Dos estrellas, por favor

This phrase became all too familiar this weekend.

In my last blog post I mentioned the festival that Tara and I had been to invited to and how we probably weren’t going to go. Well, after some thought we decided to go for it and do it. The advice I have been given from post-year abroaders has been to say YES to every opportunity. Even though we aren’t technically on our year abroad yet – why not start early? I ended up spending about 100 euros which isn’t ideal. Ticket, trains, food and drink, and I bought a t shirt. It was worth it though; it was a new and different experience. It was also my first festival!

Tara arrived on Friday evening; it had been a bit hectic with more friends of Nuria visiting for the evening for dinner and a swim. Of course sods law the day that my contract ended on my phone was the day Tara was arriving which made things harder. Nonetheless I picked Tara up from the train station at half 10 (when I say pick up I mean walk 2 minutes across the road). Tara and I are genuinely great friends, but we’re just not particularly affectionate friends. We’re not huggers. However, after a rather long stint apart (we saw each other every day at uni) and various stressful, homesick and tiring weeks au pairing in Spain, we embraced one another with one big abrazo.

We got back to the flat, said hello to everyone and had some dinner. We decided to go out for some drinks; we didn’t leave til gone 12 (in Canterbury I’d sometimes be coming home at this time!). We went to Tennis, the bar I’d gone to a few days before. Instead of the extortionate 8 euro cocktail I previously had we decided to drink beer. Una caña de estrella (hence the title). At 2 euros it was definitely the best thing to drink. We chatted, caught up and exchanged funny au pairing stories. We also went to a bar opposite tennis, it wasn’t quite as luxurious but the beers were 1.30 - amazing. It was full of locals who stared at us (me – paley, tara is so brown she could be a Spaniard). Anyway, we decided to buy two more beers but take them to drink on the beach. This is of course after Tara gave her number to the guy behind the bar.

We sat on the beach and enjoyed the moonlight shining onto the sea. It was very tranquil until two boys came over and decided to try and talk to us. A great opportunity for us to speak Spanish, but even without sunlight we were pretty sure they were feos. Eventually they left us, after the obligatory besos. Gross. We waited for them to walk further ahead then we made our way back, unfortunately they were slow walkers and we ended up over taking them. Incredibly awkward, we decided to ignore them and walk faster. Somehow by the time we got home it was half 3, needless to say we got about 5 hours sleep that night.

Saturday meant only one thing for me and Tara...PLAYA! We headed down and pitched our towels, sunbathed a bit and had a dip in the sea. Oh and maybe a cheeky peek at the beautiful Spanish lifeguards who happened to be right by us. After about two hours it was back to the flat to shower and get ready for Bona Nit (the festival). We got fed to the brim before we left with a lovely paella, some jamón and melon. 

We got the train to Barcelona fairly easily although it was delayed 40 minutes in the 30 degree heat with no shade. Luckily, we managed to get seats on the train and it was air conditioned. In the train station we met Erica, Paula and her boyfriend Alberto. We got the metro to somewhere I can’t remember, and walked up a hill to get to Poble Espanyol where the festival was being held. It was an incredible venue but unfortunately we couldn’t really look around because most of it was closed off. Poble Espanyol is a mini town surrounded by an old wall. It’s full of shops, bars and restaurants. Each street represents a different part of Spain, for example there is an Andalucían area, a restaurant with food typical of Asturias or a shop with traditional handcrafting from Valencia. That might not actually be true because we didn’t get to see a lot, but you get the idea. The festival was quite hippy and eco friendly. When you arrive everyone gets given a plastic cup to use for the whole night rather than loads of plastic ones which would create a lot of rubbish. The cup is red and says Bona Nit on it, we kept ours. It also had a clip round it so you could hang it off your bag or trousers if you wanted to dance or you just didn’t want to carry it. Rather cool, no? Despite not knowing any of the bands playing, Tara and I embraced it and went along. The first band was Inspira, a catalan band. They were pretty good considering I only recognised 1 in every 10 words. After them was a band called Fanfarlo, they were English. They were definitely the band I enjoyed the most, I got my boogie on. Sometime after we went to the toilet, we came back and couldn’t find the others. At this point the plaza was pretty much full and we figured we’d waste time trying to find them so we found a good spot on some stairs and watched from up there. We took it in turns to do the beer run (5 euros for two beers). The music was good and mostly in English. There was one Catalan band and the rest were either English or Norwegian, I’m not quite sure why Norwegians’ write, sing and speak in English but that’s a mystery. The last band was called Kakkmaddafukka. Strange, I know. They were a bit crazy but the atmosphere was great and their music was catchy.

When the festival ended we found the others. There were after parties in the city which was originally the idea however we were all pretty much dead. We ended up walking through Plaza Cataluña and Paseo de Gracia and sat on a bench somewhere where I kept falling asleep. It was about 3am and our train wasn’t until 6:30. Anyone who knows me well should know I am a terrible person when I’m tired, safe to say I was incredibly grumpy until we got into bed at half 7.  We slept on the train home. As soon as we got back we got straight into bed and slept until about half 11. We went down the pool for an hour to sunbathe then came back up for lunch. Before Tara got her train home we went for a walk along the beach for a drink (non alcoholic of course). It was sad to say goodbye again but we’ll see each other before we both start our new adventures studying in different cities in September. We had a great weekend and it was nice to have a friend.

Tomorrow marks the beginning of my last week au pairing in Spain!