Welcome to Barcelona!

Rental car (I reserved a ford focus... )
View from the room
Looking up in the lobby
In the lobby
Hostel from the outside

Ok, long at last I made it to a hostel in Barcelona called Nontserrat Hostel. It is absolutely amaizing and I could not have imagined winding up at a better place. It is the biggest and oldest hostel in Barcelona, and maybe Spain. It has beds for 240 people and the floors, stairs, pillars are all made out of marble, and the building it built out of large stone. It is on probably 2-3 acres and has a buetyful garden behind it. When we come back to Barcelona at the end of our trip I would definitely stay here again.

Ah, but I jumped ahead of myself. It has taken me roughly 24 hours from the time I left portland to arrive at the Hostel. The initial flight leaving at 10am was great. I got to sit next to an 83 year old lady who was visiting her daughter in Oregon for a week. Switching flights in SFO went w/o a hitch and after some great sushi I was off to Frankfurt Germany. I sat next to a physisist, and a guy who works in solar electricity. The flight was over 9 hours so did some eating (avoid the chicken) found out that alchohol is no longer free on United international flights, and watched a hand full of movies.

Ok, this is where the real fun started. I booked seperate flights to Frankfurt and to Barcelona and saved a couple hundred dollars. I had 3 hours to get my luggage from the airport, find the new terminal, check in, and make my flight. No problem, except my flight was 45 minutes late, the auto check in didn´t recognize me, I waited in the wrong line to begin with, and finally made it to my flight 30 minutes before it was supposed to take off. Then of course it was also 45 minutes late to take off so it didn´t matter.

Arriving in Barcelona I had a HUGE grin on my face, I knew I had made it here and everything was going to be fine. I got my luggage around 4:00 and found the rental car place. They were out of the ford focus I had reserved (dude it was only $45/day, it would have been fine) so they upgraded me to a brand new BWM but it was only a 2 seater. Went out and looked at the car and my luggage filled up the entire trunk, (the car was way too small) I went back and asked for something with a hatch back and she upped me to another brand new BMW (gun metal silver hatch back with only 500 miles) 6 speed manual transmission. Anyways it´s really too nice and I hope I don´t hurt it or attract any undo attention.

Then it was off to the Hostel. The short story is it took me 3.5 hours of driving around lost in Barcelona to find the first one, which was full and finially find the second one. However as mentioned above the place is pimp, way better than the car!

Well that´s all for now, I´m off to get a shower, and then try and find my way back to the airport in the morning to pick up Mikey.