We got up early and spent a couple more hours touring Madrid before we had to catch the AVE (a high speed train). We went to a modern art museum, which wasn't really anyone's thing except for two of the other adult sponsors. I did get to see some Salvador Dalí paintings and Picasso paintings, but they weren't the especially famous ones. I know I'm uncultured, but arts museums just aren't that fascinating to me. I enjoy history museums far more. I remember feeling the same way when we went to the Smithsonian museums in the eighth grade. I loved many of the museums (the Holocaust Museum, the American Indian Museum, the Botanical Museum, etc.), but myself and my classmates got done with the Modern Art museum in about 20 minutes. It infuriated the art teacher who was one of our adult sponsors...
Getting back on track, the most interesting thing about the modern art museum was what happened immediately before entering. My boyfriend, his mother (a Spanish teacher), and myself called ourselves "sweeper team" because we would hang out in the very back of the tour group and "sweep" all of the high schoolers back together if there were any stragglers. This usually worked out well, except this time I was wearing a backpack... As a general rule, I always used my camera bag as a purse of sorts so I could wear it over one shoulder and guard my bag in front of me. Unfortunately, we had checked out of our hotel, and our big suitcases were locked in a separate room until we returned to get on a bus to the train station. I felt nervous about leaving ALL of my stuff in a shared hotel room, so I took my backpack that day.
Obviously, it's hard to keep your eyes on your backpack at all times because it's not in your line of sight. I learned that it's an easy target for pickpockets when I felt a strange pull on my bag and sensed a presence behind me. I looked back and a teenage girl (not one of our girls) put her hands down very quickly and tried to look the other way. I swung my backpack off immediately and saw that she had managed to open the entire tiny back pocket of my backpack. Nothing was gone because I had caught her mid-unzip, but she could have made off with a couple very inexpensive and boring objects if she had really tried. I guess that proves that you shouldn't profile. Before that moment, I was looking for teenage boys or older men as pickpockets, but clearly that was a bad assumption. I'm just glad that I had consciously put anything I cared about in bigger pockets that would have been too risky to attempt to open. I'm also glad that my spidey senses started tingling in that moment. It would have been very disappointing if I hadn't been able to catch her red-handed.
Anyway, after the art museum, packing up our stuff, and getting to the train station, we hopped on a high speed train to Barcelona. If I'm remembering correctly, it was about 450 miles that we traveled in 2 to 2.5 hours. Basically, it's like traveling across the entire state of Nebraska (the long way) in just a couple hours. The train was amazingly smooth, and the ride wasn't too bad at all.
In Barcelona, we checked into our slightly shady hotel and then took a walk to the beach. I've never seen the ocean (or in this case, the Mediterranean Sea) close up before, so it was a surreal experience for me. I've been landlocked my whole life, so it was crazy to be able to stand in the ocean and feel how (surprisingly) cold the water was this time of year. That's another thing that was funny... The girls on the trip wanted to go to the beach so badly, but it was honestly pretty breezy and cold in Barcelona. It was far cooler than it had been in Madrid, and Madrid wasn't even terribly hot.
After the beach, we made the trek back to the hotel. The hotel was in some kind of outlying suburb of Barcelona, so it took us an hour of tram and subway hopping to get all the way back. We saw a meth addict on our way to the beach who was acting shady, so I wasn't crazy about walking the same neighborhoods with a bunch of kids super late at night. I was extremely relieved to arrive back to the relative safety of our hotel.
So, that's was our travel/transition day! Here are a few pictures from the first night in Barcelona. I have video of the AVE that still needs edited, but no pictures.
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