But I guess it's time to put that behind me, and move on to the lovely crowd at the hostel in Barcelona. After settling in, buying some groceries and cooking some dinner, we found ourselves in the midst of a classic hostel hodgepodge, ready to go out on the town. Rafa, a Spanish hostel employee, was our guide, and he had assembled this fellowship of randoms for the quest to find a free Wednesday night party. There were two Brazilians, one of whom was quite the ladies' man and snuck off with a little Asian Californian girl before the night was over. There were two Canadians whom I awkwardly assumed to be married, but who actually didn't know each other at all. I was representing the States, accompanied by the lovely Indian ambassadress Ms. Dinshaw. And then there was Itay. No, I did not just forget the "L" in Italy. Itay was the name of the crowning glory of our little gang. The small, grinning embodiment of goofy friendliness had a frizzy red "jewfro" as he called it, and spoke with the singsong inflection of Tevye, lamenting the loss of his world-weary horse in Fiddler on the Roof. I knew from the minute I saw him that we would share a few "l'chaims" with him before the night was over (to life! in Hebrew), but what I didn't know was that this clownish, disarming little man had just spent three years in the Israeli army."I made some of the best friends of my life, and I had experiences I will never forget," he explained, telling us how he chose to be an infantryman because it was more dangerous and difficult than the other jobs. "But I would give anything to make it so it never happened." I couldn't honestly say that I understood where he was coming from, but I could certainly imagine the melange of patriotic devotion to comrades and basic human horror at the violence of war that must be behind the sentiment he was expressing. It was hard to believe that this gentle, easy-going soul who was the good-natured butt of most of our jokes could have had anything to do with the military, but I knew that his current demeanor might be a reaction to the demands made on him over the past three years. He had escaped, and now he was free to have fun.
And have fun we did. After stopping at a bar and meeting some other random international folks we found ourselves shepherded by Rafa into a taxi with two British girls we'd never met before, with a driver who spoke only Spanish (the nerve!), a language of which none of us knew any non-culinary words. Much to our dismay, our fearless Spanish leader did not get in, and the cab sped away. After a barrage of "Quesadilla! Chalupa!" and other Taco Bell vocabulary, we relented, and realized that we had no way of figuring out where we were headed, and we would just have to trust Rafa's good judgement in communication with the cabbie.
We wound up at hopping night club, where we were given free entry and a free drink because of our affiliation with the hostel. It was packed, resounded with dime a dozen hip-hop music, and reminded me a bit of the kind of parties I tried to avoid in college, but I was in Barcelona, and somehow it made perfect sense. I was having a very good time, but I began to realize that everyone was speaking English. We had come to Barcelona for the Spanish experience, and found ourselves surrounded by other tourists, probably lured there by their hostel hosts as well to keep these clubs running and to create the illusion of happening night life for suckers like us. The real Spaniards were either at some other club, or home in their beds like sane people. Well, as I told Ayesha earlier that day, I hadn't come to Barcelona to go to bars alone-a, so I embraced the company of my fellow tourists and enjoyed the rest of the night, before heading home to the hostel and crashing into bed.
There are two kinds of people in this world: the kind who deeply appreciated that pun, and the kind who aren't even reading this sentence because their sense of humor is mortally offended. Ayesha is actually the former, but she pretends to be the latter. Shhh! Don't tell her I know.
Anyway, the next day we made the rounds as usual, trying to hit up all the things worth a cartoony, blown-up illustration on our tourist map. We saw a lot, and got a pretty good sense of the city, but easily the most impressive sight was the famous "Sagrada Familia" by Gaudi. I had actually never heard of it before we arrived, but when I saw it I couldn't get enough. Ayesha and I payed 11 Euros each to get in (an unthinkable amount for people skipping meals to save money) and spent a full four hours just staring at it. In a sense there wasn't much to see. Construction of this monumental cathedral started over a hundred years
ago, and still isn't 
finished, so tourists have only limited access to the inside. The stained glass windows were enormous, and threw the sun's light in vibrant but natural colors on the walls and floor. The pillars branched in four directions as they neared the canopy, imitating tree trunks that reached up to a ceiling of carved, leafy stone. I had the impression of walking among the tallest sunflowers in the world after some kind of ice age had frozen them solid. The walls were spiky and irregular, like off-kilter mountain ranges or ocean waves leaning in toward us. We stood for a while, in awe of the sheer scope of the place, but most of the interior was obscured by scaffolding and barricades, which made it all the more mysterious and exciting to imagine in completion.We spent the majority of our time, after checking out the museum and watching an educational movie in the basement, just gazing at the two finished facades of this truly unique building.
