the best laid schemes of mice and men...

Barcelona was just one disaster after another, to the point that it was comical how much shit we were forced to endure.

Amanda, Kimiko, and I arrived Saturday night with no place to stay, hoping we could get an extra night at the hostel. No luck. We dumped our bags and tried to kill time, seeing that we had no where to go until we could check in at noon the following day. We went out to a very delicious and very prolonged dinner in downtown Barça, sitting in the restaurant for a good three hours before we finally ventured out for the night. We walked around for a while and eventually found this little club that was playing a funk show. It was small inside and very intimate, with only about 20-25 people there. The crowd was a little bit older than us, and it almost seemed like they were one big group of friends. We joked that we felt like we were crashing someone's birthday party. After a good hour of dancing--with the three of us being by far the most enthusiastic--one of the women walked up and started talking to us.

Woman: You guys are the life of the party! Good thing you're here for the celebration!

Amanda: Yeah! But what are we celebrating?

Woman: ...You aren't here for the birthday party?

We had actually crashed someone's party. Luckily, they found it as funny as we thought it was awkward, and no one kicked us out. We even made some new friends. Unfortunately, none of them offered us a place to stay though, and when the party ended at 4am (which actually felt like 5am because of the time change here), we had no where to go.

When the night had started, we all had these notions that sleeping on the streets for one night would be an interesting experience, and it definitely was interesting, but not in the positive way we had imagined. We started out in the quintessential hobo location: a park bench, and lasted a little over an hour until the cold and the other park residents drove us away. We tried the metro station next, but they kicked us out real quick. We traveled back to the hostel, hours too early for check-in, and ended up sleeping on the floor and shelves of the luggage room until our room was available (couches were already taken, so we weren't the only destitute guests looking for a place to sleep that night). It was all terrible as it was happening, but we survived and came out with a newfound empathy for the homeless. Those few hours were hell and I can't imagine living like that every single night.

And all of this was only in the first twelve hours...