gracias buenos dias bocadillo

I went to Spain. I totally learned Spanish (see above).

I went with a few of my friends here (Kirill, Aaron, Dan) and met up with others in Madrid, both from France (Andy, Rhiannon, Lizzie, Allie) and from Spain (Dana, Ellen, Meredith). Chances are good that, unless you are one of those people or me, you will not know all those names. That's fine, I don't really care.

First off, I actually put pictures on Facebook, so you should check those out.

Ok, first was a 7 hour train ride to Toulouse, which turned into an epic eating party, with some card games and singing and ridiculousness thrown in.
Kirill bought a huge bag of food. I mean HUGE. He included raw eggs (on his behalf, he meant to cook them that morning, and when he couldn't, he decided to bring them to cook in Barcelona. They didn't make it that far). I decided that I really like traveling on trains. Can really figure out why, but I do.

We got to Barcelona that night, and had paella for dinner (definitely the thing to get in Spain). It's really yummy, though I still can't get over the food looking back at you (they don't peel the shrimps for you ahead of time).
Las Ramblas is a giant open-air market that we went to the next day that had EVERYTHING. Seriously. Anything you could want to eat, it had it. Chocolate, fruit, fresh eggs, meat, seafood (the lobsters were still alive, which freaked Kirill out like nothing else).
We made a game of pickpocketing Kirill. We succeeded way too often than we should have, haha.
Gelato is yummy, even in Spain.

A few things to know about nightlife in Spain (especially in Barcelona). It doesn't really start until around 2am. The clubs don't even open until 1am. It makes sense when you realize that the normal time to eat dinner is around 10pm. Another thing is that when people walk around handing out flyers, it's a good thing. They actually give you good deals, like free mojitos (yes, actually. Andy and I got some when we were walking around). Also, a lot of Spanish people understand English, but no one understands French. This means that, if I wanted someone to leave me alone, I would say "Pardon, je suis une fenetre" which means "Sorry, I am a window", but of course, they didn't know that :D