Barcelona

for thanksgiving kevin and i went to barcelona with some friends. emily butler, allison wyman, and kevin's roommate brian gauthier. we flew from pisa, yes the pisa with that leaning tower. we flew into a town about an hour away from barcelona, this was a surprise to me and so instead of taking a train that cost 2 euro to get to our apartment we had to take a bus that cost 12 euro each way :( but hey at least we made it. (my roomates missed their plane to london because they went to the wrong airport in bologna. so they missed seeing the phantom of the operah too). so really i have very little to complain about. we got to the street i thought our apartment was off of, and i had two different directions to find it. a map and an address. well everyone knows i love maps so i followed it well it led us to the correct street but we realized that we had walked about 5 blocks past our apartment(this was at about 12 pm). so we found our apartment and contacted our "agent". he came and led us into a foyer that was fairly dark and all i could see was some mailboxes that had been bashed in. as we walked up the stairs there was no lighting and he told us that they would be fixed by tomorrow. well if you know latin countries we figured that meant maybe they would be done when we returned to barcelona with our children. finally we arrived at the apartment door. all of us were quite nervous to go inside. everyone told me later that they were questioning the fact that they had trusted me to book our apartment.
we walked inside and were met by a beautiful sight. the apartment was fully furnished. great lighting. very clean. and even had some very creative art pieces.
we all went to bed exhausted and happy that we were safe in our nice apartment. next morning we all woke up late and then went in search of food. we had gotten up too early so we wandered the harbour area(did i mention we were only a few blockes from the beach?) there were yachts from all over the world and even a ship that looked like it was from "pirates of the carribean". later that day we wandered around barcelona and discovered that it was full of cute little boutiques.
our greatest discoveries of the weekend were: starbucks on practically every corner(there are none! in all of italy), there was a subway, and i had my first dunkin donut just because it was something from home.
because we had an apartment we were able to make our very own thanksgiving dinner! which was wonderful. there was chicken, stuffing, garlic green beans, mashed potatoes, carrots, and for dessert we had icecream.
coming back from barcelona was uneventful until we arrived at pisa. we went to grab a train from the airport to the main trainstation but there were no trains running until 7 am the next morning. but we saw that there was a train from the main trainstation to florence. so we followed another group of florentine students on a 20 minute walk to the main trainstation(it was about midnight now). we arrived at the train station and ran around trying to get tickets from the automatic machines. eventually found out that the "train" that left at 1 am was actually a bus. so we waited for the bus. it came about twenty minutes late so very italian of the driver even more italian of him was that he left the bus for about 5 minutes before we were able to board. we took that bus for about and hour and arrived downtown florence at 2:30 am. we then had to walk a few miles to villa aurora because no buses run until 6 am. we arrived at 3:30 am and fell into bed exhausted. all in all a wonderful vacation with many memories made.