La Noche de Sabado y Sarria y Barri Gotic

Last night was my first Saturday out in Barcelona, and even though every night is a big night here, Saturday is when everyone in the city goes out. The metros are open all night long, instead of closing at 2 on other nights. Last night we decided that we wanted to try this place called Chupitos. It literally means “shots” It is supposed to be pretty well known throughout Europe, and I can see why. We walk into this tiny little bar, not really knowing how good it is going to be. I look to the right and there is a huge menu of all the different shots you can get. All these crazy names, I can’t even name them because there were so many. There must have been over 100. It was crazy. We didn’t even know where to start. Most of the shots included some kind of fire. The bartenders really knew what they were doing and made it really fun. My first shot was called “willy wonka.” It was delicious. It was a chocolate based liquor(? I guess) mixed with another lighter chocolate drink, topped off with whipped cream and a small square of chocolate. It’s hard to remember particular ones because we ended up meeting three Australian guys, who we ended up hanging out with practically all night, so between the seven of us, we probably tried around 18 shots. Some of the other shots I remember were:
-I don’t remember the name but he lit the shot glass and the bar on fire and then gave you a straw, so you were drinking burning liquid, it looked cool
- another ones had tabasco sauce in it
-Bob Marley - red, yellow, and green (density tower - thank you eighth grade science)
-Caramello - caramel based liquor, shaken with whipped cream
- Boy Scout- bartender lit the bar on fire, gave you a marshmallow on a wooden stick, you had to roast the marshmallow then put it in the shot.
-Finding Nemo - blue colored liquor, with an orange m&m on the bottom with whipped cream on top and a white m&m. The trick was to take the shot, not using your hands, swallow the shot and keep both the white and orange m&m in your mouth. Don’t worry, I completed the task (not without breaking the glass though, I forgot about gravity, oops)
That place was really fun, and then we walked down to La Rambla, with the Australian guys, who actually made the night a lot more fun. We found out that they were all 19 years old on a seven month trip around Europe. They were on their third month, and they were spending a week in Barcelona. They were so nice and really funny with their australian accents. The people here who you meet are so great and everyone just wants to have fun and meet new people, which I love doing. We were then going to go a really great club called Razzmatazz, but it was a 12 euro cover charge, so we decided it was too expensive and just went home.

This morning I was meeting my friends in Sarria, where they are living with their home stays. We went to church, because there is a great little church right in the center of Sarria, and we thought it would be cool to go to a Spanish mass. The church was sooo pretty inside. I hadn’t been to church in forever so I was trying to follow what other people were doing: sitting, standing, kneeling, etc. I couldn’t really tell what the priest was saying, but I think that it was more that the church had an echo, rather than I wouldn’t be able to understand the spanish he was speaking. At the beginning of the mass, he talked about 9/11, which I thought was really cool. All the Spanish people seem really interested in our perspective of 9/11 because my GA had asked me, my spanish teacher, and now the priest was talking about it in his sermon, all the way in Barcelona, Spain. Anyways, so mass was actually really interesting because the church was beautiful. I guess they have documents that date back to 980 a.d. So the church was founded over 1000 years ago, and it was really cool to be in a place that old and significant. We then walked around Sarria a bit, got gelato, obviously. It was really good, and they have so many different bakeries and pastry shops, little restaurants, it really is an awesome part of town. We decided after church that we were going to go downtown to the Gothic quarters because 9/11 in Cataluna is a holiday where the Catalonians demonstrate their wants to secede from Spain and become their own nation state. We walked around the gothic section, which is unbelievable. It might be my favorite section of the city. All the roads are too narrow for cars to fit through because they were designed so long ago. It was the original site of Barcelona, founded by the Romans. It was the farthest the Romans ever got in Western Europe. There are old aqueducts and a church and the pathways are all cobblestone. It was really interesting. We ate at this tiny little shop in the Gothic quarters. It was foccacia bread pizza. To.Die.For. I even brought one home to eat for dinner here. So now I am home, going to watch a movie and go to sleep!