We started off the day with breakfast at school that consisted of tons of tiny meat and cheese sandwiches. Once again, welcome to Spain. Pretty tasty but man, I'm not a fan of eating every meal standing up! More awkward mingling with a good third of the attendees mildly hung over or, in my case, still asleep. They then ushered us in to the auditorium for more lectures about how amazing and challenging the next two years of our lives would be. I thought most of it was generally a waste of time, until the Student panel. The current students put together a video of their favorite memories (to the tune of David Guetta's memories, which will now permanently in my head be associated with my first IESE experience), and then answered any and all questions anyone could possibly think to ask. We then had lunch (standing up, once again) and headed out for our bus tour of Barcelona.
This city is so beautiful!!! I don't remmeber what's what since I was basically comatose at this point, from lack of sleep and hot sun, but here are some not very good pictures of the amazing city:
We then, once again, went to eat, and then the girls went to get their hair done while I went back to the hotel to pass out. The view from our hotel:
That night Alex, the girl who I'd e-mailed to death with visa questions, and her friend Marisa and Floriane invited us out to dinner with them, and then to a party themed "Seven Daily Sins". We went out to a sushi restaurant that was surprisingly good, alleviating my fears that I'd be pitifully deprived of my sushi obsession during my two years in Barcelona. Our lovely escorts for the evening:
The party was great, met even more people. Turns out my recounting what I'm planning on doing with my summer makes for easy conversation, even though I do sometimes feel like I'm bragging, even though I really don't mean to be. I'm no good at making conversation with strangers and talking about traveling comes naturally to the group we're gonna be with for the next two years. We ended up getting kicked out of the party by cops at 3am for being too noisy (hey, at least it wasn't a midnight!), and so we took the party to the street outside instead:
Finally, they told us we HAD TO MOVE, so the girls took us to a club the name of which I don't remember. Not that it really mattered because they tried to make us pay to come in, so we left and ended up at the only place we could get food at 4am - some random 24hr a day convenience store. We bought bread, salami, and cheese...When in Rome (or, Barcelona in this case). Its odd, really, that in a city that parties until 6 in the morning there aren't more late night places to eat open. All for the best though - I'll be getting fat enough as is.
Stephanie then went home at 4:30 as she had a 6:30am flight to catch - what a trooper! Kathy and I headed back to our hotel, exhausted. Still not sure how we made it there...
As I was trying to fall asleep around 5am, some dude in the street below busted out in a lengthy rendition of "Sugar, Sugar, Honey Honey"...thank you, Barcelona, for the lullaby!
View from our hotel at night:
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