I'm getting forgetful in my old age

This is a little addendum to my Paris post. I totally forgot about the dinner we had our last night there, which is weird because it was one of the best meals I've had here so far. We decided we didn't want to go anywhere far away or have to take a metro or train to find a restaurant, so we walked down Ave. Diderot right by our hostel and looked at every menu we saw. A few things looked good but we wanted to make sure Allison had some good gluten-free options. We settled on a little Italian restaurant that had a huge menu of salads, pizzas, and pastas. We were excited because a Coke here was only 3 euro, whereas every other restaurant would charge almost 5. For one soda. I'm assuming no free refills in Europe, either. wahhh. It gets better though -- our sodas arrived in a HUGE glass with 2 big slices of lemon, a huge slice of orange, like half an orange really, and some kind of confetti decoration on a stick. I felt like maybe I was the 1000th customer and won something. As for la comida, I ordered spaghetti carbonara after looking at the menu for 3 seconds because YUM, and I don't get to eat much pasta in Spain. Becca ordered tortellini, Allison got risotto a la bolognese because the waiter was adamant about her getting that when she showed him her French instructions for gluten-free eating, and Mel ordered a quattro fromage pizza. Everything was really good, the service was great (the waiter teased us because we wanted to order dessert but couldn't finish all the food), and it was one of the cheapest and most enjoyable meals yet. The dessert menu was impressive and had pictures of everything. It was hard to pick, but Becca got 1 scoop of chocolate and 1 scoop of vanilla ice cream, Allison got a tartuffo (sp?), and Melanie and I shared a banana split. The biggest banana split I've ever seen, to be exact. The strawberry ice cream in it was the best part. I'm getting hungry right now just writing about this.

Well, not much has gone on to be honest since we got back to Barcelona. I went to a pub called L'Ovella Negra (black sheep) last night with some friends from school and it was really cool, it seems like a good local place to hang out so I'm sure I'll be back. Still need to figure out the NitBus, but we have the daytime bus figured out reasonably well. Tomorrow we have a field trip to a museum instead of class (wheee!) and Friday we leave for Girona and the Dali Museum. Saturday and Sunday we will be in Costa Brava and staying in a hotel (sucks, right?) and lounging on the beach all day. It is a hard life I lead. I'm hoping to go to the Barcelona soccer stadium, Camp Nou, this afternoon. I'll make sure to post again when something interesting happens! Also, it took me like 45 minutes but I finally figured out how to change the background of the blog to a photo I actually took. I took that picture of la Sagrada Familia last week and edited the colors so only the sky would be blue. I thought it looked cool since the building itself is kind of creepy looking, it belonged in black and white.
One more thing...I found a Barcelona travel book in my carry-on that I forgot about, and wrote down a ton of stuff I want to do. I thought I would share a few things. 1-a reasonably priced sushi restaurant. I've been so sad without sushi, and I read that it's actually really popular and tasty here, but most places charge 20euro per person, no thanks! 2-There is a specialty gift store called Papirum that sells handmade photo albums. I want to go and see if there are any I can afford- I'd love to put my pictures in a handmade Spanish album. 3-Museu Picasso, of course. I read it's free on the 1st Sunday of the month, so hopefully if I'm here on the first Sunday in July that can be our plan for the day. 4-Try orxata and/or granizado. Orxata, or horchata, is famous in Barcelona and made with ground tigernuts (anyone know what those are?) It's supposed to be kind of milky and sweet. Granizado is kind of like a slushy made with fresh fruit and crushed ice. I hear the lemon is best. I wrote down the best places to try both from my book. 5-La Pedrera de Nit. We've already been to la Pedrera, the apartment building designed by Gaudi supposedly without a single straight line or right-angle, but we didn't go inside. (side story: I read that back in the day when people lived there, a tenant complained that his piano wouldn't fit well in the room because everything was curved, and Gaudi suggested he take up the violin instead. HA) Apparently Fri and Sat nights from 9pm-1am you can go up to the roof there and have cava (Spanish sparkling wine) and watch the city. Sounds worth a few euros to me. 6-Piscines Bernat Picornell, or the big swimming pool used when they had the Olympic games here (I think that was 1992). I assumed it would be closed to the public, but it's not! andddd honestly there are 100 more things on this list but for the sake of boring you I'll say the last thing is the Icaria Yelmo cineplex, which is on the beach in Port Olimpic (right down the street from us) and plays new films in English. This might seem dumb, but I NEED to see the final Harry Potter film when it comes out :). That's all for now! Let's see if I can do all this by July 30th!

Love you lots in los Estados Unidos,
Leah K