barcelona numero dos (ok i lied, i cant really speak spanish)

yeah, my spanish vocabulary is limited but my pronunciation is amazing (NOT).

day two aka saturday hannah and i visited the picasso museum which was pretty cool because it followed his development chronologically. the museum started off with a showcase of sketches from his youth and then mapped his development through his time in paris, the blue period, and then finally to cubism and some random pottery pieces he did. wow, cubism. here's the thing about modern art that i find so conceptually difficult: uh, it is conceptually difficult. i can always sort of pick out bits and pieces of what picasso is trying to say but unless it's something like guernica, picasso is hard for me to 'get'. i also feel like i need the prints to be in front of me in a book or something because i was overwhelmed by the largeness and colorfulness of the paintings, as well as confronted by a dearth of time to really examine each one. my one super brilliant observation was this: in a lot of his cubist paintings, picasso paints in a small cat or dog, often including genitalia to distinguish biology, at the bottom of the painting. yup that's it.

moving on from my obvious insufficient art analyses...

hannah and i then embarked on another exceptionally long walk in search of the sagrada familia. the best part of this weekend was the fact that i was in charge of navigation and didnt realize that the hostel map i had actually did have all the street names on it until more than halfway through the trip. yeah, how did i get into berkeley? anyway, we did a lot of intuitive wandering but it turned out to be really nice because we walked and saw more of the city than we would have done had we taken the metro everywhere. the sagrada familia was fantastic. it is incredible mostly because it is so exceptionally large. it also sort of messes with your mind because it is under construction and the projected year of completion is 2080! that's something that will make you feel mortal...

hannah and i then walked some more (duh) and then we went to top shop with which i am now completely obsessed. ok, realize this is really materialistic. i'll stop now.

after returning to the hostel (which was called 'alternative creative youth hostel'...uh, ok) we ended up going to eat tapas with two random brits who were staying at the same hostel. they were in town for the big soccer (aka football) game of sunday, which barcelona won (but i'll get to that). they were hilarious and BRITISH and i would like to point out that even if british people have the personality of a stone, they are still hilarious because of their accent. oh man, so good. we also went to a bar which was definitely populated by spanish people which was so exciting because i hate being among only other tourists.

i'll leave you with this quote from british man #1, which is nothing without the accent but whatever:

'i went into an antique shop on my lunch break the other day and listened to these two biddies natterin' away. one of 'em says to t' other one; 'there's a lotta old tings in here, ain't there?' '
hahaha, whaat??

oh, also, we met an austrian man named christophhh who sounded like old arnie schwarzenegger when he spoke english, and whose dialect i could not understand when he spoke german. awkwardddd.

post number three it is