This is Amsterdam: Spain! Traveling, homeless style! Tapas!

Although the VU doesn't have a spring break, they do have a week set aside for exams, and since I only had 2 exams, I essentially had a week off after my Quantum Computing midterm on Monday afternoon. In order to properly take advantage of this free time, about half of the students in the calvin exchange program decided to travel to spain for several days (leaving on monday night and returning on sunday morning). We spent the first 2 days in Barcelona, the second 2 in Seville, and one final day in Madrid.

In brief: Spain is pretty cool.

Less briefly, it was too cool at times (I had to wear a jacket for several of the days, when I expected a tropical climate). Also, pretty (the cities we visited kinda put Amsterdam to shame in terms of that classic European beautiful town look).

If you would like a more in-depth review of my time in spain, I'm going to be breaking up my journaling over several posts.

Monday March 21st, 2011 - Eindhoven, Amsterdam

Our trip began around 11 at night, as we took the train to the Eindhoven airport (Eindhoven is a city a couple hours south of Amsterdam). Although Amsterdam has an airport, the budget airline that we were flying on only touches down in a limited number of cities, so our plan for the first night was to stay in either the Eindhoven airport or the train station for the night, and fly out early the next morning to Barcelona.

Walking the streets of Eindhoven

When we arrived in Eindhoven, we learned from several taxi drivers at the station that both the airport and the train station are closed during the night. Madness! With no place to stay, and nothing to do until our flight the next morning, we decided to walk the 2 hours across town to the airport. Once we arrived, it was a bit too cold to sleep on the benches outside, so we walked around the airport until 5, when the airport finally opened.

To those looking for a nice place to visit in the Netherlands: i would not recommend Eindhoven, unless you are a fan of industrial parks. We walked around Eindhoven looking for a late night cafe or something where we could hang out for a while, but saw nothing at all. It was a rough start to our trip, but entertaining in its strangeness.

Tuesday, March 22 - Barcelona

A shot of our hostel room.

In the morning we left from the Eindhoven airport to Girona, spain, and took the bus from there to Barcelona. Once we arrived in Barcelona, we found the hostel where we would be sleeping for the next couple of days. The website describes the hostel as a "cuckoo that’s muscled into the very plushest of nests", "in the best location ever dreamed for a hostel". While I don't know if the hostel is ritzy enough to be deserving of bird comparisons, I was surprised at the quality of the hostel - i hadn't previously stayed in a hostel, and pictured a ratty 1950's era government building with 40 people to a room. Instead, it proved to be quite nice - everything was clean and well-kept. The room that we slept in was on the corner of the top/6th floor of the building, looking out over one of the main streets. It could hold 10 people, but because we were visiting in the middle of the week, there were several vacancies, and we had the room to ourselves.

View through the Arc de triomf

After leaving our bags at the hostel, we left to go grab some lunch, and ended up eating tapas. Although there are tapas bars in the us, tapas originates in spain, and is a really important element of the spanish diet. I ate tortillas (egg-casserole type of thing) and a bomba - fried potato ball. It was okay, but the bar where we consumed said tapas was rather divey.

Following lunch, we wandered around barcelona for several hours, saw the port, and walked up la rambla, a main touristy street in the center of town, largely populated by street vendors and performers.