A blog post written on the same day as the post is about? Wild!
I continue to forget to take pictures of my breakfasts – generally by the time I get breakfast I’m too focused on eating to remember! But, this morning I walked to a nearby grocery store to grab bananas, yogurt, granola, and orange juice. I also grabbed a few mini oranges for snacks throughout the next few days. The hostel I’m in has a kitchen, which means I can actually cook if I want! I will be taking advantage of it – being able to make my own food will be nice.
After breakfast (and writing the past two blog posts), I decided to head out to a nearby park. I wanted to spend the day very relaxed, so walking around the park seemed like a good idea (and a good way to learn my new camera)!
This flowerbed is right outside the hostel.OLYMPUS C4100
Honestly, not a lot to say here – most of these pictures are from the park!
These tiles were cute!
One thing I did notice walking around (that I had heard before) was that there are a lot of vending machines – on the corners of streets, tucked among residential houses. Mostly they have drinks, and one even had alcohol? This is how I know the legal drinking age in Japan is apparently 20 years.
Of course, I also took pictures of vehicles. There are a ton of kei vehicles here (Kei vehicles are a specific class of car in Japan, limited to a certain size and engine displacement. In return for the limits, they are cheaper and get tax benefits compared to normal cars)
This moped had a “The North Face” and Prius Hybrid Energy badge on it. Somehow I doubt this scooter is a hybrid…
There are still more mopeds here, and more bikes even. I’d say there are more cars than mopeds, but about the same number of bikes as cars.
…
More pillars for Felix!There were a lot of gardens as part of the park. I sat here for a while, reading.If you look really close, this is a selfie!I thought this light looked really cool.These lanterns were just hanging above this pathway.I liked the light sort of filtering into this small courtyard.This clock looked really cool among the trees!I really liked this poppy against the tile.This light tower looked cool framed through this wire fence.Another light tower, framed through tree branches.
As I was sitting here writing this post, another guest checked in – she is here from China, and brought her Erhu (a two-stringed traditional Chinese instrument) and she played a bit for us! She played Master Oogway’s theme from Kung Fu Panda – and it was beautiful. She’s been practicing for 20 years!
This, obviously, is not her – this is just the first good public domain image I could find for an Erhu.
After the park, I walked back to the hostel, stopping at a local grocery store for a couple of snacks.
After sitting and writing this blog post for a while, I left again, this time with several other folks from the Hostel, to get sushi at a nearby sushi conveyor belt place.
I think I got about 7 plates, which cost only about $13.75!
At this place, you order on a tablet, and then (sometimes as little as 60 seconds later!) your food zooms up on the belt next to the table.
The squid, close upCoffee jelly for desert!
After the dinner, we walked back to the hostel with a quick stop at a convenience store for drinks and snacks, and then we came back to the hostel to sit around the main area and talk and laugh.
Here’s the first of Barcelona! I’m currently sitting in the courtyard of my hostel (very quiet at the moment, I think most people are out exploring right now), eating some fruit I picked up a bit ago, and writing this post.
I don’t know how old this building is, but it certainly isn’t new. The hostel feels like modernity built into ancient bones.
4/6: Sunday
All I did this day was sleep. The previous day, I left Boston at 6PM on the 5th, flew for about 6 hours to Lisbon and arrived at midnight Boston time, or 7AM (on the 5th, still!) Lisbon time. There, I went through customs (A tired border officer said nothing to me and simply stamped my passport. Easier than getting into Canada!). After another two hours of waiting, I hopped (more like slogged) onto my connecting flight to Madrid.
Once in Madrid, I took a taxi to the train station I’d booked a train to Barcelona on. At this point I had already been awake almost 20 hours, and was really starting to feel it. Unfortunately, the train to Barcelona was another four hours or so – in total, when I arrived at the Hostel, I hadn’t slept (properly) for over 27 hours. Lesson learned: it may seem cheaper to split some travel into a couple of tickets, but I would have had a much better time had I paid $100 more for a direct ticket.
Once I got to the hostel, I took a much-needed shower, then fell asleep (at around 6PM Barcelona time) until the next morning.
4/7: Monday:
Being in Barcelona is really cool, but not knowing the language kind of terrifies me sometimes. Most casual interactions can be passed with a smile and nod, but interactions at restaraunts, for example, need some type of common language. My first stop was a cafe for breakfast – cafes are SUPER common here, I pass them every 3 minutes when walking in the city, it seems.
The tuna was very oily – I suspect it was from a can submerged in oil. In this case, it actually helped a lot to make the sandwich less dry.
“No ingles” was the server’s response to my poorly pronounced “hablas ingles?” – but he was, nontheless, a server, so he sat me down and handed me the menu (a QR code to their online menu). After some deliberation, I ordered a Cappuchino, a fresh-made juice containing Apple, Lemon, and some vegetable I don’t remember, and a Tuna Sandwich with Avocado. All were delicious and fresh. I think it cost about €13.75 (~$15 USD), which (considering the quality and atmosphere) seems on par or better than what I would expect to pay in the US.
