Awful Travel Day

Wow, what a nightmare it was getting to Barcelona. My flight to London was great—I slept the entire time, but when I arrived at Heathrow, I was informed that my connecting flight to Barcelona at 11:30 a.m. was cancelled because of snow. By snow, I mean barely an inch of slush on the ground. Luckily, I found one of my roommates Lindsay and together we located a lovely British man who helped us rebook a 4:15 p.m. flight. We decided to make sure our luggage would still be sent on and we got lost going between terminals. We literally went back and forth, up and down, a dozen times before being sent to wait in a line that we thought was about luggage. After waiting for an hour and barely moving, we realized we were in the wrong line. We gave up and had lunch and then just sat for the next few hours. Finally, we went to through customs to go wait for our flight. The screen told us to wait for the gate to show up. We waited. And waited. It got delayed. We waited some more and explored a bit. The airport is ridiculous. There were so many designer stores. Do people really buy that stuff at the airport? Anyways, we finally got to the gate and we had to take a bus to get to the plane. Once we boarded the plane, we were told that we needed to wait because someone who was supposed to be on the plane didn’t show up so they needed to take off all our luggage to find hers to take off. Fine. Another hour goes by. We miss our takeoff time and are sent to the back of the line. Then the girl in front of me lost her passport. We spend the next 15 minutes looking for it before she finds it in between her seat. The flight itself was fine—I slept a little. When we landed we went to go get our luggage. Luckily I found mine right away but poor Lindsay’s never showed up. She just found out they are still in London. We had to wait at the airport until everyone in CEA got their luggage and then we got on our bus to go to our hotels. Rikki, our third roommate was very sweet and was waiting up for us. At this point it was past 3 a.m. I had been traveling for over 24 hours! Woke up the next morning to go to orientation at 9 a.m. We made it to the first one but then napped for the next three hours. It had been a long day. Went on a bus tour around the city, which was nice and had our first dinner out. Barcelona is such a beautiful city.

Now, we just moved into our apartment and it is AMAZING. It is gorgeous and big. Three bedrooms, a nice kitchen, a porch, a washing machine and it is right next to the market. I'm so pleased. Feeling much better. I unpacked and finally feel settled. In a few minutes we are going to buy some extra necessities for our apartment and get groceries and then tonight we are going to go out.