw Churchill's secretary's to-do list from D-Day as well as the meeting minutes from the day the Allies won the war in Europe... very cool stuff. We then sat in on a choral performance in St. Paul's Cathedral and saw Shakespeare's theater before getting some dinner and heading back to the old Bayswater for round two. Now of course, we pregamed harder than most people find acceptable, and hopped on the Tube to get to Picadilly, where we went to a bar called O'Neal's. We slammed Jaeger bombs (cause we're awesome like that), and when Empire State of Mind came over the speakers, we took over the whole place with our Americanness. After that, it's a blur.
The next morning, we got up and checked out of the Royal Bayswater and got what turned out to be the most expensive breakfast any of us had ever eaten. The bill itself wasn't that big, but the horribly slow service led to us missing our flight. I mean, we were there on time, but a certain low-cost airline called RyanAir has a strange way of doing things. After we ran through security (nobody even asked me for ID the whole time... kinda scary) and ran to the absolute furthest gate in the airport, the people working at the gate told us that we couldn't get on the plane. You see, we were missing a particular stamp on our boarding pass... one that we were never told we needed, even when we checked in at the front desk. Long story short, the employees of RyanAir were far and away the rudest people I've ever met, and we had to buy 150 pound tickets from EasyJet the next morning in order to get back to Barcelona in time for class. So we were out the dough from two flights, had nowhere to stay, nothing to do, and all our luggage with us. So what did we do? We went back into London, got some dinner, and saw Alice in Wonderland in 3-D. After that, we defended our nation's pride against some dickhead Brit, got on a train to the airport for the second time that day, and tried to snag a few z's on the cold, hard ground of London Gatwick. A successful trip.
Here I'm gonna do two things: first I'm gonna throw a quick shout-out to the fam, who visited me that next week in Barcelona. It was great to have you guys here and show you around the city. The dinners were good, the drinks better, and the company fantastic. I'm also gonna break this post off because it is getting just stupid long. And the next one will be too. So... sorry about that.
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