Freshness, excellent taste and reasonable prices seem consisten in all of my food experience in spain so far. Coffees (while much simpler and less sweet than what we Americans are used to) are usually only a few euros, and I haven’t paid more than €15 for anything yet.
Even the pidgeons here are different! They have much pinker colors and iridescence on their wings. There’s a nest in the courtyard of my hostel, and they make the weirdest sounds! Sometimes they sound like owls. I have learned not to sit under that tree!
After this, I headed back to the hostel and finished yesterday’s blog posts about Boston.
Lunch was at a cafe that was a 3 minute walk from the hostel – a chicken feta salad with an excellent honey mustard dressing, sundried tomatos, and a tasty acaii smoothie. This was one of the more expensive meals I’ve had – coming in right around 15 euros.
Then, I headed to the beach, and spent a LONG time laying in the sun. It’s too cold here to swim, but the sun has been hot and shorts and a t-shirt is comfortable during the afternoon. On the warm beach under the sun, the light breeze made it perfectly comfortable. I did use sunscreen, which is the only reason I don’t look like a lobster today.
After this and some other things, my path back to the hostel took me through the parc (park) where the Arc de Triomf (not the one from Paris) is. Feeling especially like a tourist (something I am trying to avoid looking too much like here, lest I get squirted with water guns), I took my camera out and started snapping various angles.
The sun was setting behind the arc. In one of my last classes, I learned that the less-defined edges where the sun is backlighting the arc are due to how different wavelengths of light refract differently. Since light is a wave, the edge interacts with the light going around it, and different colors bend slightly differently. Especially in older cameras like this, this creates “chromatic abberations” – or purple-blue fringing around more distant edges.I had to wait next to a crosswalk for a bus to pass before I could take this. Standing out in the open like that with my camera makes me feel like I’m sticking out like a sore thumb, but at least this is an area people expect tourists with cameras.
I also snapped some photos of nearby interesting architecture. The abundance of balconies here is cool!
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAOLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAOLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAOLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
I’ve also been enjoying trying street photography. The camera I brought has a screen that will flip up 90 degrees so I can hold it at waist level and see what it is seeing – handy for when you don’t want people to realize they are being photographed.
This man running his dog on bike caught my eye. I wanted to get a shot more directly from the side, but was too late with the camera.
This building looked nice. Sometimes that’s all it takes for me to snap a photo, and sometimes I think too hard about it and decide not to.
I especially liked the pastel yellow between the beige and grey.
This woman walking her dog also caught my eye, and I feel pretty good about this photo! There’s a slight bit of motion blur to show them walking, and the camera actually focused on them. This was one photo taken from waist height so it wasn’t obvious 🙂
There are plenty of dogs in Barcelona, and people walking them!This one turned out better than I expected – it was while I was walking by, also shot from waist height. The motion blur of the close tiles is pretty cool.This guy had a funky bike, but I caught him just after he went into the bush. Since I was moving the camera, there is a slight motion blur, but he is sharply in focus. Maybe I should try more motion blur photography.
I was starting to get hungry at this point (the walk back was about 30 minutes, and with all the photos I was taking, it took more like an hour). A kebab shop happened convenitently across my path, so I popped in and got one (which I forgot to photograph).
I didn’t want to be too touristy with my camera, so didn’t try for a great shot here. The kebab shop’s ingredients bar looked good through the window – probably pretty effective marketing, especially since it worked on me!I also snapped a selfie in the mirror while waiting.
Again, I had planned for this post to cover three days – but I think I will split it again, since today (4/8) has a lot of photos 🙂
Now that I’ve had a chance to settle into Barcelona, catch up on sleep after 27 hours being mostly awake (it was hard to stay awake during the last train ride to Barcelona), I can write about Boston 🙂
Day 1: Wednesday
I flew in around 4PM local time Wednesday, and spent most of the day settling in. My hostel was quiet and each bed was in its own pod, similar to how I imagine Toyko’s Capsule hotels will be. This is the only good photo I got of them – I intended to get a nicer one with my camera, but then accidentally stayed past check-out (my booking app said 12, the actual checkout time was 11).
I did stop at a New York Swarma Guys place and get a tasty lamb swarma, but didn’t take a photo of it.
Day 2: North End, Paul Revere House, Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Market, and Seafood
The route I walked on day 2 (roughly). I was pleasantly surprised by how walkable and close everything here is!
First, I stopped at Bean and Leaf Cafe (underneath a boring looking corporate skyscrape?) and paid a very reasonable $12 for a fresh orange juice and a delicious breakfast burrito.
Orange juice and a breakfast burrito
I didn’t have a set plan for the day, but I wanted a coffee and to go see the water, so I kept walking into the north end.
