Week 9 through Spring Break

Week nine was a busy yet unexciting week that consisted of a plethora of schoolwork and studying until Friday, the first day of our elongated Spring Break. Friday morning, Jen and I bused to the Bonn-Cologne airport. We quickly checked in and arrived at our terminal. The flight attendants called us to board our Ryanair flight, so we walked outdoors but were greeted by a closed gate. We waited in the cold wind for forty-five minutes until the flight crew finally allowed us onto the plane. This was only the beginning of a series of travel misfortunes that we encountered from the start of Spring Break to the end of our study abroad.

After a two-hour flight, we landed in the beautiful city of Barcelona. We took a quick Subway downtown and walked quite a few miles to our Airbnb. The room was a strange yet nice converted barbershop. We ate at a great pizza shop and had mojitos at the “best Mojito shop in the world”. The next two days were not quite as fun. We explored more of the city early in day two, until we eventually found our second Airbnb. Jen sadly got sick and slept for forty hours straight with intermittent puking in between. I did not really want to go out by myself, so I decided to watch some excellent films such as Borat and Happy Gilmore.

Early the fourth morning, we headed back to the Barcelona airport and flew to Paris. Thankfully, Jen was feeling a bit better but still puked in the airport bathroom. We had a difficult time navigating the Paris airport train system and got split up for around an hour. I wandered the airport looking for Wi-Fi that would connect to my phone but had no luck. I finally took out my laptop and turned on the hotspot so I could call Jen. We met up, checked into our hotel, and walked to the Eiffel Tower. The views from the top were fantastic, even though the day was quite cloudy. We ate Nutella crepes, which are close to the best crepes I have ever had. On the final day in Paris, we toured the Louvre and witnessed the most beautiful paintings I have ever seen. My favorite part of the museum was an indoor corridor filled with fantastic marble sculptures. Overall, the Paris experience was far greater than that of Barcelona; however, Paris is a much dirtier city. Later that night, we found out that out trip had been cancelled. The next two days involved more unfortunate events that led to an extremely poor travel weekend back home.

*Me on the top of the Eiffel tower too scared to lean all the way back