Tarragona, Torres Winery, and beach surprises!

On Friday, we went on a trip to Tarragona, which is about an hour south of Barcelona along the eastern coast of Spain. The day was split into two parts. First, we visited a whole bunch of Roman ruins (although they don't really count as ruins since they're mostly intact). Almost the entire wall that surrounded ancient Tarraco is still standing and many of the buildings are as well. Interestingly, modern-day Tarragona is a thriving city and plenty of people live there, living in the old walls and with all of the ruins right at their doorstep. The most interesting thing that we saw in my opinion was the Roman amphitheater with a church built right in the middle of it. During Roman times, Christians were persecuted and killed in the arena as a sport. When Christianity took hold, the practice of was outlawed and the church was built to commemorate the Christians who were killed.

After we toured around, we got some free time. Beach time!!! the water was beautiful and I was kicking myself for not bringing my swimsuit. But we only had 45 min there anyway, which is not a lot of swim time considering that you have to be wet and salty for the bus ride home.

We jumped back on the bus and headed to the Torres winery. Now, this was something. First, we got to watch a video. Not a video on wine-making, a promotional video extolling the greatness of the Torres tradition. Then we troop into this room and they showed us this weird, modern video that was supposed to fill our senses with the seasons of grape harvesting. To say the least, it was rather strange. We are then escorted outside and get into this little tram which takes us past the grape vines, trucks filled with grapes, and around the newest wine aging facility (which looks more like a modern house than a facility). It even has the Torres family statue, called "La Familia." How original. I don't think the comparison to the Sagrada Familia was unintentional either. Then these doors open and we are taken into pitch blackness. The tram halts and these screens appear, and another whole video about the sanctity of the Torres tradition plays. As the finale, the screens roll up and reveals the hundreds of barrels of wine. (It is now apparent that we are in the cellar). After this, we get back on the tram and eventually roll back to the main place where we taste some wine, which was fairly good. I really could not get over how extremely ostentatious the whole thing was. It was quite amazing.

And lastly, today I went to the beach! It was such a nice day and the water was perfect. :) And surprise, there was an airshow. So I got to sit in the sand and see all sorts of cool planes doing tricks. And then I went for a swim and there were 4 jets doing tricks in unison and they dropped fireworks! I don't know what the deal is with Barcelona and fireworks, but I have now seen at least 5. Awesome!!!

A quick note: I know I write a lot of positive, fun things on this blog. Don't get me wrong, there are days when this is really tough. When I don't want to speak Spanish any more and I just want to come home. However, I am using this blog to help myself keep a record all of the awesome things that I have done - kind of like a reminder to myself that for every difficult moment, there is a wonderful moment.

Besos!