Over the summer I went to Spain on tour for the first time to Barcelona and Valencia. I saw many different things that you wouldn’t find here in the Bay Area. There are no houses unless you go about a mile out of the city. Most of the people walked, rode bike or used motorcycles. Unless people carpooled with others there weren’t many people who used cars. I was really surprised by how many people were there. I was never the only person walking on a street. There were always people in sight. It was also easier to walk to places because all of the traffic. I thought it was really cool that there was more motorcycles and scooters than cars on the street.
The many tourist attractions and buildings made the trip really fun. I was really fond of all the churches. They had really nice acoustics for singing and paintings on the walls. I heard some teen choirs and was amazed by how well the churches could carry sound around the room. The one thing that I thought wasn’t really fun was the heat. I was sweating whenever I was outside. But because of the heat it was really nice when I went to the beach. The water felt really nice because it was right after a long hike up the hill to an old church.
The water was so salty, it hurt my nose and throat but not that much so I could still swim. The beaches were really crowded but the water was shallow so you could go out pretty far where no one was. I was there on the shortest night of the year. On that night almost every person stayed up late and celebrated. I went a couple miles out of town with the people I was staying with to a friend’s house and celebrated with them. We had a ton of fireworks. I think I went back to the place I was staying at around 4am and people were still setting off firecrackers in the streets.
I had a lot of fun in Spain but I would want to go back and do more things around water so I would be able to cool off more. I was revisit the opera house in Valencia, it was really fun watching live people play instruments and sing in musicals. There were also about ten different rooms you could go to and see people play instruments or sing that wasn’t in the main theater. I would also go to La Sagrada Familia which is a huge church in Barcelona because it had really interesting architecture.