Tarragona!

Alright. Well Barcelona can get a little hectic as you can tell from the strike story so my friend and I decided to spend a day in Tarragona, Spain. It's about an hour and fifteen minute ride out of Barcelona by train and it only cost like 11 euro for a roundtrip ticket.

Tarragona is one of the cities with the most Roman ruins in Catalunya. My friend and I headed to the old part of town where the walled in Roman city sits. It's very similar to the Barri Gotic neighborhood in Barcelona, which is the original Roman city of Barcelona. So it was similar to Barcelona except more Catalan pride and surprisingly more street art. Roman walls and a massive cathedral are still standing in this Roman city. We didn't go into any of the Cathedrals or history/anthropology museums. We were only there for one day plus we wanted to see the ampitheatre. Tarragona has a massive Roman ampitheatre, right near the coast. So if you stand at the top edge of the ampitheatre all you see is the Mediterrian Sea. Sitting there I had another one of those moments where it's like wait how old is this? And I'm actually sitting here? The massiveness of history and the insignificance of human beings in relation to it.

After wandering the walled city and aweing at the ampitheatre. We found a little cafe for some cafe con leche. As we were ordering, the woman working there started speaking to us in English. That rarely happens in Barcelona and definitely not in a small town an hour out of Barcelona. She then proceeded to tell us how they normally never get Americans in Tarragona. She also explained how the government there will pay for anyone to take any language classes a citizen wants excluding Spanish or Castilean Spanish. Catalan is widely spoken in the region of Catalunya so much so that if you speak Spanish they wont respond to you. I think it's interesting too because he government won't pay to learn Spanish, but there is such a mix of people who don't agree with the growing Catalan language. Most people think that since its spoken is such limited areas its not worth preserving and growning. Even the woman at the cafe was skeptical then she convinced us to buy an amazing burger. It was delicious. Tarragona was beautiful too, of course.