La Merce and The Night I Didn't Take a Cab Home...

Good morning lovely people,

I feel the need to preface this post by saying that I have literally had no more than 4 hours of sleep last night, and about 5 the night before. (Thursday night it wasn't my fault- I just woke up at 5am and couldn't sleep any longer). Today is an entirely different story.

Thursday night was the beginning of La Merce. It is the biggest festival in Barcelona to celebrate it's patron Saint, the Saint of Mercy. I met up with a few friends from school to go down for the opening ceremonies and it was insane. There were crazy amounts of people down there! We started in Placa Rei where there was a speech happening (in Spanish so none of us had any clue what was being said, but apparently it was quite inspirational), and then these crazy huge statues came out of the building in a parade and did some dancing. All of the music sounded somewhat the same, though I'm sure it all had significant meaning to the people of Bacelona. We wandered around for the rest of the evening, bumping into people, wandering into shops and watching live bands. It was a great night. We turned it in before midnight because we wanted to catch the metro home.

Some pictures of that night:

The top of one of the buildings- I want to say it is city hall, but I could be wrong.

Two awesome friends from school. I'll call them Arizona and Oregon.

Me and E. We'll call her L.A. though, because she is so very L.A. :)

Clearly we all had to have photos with everyone.. lol

The opening of the building- this is where the giant statues came out. I forgot to mention that they fired some VERY loud guns filled with confetti RIGHT infront of us. They were SO loud that the only thing you could do was duck and cover your ears- total reaction!

I'm pretty sure this was a king of some sort. It was the first statue and it was HUGE!!

This may have been the queen. Or a concubine. But probably a queen.

Lion, of course. All of the statues would come out dancing and swinging around, so this was probably the clearest shot I got of anything...

Horse. Woah Nellie.

A Dragon!

I don't know....

Heh.

Maybe this one was the concubine. She came out much later. After all the animals and big tortise/dinosaur looking thing...

One of the stages in Placa Rei.

Statues. Dancing. It was kinda weird.

Someone else's kids having fun climbing a lamp post. It's like "how many people can you fit in a phone booth" only its kids on a lamp post. (In case you were wondering, "lamp post" is a compound noun.) 

Jamon, Jamon. (Now all I need is two men to fight over me!)

You can't really tell, but this man is a waiter.. at MacDonald's. Yes, that's right, he is SERVING people on a patio, wearing a bowtie!

5 Euros for this beer. And that was expensive!

Like I said, at 11:30 we left so that we could catch the metro, and then I woke up at 5 am. Friday was a bit of a rough school day for me. After school, I came home to siesta a bit. I checked my email and whatnot, Skyped with my sister and her adorable children (*so glad to hear that Jay's surgery went well!!*) and tried to siesta. I only got about 5 minutes of sleep because by the time the cat settled down next to me and stopped being needy for attention and I finally fell asleep, my friend called. The plan for the evening was supposed to be that a couple of girls meet up at my house, we go up to Parc Guell with some wine and drink it while the sunsets and then go find something else to do. It didn't happen quite as wel planned, as most of us didn't make it to Parc Guell (we'll go back another day to see the sunset). We ended up meeting at another friend's house and having a couple of beverages before heading out to La Merce.

Waiting for the train at the metro.

Australia, Seattle, L.A., Arizona and Colorado.

Once we got to where all the festivites were happening, we went to watch some live music.

Some random guy jumped into our photo...

And then he got RIGHT in there!



After the music got old, we wanted to sit somewhere. We started to walk out of that area when we bumped into someone we had met on the metro on our way home the night before. Since he's a local, we asked him to take us to a bar in the area where we could sit and have a couple of drinks. He took us to one place that wouldn't let us in because none of us were carrying id's of any sort (you just don't here- most of the time you don't need it, and if you do have it, it might get stolen by a pick-pocket, so it's better to leave it home). We ended up at another little place that wouldn't let us sit down because we are "foreigners", but we eventually just sat down anyway. We started talking to other people around. We met some people from Arizona, Britain and Finland. One of the Brits turned out to be a pilot with Ryan Air (but I'll believe it when I see it) so he told us he could get us REALLY cheap flights anywhere it Europe. We'll see. We exchanged contact info, partly because someone in our group kept asking him if he would marry her and trade a green card for EU citizenship and partly because he thought my accent was cute. 

We ended up hanging out with the Finnish guys down by the docks until about 6 am when the party finally broke up because the metro was open for service again. (None of us really wanted to pay for cab rides home because we all live in different directions).

It was one of those nights that everything just seemed to flow. The vibe was good from all the girls, no drama and no one fighting over where they wanted to go. We stuck together and made sure everyone was okay all night. Text messages to say we're home in the morning. The six of us had a really great night and I'm so glad I met these ladies! (Well, that and they all thought L.A. and I are 22!! They now know how old we are, but seriously, it's a good feeling to pass for 22 again!!) 

Time to do some serious relaxing. (That is an oxymoron- I did not learn that in English classes)

Bon Noche!