Thursday, May 31, 2012

Barcelona - 3



These are our new friends, Renzo and his wife, who were so kind to feed us lunch. We met Renzo the night before, playing soccer. He is from Peru and he served a full-time mission in Colombia. He was so nice to us and he even showed us around town. We are so grateful for Renzo and his rad example. 


Ya......so.....the Picasso Museum was pretty expensive and we had a bunch of other sites to see this day. So this is the exhibit that you could see for free in the street and I found it to be a good quick representation of his work. 


I feel like if you see one painting from Picasso, you've seen them all. 



After not paying to see the Picasso museum, we decided to go see a free museum! It was pretty boring, but we found one room that was really cool where you could draw stuff! 




So people say, "95% percent of people have the drawing skills of a 5th grader." Well I can't quote anybody actually saying that but I think it was one of my art teachers in High School. But you know what, this just proves that I am in that 5% of artists in the world that can draw like I should. You and me Picasso, the lonely wolves in the world. We understand each other. 


One of many views we saw of Barcelona. I feel like we walked the entire city of Barcelona four or five times, and saw it from every angle. 


Standing here, you feel like a king. The years, history, excitement, and passion that come out of this stadium is remarkable to me. Ronaldhino and Messi are the two kings of this Colosseum. One day I will be back to see the best team in the World play.  

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Barcelona - Segunda Dia


Once again...another amazing skate spot for the pros. 


This skatepark was so chill. There was even a Chilean roller bladder. I haven't seen the blades in years.


This water was pretty chilly... Cool thing about the beach was that they were having a bunch of different heats of triathlons going on. They had younger kids that were elementary age, middle schoolers and even kids that were high school age doing this mini triathlon course to promote good health. It looked like a blast and I think its so important for kids to have opportunities to try new sports and find enjoyable ways to exercise.


I love the beach. Barcelona doesn't have the nicest beach, but it sure has a lot of it. The beach is huge and they have beach volleyball, some sort of weird beach pickleball, and they also have a pretty good little outdoor gym. I wish they had those in Hawaii! 




This is Luciano and Coral, they're awesome. We met them when we went to FHE our first night here and then we were able to hang out with them a little again.

Luciano is Chilean!!! 


Barcelona is a really cool city, and this ranks up there as one of the coolest things about it for me. haha. Basically, this a giant dragon-shaped slide that we randomly stumbled upon. It's an awesome slide. It probably helped that I was wearing my swim trunks (suuuper slick), but I FLEW down this slide. I could've spent the entire night going up and down that slide because it was so much fun, but we were already a couple hours late to soccer. 




Our night was incredible. I love soccer! We had the perfect court to play on because it was all concrete and you could slide around just a little bit sometimes. I feel like sports can really bring people together, and even though we didn't know these guys at the beginning, by the end we were great friends and Renzo even invited us over for lunch the next day!

Barcelona - Dia 1

We made it to Barcelona!! What better way to celebrate than with some McDonald's? When we showed up in Barcelona we went to the info booth and they gave us a free map that has all the McDonald's in the city labeled! hahaha. 


Gaudi is pretty amazing. Every street corner we pass has something from Gaudi. He made this city unique. If you study architecture, this is the place to come and study.

What are the odds?! Ray and I were just passing by the mission office with the purpose of finding out about all the church activities going on this week, and we just happened to stumble upon the list of people going home. I was looking through and all of a sudden I read, ELDER RILEY VAIN... I couldn't believe it. I than asked the nerdy secretary when he would be passing by the office and he said we could wait 15 minutes to see him. We just chilled by our bags for a bit, (we hadn't showered for like three days...poor Riley having to hug us) and lo and behold Riley showed up. It was great to see my brotha from dog town and I wish him the best. You could feel he had a great mission and was a great missionary and blessed the lives of many.




Ok, this hostel that we stayed in was one of the coolest places I have ever been. Above two pictures is our room and just under it is a mini ramp. One day my backyard will look like this. I didn't get the chance to skate it but I am already planning a return visit. Under this entry is a picture of Skateboards that they have collected throughout the years and around the corner is TV that is dedicated to movies and skate videos. 




La Sagrada Familia is without doubt the craziest building I have ever seen. You stare and stare and it gets more and more insane. As Ray stated below, this has been in the making for hundreds of years. It still has many years left until being finished. They hope to be finished by 2030 if they receive proper funding. 


Gaudi died crossing the road to this church. He was hit by tram. No one knew who he was because he looked like a bum but he is a legend here in Barcelona. It's been difficult for others to finish this work of art because Gaudi never used blue prints. He would do everything in his head.

La Sagrada Familia - under construction since 1883, probably won't be finished til 2030


My brotha from the same motha (Stewart) was right. This city was built to skate. I am pretty sure everyone in every skate video has hit this. 



Barcelona has some pretty awesome parks. I feel like this city was made for going on dates. You can rent tandem bikes, you can paddle out on the water in a row boat, have a picnic...and I came here with Clark. 


 Well, everything was closed. The people here in Spain have their siesta from 2-4 pm. We decided to take advantage of it also. This is under a tree in a really nice park where we slept for about 40 minutes. We were pretty exhausted. It felt so great.


 Every day i'm hustlin...


 Look at this church!!! This was amazing. I could not believe how tall it was. This is the Barcelona Cathedral and it was very impressive.






If you look closely in this photo you can see a monkey. Or at least a guy dressed up like a monkey. As people walked by he would sneak up to them and scare them. hahaha. I think we spent about 20 minutes just watching him. This is the night where we thought it was about 10 and really it was like 12:30. It's probably because the time flew by as we watched this guy. 

Sunday, May 27, 2012

Jerusalem - Last Day







Today we went to church and we just happened to run into the beautiful Angela Smith! Even though she didn't recognize me, it was still amazing to see her. BYU Jerusalem is located near the mount of olives and Gethsemane. This picture is located on the balcony of this gorgeous church building which overlooks the city. 

So I am sitting in sacrament thinking, that kid that is passing the sacrament looks a lot like Elder Carroll. Come to find out that it was my homie from the Chile Santiago East Mission. Elder Carroll (Robert) was an amazing missionary and I am so grateful for his great example. I don't know many people quite as friendly and genuine as Carroll. 


Ran into Sorella Askew and Jenkins! (from my mission) That was totally awesome. I definitely didn´t expect to see them here. Sorella Jenkins is doing the BYU-Jerusalem program, which is super cool, and Sorella Askew is studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which I think is even cooler and I´m super jealous.


You know us, just chillin. Chillin after church by the garden of Gethsemane. Then we all went into the church and sang together. It was great. : )



So this is a really cool pizza that is cooked with egg and cheese with a little bit of tomato sauce. It's not  that good but it gave me the great idea to try it myself when I get home. 






These are pictures of Church of the Holy Sepluchre. I was very glad we went. But in all honesty, I didn't feel very comfortable. When the time came to leave, I was more than happy to get out of there. The feelings you receive here and at the Garden Tomb are very distinct.








Here Assaf and I were juggling for this Asian crowd. They weren't very impressed. Assaf taught me some new tricks and for some reason I was juggling unbelievably well.



Dad!!!! You are in Jerusalem!!!


This is our Falafel guy. Gotta love him!
We´re going to miss him and all our new friends in Jerusalem!

What an amazing city.