Livin' La Vida Loca: Venturing Outside Barcelona

Sorry I didn't post yesterday, I'm sure you all missed me and are wondering where I went. The answer to that is Tarragona, Spain.

Tarragona was the capital of Ancient Rome's colony on the Iberian Peninsula or something like that. Moral of the story is that there were a ton of ancient ruins and they were really cool to look at. The rest of the city had literally nothing else to offer.

We first went on a tour of the amphitheater and the place where they held chariot races. I wish I could tell you more about this but I was definitely placed in the wrong group because the tour was entirely in Spanish (at least it wasn't Catalan) and I retained about 12% of what was said. It's not like I don't understand it, I just spend more time translating than looking around and appreciating the information. So basically, Romans lived here and made a big city and held races and gladiator fights.

Here is the amphitheater right on the beach. Would have been a better picture if the sun ever came out in Europe but that isn't looking promising.

After that, we went to the monastery right outside of Tarragona. That tour was also in Spanish and I literally cannot tell you one thing about the monastery other than monks lived there and I am pretty sure this is where the monks played basketball.

Then we went out last night. It was fun, and it kills me to say that some stories just aren't meant for blogging about. Sorry.

Today, we did something that was actually really cool. So Catalonia has this awesome tradition/pride thing called castells. A castell is a human tower (or castle) that they build basically for fun I guess but it's a huge team effort and they are really passionate about it. It's really hard to explain so I found a video that shows it:

This is so awesome because it incorporates people of all ages and gender. A child is ALWAYS on the tippy top and raises his or her hand to signify that the tower is complete (which he did in the video) and then usually they smoothly collapse but I guess this time they fell. The towers can consist of a bunch of different combinations of levels and number of people on each level. The structure is extremely important and it takes everyone working together to create a successful tower. Seriously, look at how much they are swaying and how much they work together just to keep the tower standing. The teamwork is absolutely unbelievable and when I was watching the videos of successful towers and the reactions of the people when the completed the tower, it gave me the chills.

Anyway, we went to a place that trains people to do this and they taught us how to do it. We obviously did not make one this high, but we learned how they did it. A few people actually practiced climbing on to someone else and standing on their shoulders. I was one of the lucky ones that got chosen to climb on to someone without any help. The guy I was climbing on to was shaking, I was shaking, I almost fell a few times, and balancing was a challenge but it was really cool. Actually the worst part was I needed to be barefoot and I was caught without my toenails painted and it was pretty humiliating...I almost wish I did fall of his shoulders to hide from the embarrassment. Here are some pics of me almost dying while trying to accomplish this:

"Ok, this won't be that bad."