Barcelona

For the weekend, a few girls and I decided we were going to go to Barcelona. We left Friday at noon and headed into downtown Cannes to catch our 50 min. bus to the Nice airport. We were transported to this little puddle-jumper plane, which freaked a lot of the girls out, because they had never been on a plane this small before. After an hour flight we managed to get to Barcelona safely and caught another bus to Plaza Catalunya where all of our hostels were. I guess my incredibly naive self came out, because I did not realize how large Barcelona is. About 18 million people live there, and being from Portland, that's quite a difference! Just walking to our hostel was a challenge with so many people wandering around! We had some difficulties, of course, with our hostel.
First, we did not know if we were actually there or not. None of the hostels in the city seemed to be marked on the walls, so we walked into Balmes 16 and stood there confused. Luckily this guy about our age (on rollerblades!) was going up the stairs so we asked him where "Asterisca" was and he said "That's my aunt!" Yes, following a stranger up stairs made us a little weary, but he was right! Apparently our hostel was actually an old converted apartment where rooms were rented out. Sounds fantastic to me! So we got in and the women Asterisca, spoke no english, only Catalan.
Second, the website was marked wrong. When she asked us to pay, she asked for 88e. We thought we were paying 44e for the both of us (so 22e each). The website said that it was 22e a night per ROOM, not per Person. So, because they were wrong and we had no idea what we were doing, instead of it costing us 88e, which is what it was supposed to cost us, we only had to pay 44e! Which was a great start to our good luck of getting one of the cheapest 3day trips ever!

more to come...