Final Night

Tonight is my last night in Barcelona. I should be out partying right now but I feel like I've done my share of partying for the last week. Instead tonight was my earliest night of the entire trip. I was back in my hotel room by 10:30 PM. This trip has also been characterized by sleep deprivation. I haven't gotten more than 5 hours sleep any night since I've been here. Some nights I've had as few as three. Luckily the reason that I didn't get any sleep was because I was out having so much fun :)

Today was the last day of Brainshare. I worked up in the Migration Lab for a short morning shift before tearing everything down at 1:30 PM. Our plan for the afternoon was to take a train to Montserrat and visit a monastery up in the mountains. After mobilizing a group of about 15 people and getting everyone to meet at a train station on the other side of the city, we were disappointed to find out that we didn't really have enough time to go. One of the folks at the train station told us that if we were to leave when we did that we would ride on the train for 2.5 hours (1.25 each way) and only get to see the monastery for 30 minutes before it closed.

Chaos ensued once everyone in the group was clued into the unfortunate news. We sat on the street for 15 minutes and argued about where we should go instead. Eventually we lost three people who went off to Port Olympic while the remainder of us headed in the direction of the National Art Museum. Rand and I were the next to go. We stopped outside of the art museum for beer and ice cream while everyone else headed inside. I don't think that we intentionaly intended to lose the group, but when they didn't come back out we just went our own way.

We started aimlessly wandering the mountainous streets to get to the "Castle on the Hill". The Castle was an old military fortress that housed a museum. Unfortunately we had left our only map with the other group of people. When I say aimlessly wandering I am really putting the emphasis on wandering. We were damn near walking through peoples back yards. It was clear that we were forging paths that had never been walked by tourists before.

The castle was cool but I think that the weather detracted from the experience. It was hot, humid and, as a result, sticky. We were also both pretty beat from walking for a very, very long time. I took a brief nap in the sun on one of the stone benches while Rand found the bar. When I woke up, the sweat on my t-shirt had dried and left nasty, crusty salt stains.

Rand was pretty excited to walk through the military museum considering that he had served in the army. I wasn't dying to see the museum but neither was I opposed to the idea. We spent about an hour walking through the inside rooms of the castle looksing at old knives, guns, swords, rifles, armor and cannons.

Our plan for descending from the castle back down to the city was to take a funicular (a sky tram). Unfortunately we discovered that the tram that left from the castle hadn't worked in quite a long time. This meant more walking. We had actually managed to pick up a map of the city inside the castle but we didn't bother consulting it. We figured that if we were to just head downhill and towards the ocean that we would eventually end up back somewhere where we could hop back on the subway.

About halfway down the mountain (hill) we discovered a second funicular that descended into the harbor. We rode the rest of the way down suspended several hundred feet above ground and ocean. The tower that the funicular stopped at was still a couple of hundred feet above ground and required that we take an elevator the rest of the way.

Eventually we found our way back to the subway and back to my hotel. We wanted to go out to dinner but I needed to wash the stickiness off of me first. We also thought that we would check if anyone else had made it back to the hotel and was interested in going out to dinner.

The other group had not returned when we left for dinner. Rand needed to do some shopping so we decided to kill two birds with one stone and eat at the mall. We stopped at a sausage shop in the mall called "Kurz & Gut". When I found a sausage that was wrapped in bacon and covered in cheese, I knew that I was good to go. They also served beer... in the mall. Spain Rocks! After dinner we stopped at a Hagen Daaz shop for desert. Why don't we have a Hagen Daaz store in America?