The Passion Facade is the first thing you see when you get off the metro and turn around. It features the stations of the cross, along with a few additional biblical episodes that relate to the Passion. If you take a few minutes to stare at the carved stone, it comes alive with the story of Christ. The story unravels as your eye follows the clues left by the sculptor to identify each character and episode. Three idle people, a fourth, sad-looking one, and a rooster: Simon Peter after denying Jesus three times. An unrealistic face on a piece of cloth: 
Veronica wipes the face of Jesus. A small figure high up on the bridge between two towers, almost unnoticeable in his distance from the rest of the facade: the resurrected Christ. Sloping pillars reach from the earth to the top of the display, like filaments of some stringy, sticky substance from which the towers of the building seem to have been wrenched by an act of God in centuries past, before freezing solid in the same ice age that claimed the massive sunflowers inside.The Nativity Facade is the last thing you see on your tour of the cathedral, and it's quite a finale. In contrast to the barren, stony Passion Facade marked by grieving faces around the suffering Jesus, the Nativity Facade is alive with God's creation. The first impression was overwhelming, because there was altogether too much to take in. It was certainly the busiest bunch of carving I had ever seen, and the longer I looked, the more I noticed, which created the illusion that it was truly alive, and spilling out from some unseen source before my eyes. The stone dripped from the arches in liquid stalactites, from which sprang fish and lizards
and turtles and snakes, and all manner of slimy, non-glamorous animals very rarely associated with holiness or purity. The wall before us was vivid with intricate carvings of horses, chickens, donkeys, cows, sheep, and other smelly livestock, generally considered lowly and
stupid by those of us who like to give animals a social status. We saw no lions or eagles, nor any other animals that are exalted for their regal elegance and placed on flags and coins. Instead, the Nativity Facade was populated by the humblest, earthiest, most servile of beasts, and teeming with slimy, cold-blooded reptilian lowlifes. And right there in the middle of this open seating venue was, you guessed it, the baby Jesus, encircled by Mary, Joseph, some shepherds, the three Magi (possibly Ayesha's distant cousins? they are said to have been Zoroastrians who followed the star from the east), and various beasts of burden. This was the Holy Family. This ragtag bunch of uninvited birthday guests was the most sacred thing the world had ever seen. The only person in history worthy of such a tremendous monument was sitting in a pile of hay next to a docile, cud-chewing, manure-producing ox.As I looked up to the towers above the Glory Facade (unfinished and currently invisible to the public) to see the Fruits of the Holy Spirit spilling from their summits (literally berries and melons and stuff, in full color, piled up in precarious-looking pyramids) I was tickled by the sheer goofiness of this whole side of the structure. There was something truly laughable about the whole scene, with all its asymmetrical, unpredictable flora and fauna slithering and sprouting wherever it desired. It was ludicrous, chaotic, and completely lacking the intimidating, nearly overbearing, stone cold beauty of a Notre Dame or a Saint Peter's Basilica. While those churches evoke, and nearly demand reverence and solemnity, the Nativity Facade of the Sagrada Familia seemed to be inviting me to laugh at some beautiful, victimless joke: the kind of joke that celebrates the quirks and idiosyncrasies of it's subject, and makes you laugh because it is spot on. In this case I think the subject was life itself. All of creation (men and beasts and plants and weather, anything imaginable) was shamelessly parading around on the facade of a cathedral of all places, as if it were the dirt beneath their feet. And there was baby Jesus, entirely condoning it all, and even at the center of it all, maybe even causing it to happen, the cynosure of an open invitation party at the holy of holies. There was something so nearly sacrilegious about it that I knew it must be deeply, scandalously holy in it's embrace of all humanity, and of all created things. We both could have stared at it even longer than we did, but we managed to pry ourselves away before sunset and go see what else Barcelona had to offer.
We saw some more buildings by the same crazy Gaudi and we went to a park (also designed by Gaudi) that looked like a trippy sort of Hansel and Gretel gingerbread world. I don't know who paid for all this stuff, but Gaudi certainly seemed to have a lot of funds at his disposal, and the park was filled with all kinds of whimsical buildings and caves and tunnels and sculptures.
But Gaudi died about a hundred years ago, so I think I've spent enough time talking about him. Even more exciting than our encounter with Gaudi, was our encounter with some old friends: May
and Axel. May attended Middlebury with us back in the day, and met Axel (a Parisien) on her semester abroad in Paris, and they've been together ever since. We had the good fortune of winding up in Barcelona on the same weekend (or maybe our girlfriends planned it that way), and it was a joyous occasion. There's nothing quite like meeting up with old friends after a long journey filled with new and strange faces. We didn't do or see a lot of noteworthy things with May and Axel, but it didn't matter because good company is better than anything tourism has to offer. We spent two days and two nights tooling around the city with them, chatting, reminiscing, catching up, and enjoying each other's company, before May and Axel returned to Paris, taking a bus to the airport at 4 in the morning, leaving Ayesha and I to collapse in a heap for a couple of hours before hopping on our own airport-bound bus. And off we sped to Granada, by way of Madrid, for the final leg of our journey. 
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