My double shot vanilla espresso
Along the way to the bay, I stopped at Caffe Ducali, an italian coffee spot joint to a pizza place by the same name. On accident, I told the barista I wanted a “Vanilla espresso” (not a Latte, which is what I actually wanted). When they handed me this tiny cup, I realized my mistake, but was too embarrased to correct it.
I had ordered an espresso, and I was going to drink it!
An actual gas lamp I found nearby the graveyard. Apparently the appartments in this section of the city predate electricity! I didn’t see a lot of gas lamps in Boston, so this one must be kept around for fun.
As it turns out, I actually liked it a lot and came back for another one later. It’s just two espresso shots from the machine with a shot of vanilla syrup, but the coffee was tasty and not too bitter, and the added sweetness of the vanilla made it really nice to slowly sip as I walked around the next hour or so.
The brick pathways were very old, but clearly a lot newer than the graves.
My wandering took me next to Copps Hill Burying Ground, Boston’s second oldest graveyard, which was founded in 1659. I sipped my espresso as I wandered around looking at gravestones varying from 150 to almost 400 years old.
I noticed a lot of skulls with wings on the tops of the gravestones–apparently, this was common on pre-revolution gravestones.
Closeup of skull and wingsThis one had a skull and crossbones!The details of the (hand) carved letters is neatYou can see a couple of letters we don’t use anymore on this one: the e over a y seems to be “the”1677!The 8/9 on this one is funny. I wonder if it meant 8/9ths through the year, or that they weren’t sure if the death was in 1678 or 1679?
One thing (besides how OLD it was!) that I found neat were how you could see the marks from the gravestones being hand-carved. A lot of them had scribing lines that the craftspeople used to keep the text all aligned, as seen in the image below:
You can also use the historical use of “f” as the letter “s” here, plus an old spelling of “lies” as “lyes”.
After the graveyard, I continued wandering through the North End. Paul Revere’s house only cost $6 to go into, but wasn’t anything especially remarkable, just an old house showing a bit of insight into life during Revere’s time. I did learn that the Revere cookware brand was founded by him, which in hindsight, should have been obvious!
Many of the North End’s streets are narrow, having been designed for pedestrian and horse traffic. Most are one ways, with narrow sidewalks about 2 feet wide. Walking is easy here – driving, possibly less so!
Apparently at this point, I stopped taking pictures of the things I was going to and started taking pictures of things I saw. To be fair, the Institue of Contemprary Art wasn’t that interesting (although they only had two exhibits open that day), and I didn’t stop for food at the markets I passed through. For the rest of the afternoon before going back to my hostel for a break, I slowly walked to the ICA, then back to the hostel. Here are some photos I took along the way.
OLYMPUS C740OLYMPUS C740This one’s for JoshOLYMPUS C740OLYMPUS C740
After a break to refresh at the hostel, I headed back out for Dinner. Josh (my manager during my Rivian internship in 2024) gave me a couple recommendations, so I headed to The Daily Catch, a Scicilian pasta and seafood restaraunt.
Stuffed Calamari and orange-pomegranate San Pellegrino soda – Delicious!
I realized after ordering that what I ordered might have been an appetizer, so I also tried some of their house-made black pasta (which was also delicious!)
Cross-city running adventure:
I had plans to meet up with some folks I’d met earlier after dinner, so once I’d finished my food, I paid, ordered an uber, and rode about 2.5 miles away (which took 30 minutes with the roads and traffic). Upon arriving at my destination, I promptly realized I’d forgotten my bag (which had, among other items, my passport) at the restaraunt. Worse still, they closed at 9PM – right when I’d left. Calling got me no response and sent me to a voicemail box that was full. Their website had a contact form, but I really wanted to see if I could get it back now, not tomorrow. It was now 9:30, and an uber back would take another 30 minutes. After looking at Google Maps, I realized walking would be just as fast – and if I ran, I might just get there before the other customers finished eating and they were done cleaning. So run I did.
After about 2 minutes of running I stopped to check Google Maps, realized I’d run in the wrong direction, and started paying attention to the maps. Then, after about 20 minutes of running, running through crosswalks when I wasn’s supposed to, and walking when I needed a break, I got back.
The door was open, and the staff was still cleaning. I walked in, breathlessly explaining that I’d left my bag. My waiter laughed, said “we thought you’d be back!” and handed it to me. Whew!
My evening plans were (obviously) cancelled by that point, so instead, I walked back to the hostel (about 20 minutes) and stopped at Bova’s Bakery (an old, famous, open 24/7 bakery in the North End) for a fruit tart as a treat. After running for 20 minutes and not losing my passport, I felt great!
I was going to put all of boston in one post, but this is already pretty long, so I’ll put my last two days in the next post. We will see how breaking trips into multiple posts works!
jacobblogs 